how to generate (educate) an inquiring-jazzing community: free and open suggestions from an international workshop (ICPIC 2022)

introduction

So why not start from the beginning, leaving the rein, trusting the improvising inquiring process, and the community? Why not think of ourselves, from the beginning, as ‘ignorant’ facilitators who can explain the sense of wonder we feel when faced with the unknown, inviting the community to embark on a wandering and improvising inquiry? (^{Zorzi & Santi, 2020}, p. 15)

These two questions closed the article “Improvising inquiry in the community: The teacher’s profile” (^{Zorzi & Santi, 2020}), leaving open the idea that trusting the community could be an answer to educating the improvisational dimension of the inquiry process, while the facilitator also needs to recognise themselves as “ignorant” in front of the unknown to sustain the community in the wandering philosophical process of inquiry. Reflection on the connection between improvisation and P4wC has followed during these two years, and the 20^th ICPIC Conference-which took place in Tokyo last August-allowed us to develop a collective international dialogue around some further questions and implications.

Some premises were introduced during the workshop to share a common foundation on which to develop our community philosophical discussion²: the pedagojazz perspective (^{Santi, 2016}), the already developed connection between pedagojazz idioms and the different roles of the facilitator in P4wC (^{Zorzi & Santi, 2020}), and the idea that jazz and collective improvisation in particular (^{Scott, 2007}; ^{Woods, 2022}) can contribute to the understanding and development of CoI and the education of P4wC facilitators. These shared considerations allowed us to focus on the aim of the workshop, which was working together to determine how to educate a community of inquiry, to transform it into an inquiring-jazzing community. We proposed three questions focused on three main aspects of P4wC: community of inquiry (^{Gregory & Laverty, 2018}; ^{Sharp, 1991}), collective thinking (^{Lipman, 1995}, 2003) and facilitators (^{Kennedy, 2004}; ^{Kohan et al., 2017}).

This paper will retrace the path of the workshop, starting from the premises and presenting the tables developed through the online and in-presence activities undertaken as a temporary community of inquiry.

some echoes from pedagojazz

Before presenting the content that emerged from the workshop about the relationship between jazz and collective improvisation and the educational dimensions required to transform a CoI into an inquiring-jazzing community, we briefly explore the pedagogical perspective proposed by the “pedagojazz” approach. In this section, we summarise how jazz is considered a metaphor for a possible framework of rethinking pedagogy and didactics in the current era, and the eight idiomatic constructs of jazz in the educational sense, presented as Marina Santi did in Education as Jazz (2016).

In the pedagojazz approach, jazz is proposed as a metaphor to challenge institutional pedagogy and its formal rigidity, and deconstruct its main authoritarian and individualistic traits. In jazz, the minimal and flexible structure promotes improvisation and maximal autonomy by participants. Experts are called to master the art of unlearning and to be open to novices’ proposals to avoid being authoritarian. The collaborative and communitarian dimension is fundamental to generating music and beauty (^{Barrett, 2012}). As the great Nina Simone said, “Jazz is not just music, it is a way of life, it is a way of being, a way of thinking”. Raising awareness about the virtues of jazz means understanding how generative it can be as a metaphor, an educational tool and a force for empathy, dialogue and enhanced collaboration among people³.

It is possible to view jazz as a process, as a procedure and as a product. We speak of jazz as a process whenever we refer to a musical phenomenon in which one or more musicians address/communicate with others and themselves by using common, shared symbolic and communicative patterns in an attempt to involve themselves and be involved in a new previously unestablished and improvisational path within the playing experience (the groove) (^{Santi, 2016}, p. 11). We speak of jazz as a procedure when we deal with the methodological dimension of music making and the “technical” devices that enable the sharing of constraints, rules and standards within the dialectics of dialogical discourse, in which all participants are equally in charge of “deciding” as they improvise the path and quality of the product (^{Santi, 2016}, p. 11). In the end, when we consider jazz as a product created by the “natural” social actors who are playing, the focus becomes the particular construction of expressions that is called the “jazz piece”. Jazz as a product is a partial and imperfect representation of the possible meanings of the human experience that generated it, especially in terms of its improvisational vocation (^{Santi, 2016}, p. 12).

