Page 53 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

During the Community Conversation as well as other public engagement forums that

served as the subject of this research, multiple subgroups of gathered participants convened in

small group dialogues. Each dialogue gathering was viewed as a separate container, even as

multiple groups convened to discuss the same topic. The interactions and discussions that occurred

among members of my first Community Conversation group experience differed from the

interactions in the second and subsequent Community Conversations due to the unique make up

of participants, topic or theme to be explored by the facilitators who attended each gathering. Each

event had its own Metasphere or timber of experience which I felt important in describing settings.

PALAR is an acronym for participatory action learning and action research. It is a holistic,

integrative concept that incorporates related concepts and values such as participation,

collaboration, communication, community of practice, networking, and synergy. It is also related

to ALAR, an integrated concept of action learning (AL, traditionally used in organization and

management development) and action research (AR, traditionally developed in social work,

education, and higher education). Although several authors (Knowles, 1985; Margerison &

McCann, 1985) had noticed the similarities between action learning and action research before,

these two traditions were brought together for the first time at an international conference, namely,

the First World Congress on Action Learning, Action Research and Process Management

(ALARPM) at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, in 1990 with 360 delegates from across

the world and from all social sectors. PALAR has emerged and included further related concepts

such as lifelong action learning or LAL (Zuber-Skerritt & Teare, 2013) and action leadership

(Zuber-Skerritt, 2011). AL or action leadership is defined here as “collaborative, shared leadership

in the form of primus inter pares [the first among equals], guided by democratic, ethical human

values and universal principles, and developed in learning and coaching partnerships” (Zuber-

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