Eight idiomatic constructs of jazz, well known in Afro-American slang, are described in an educational sense: to intone a soul, fusion, cool, swing version of live pedagogy, free from chains and free of wandering and wondering at the world, immersed in the groove of the moment, devoted to risk and open to the infinite possibilities of improvisation. The polyphonic groove typical of a jam session is considered an inspiring analogy for what should happen in the community of inquiry when the discourse leads to common thinking from which ideas grow together.

Jazz is jazzing, an Afro-American metaphor for copulation connected to the enjoyment and pleasure of a shared orgasm. It refers to both the intimacy of the soul in solo performance and the relations in a jam session; “it always triggers a creative process, a generative dimension of shared music making that gives rise to new melodies and sound experiences” (^{Santi, 2016}, p. 14). Jazz is fusion because it combines different elements from different genres; it implies the abandonment of “pureness” and the opening up to contamination and promiscuity. Fusion is a melting process in which the final product is more than the sum of its parts (interplay; ^{Santi, 2016}, p. 15).

Jazz is free, with its strong libertarian roots and clear heterodox inspiration. It can be a great antidote to canonical instruction and a powerful antibody against academic pedagogy (reduced to the “pure” reproduction of classic routes). Being free to transgress fixed rules frees the system from the risk of becoming a dogma (^{Santi, 2016}, p. 16).

Jazz is swing because it is playful and full of fun; it is the essential perception of rhythm and its goodness while we listen to and make music. Jazz is groove because it is a common flow, a shared direction, a mutual intention, and an intension; the goal of each jazz performance is to find a groove, the state in which the players successfully achieve a mutual orientation to the beat (^{Barrett, 2012}, p. 69). It is a positive feeling that accompanies the achievement of satisfaction without softening the tension of dialectics; it involves collaboration and cooperation, reciprocal care and scaffolding to ensure that every individual involved feels the flow and engages in its fluency (^{Santi, 2016}, p. 17). Jazz is soul because it is a form of knowledge pervaded by insight and intuition, nurtured with agency and a harmonious disposition towards events and people. Jazz is cool because it reminds us that jazzing also means diminishing, reducing and lessening (less is more). This keeps the experience cool, not cold, and opens up a horizon of possibilities (Santi, 2016, p. 18). Jazz is improvisation that is the connatural process, procedure and product of jazzing. During improvisation, participants meet environmental constraints and have the opportunity to create momentary, unpredictable and unrepeatable “music phenomena”. Improvisation is not just a reactive response to a problem but also an ex-active approach to the ongoing activity, open to the emergence of alternative experiences (^{Gould & Vrba, 1982}; Santi, 2016, p. 19).

This approach involves sharing a jazzing, fusion, free, swing, groove, cool, improvisation pedagogy that can deconstruct the school’s indoctrinatory power as an ideological state apparatus and rebuild it as an ideological democratic apparatus (^{Kennedy & Kohan, 2021}, p. 5). It can be a way to go beyond the pedagogical limits of neoliberalism monologue and to look at the CoI (and school) as the place in which new values are invented and discovered and existing regimes of knowledge interrogated and reconstructed (^{Kennedy & Kohan, 2021}, p. 5).

How collective improvisation can inform our understanding and development of CoI

Every improvisation is a relation among improvisers and between improvisers and the environment surrounding them (^{Zorzi, 2020}), but collective improvisation is a process, procedure and product in which inter-participant dynamics become, in a “real” and concrete sense, the content of the activity. The fundamental site for the cultivation of these inter-participant dynamics is performance, where improvisers’ musical knowledge, aesthetic judgement, negotiation of difference and sense of play circulate in the process of making collaborative music in real time (^{Scott, 2007}, p. 1). The thesis we would like to propose is connected to this “site of cultivation”: What could we learn as a CoI if we perceived our sessions as a performance? As a performative collective improvisation? One suggestion to add to the artistic meaning of performance could be the definition of “performance” given by the World Health Organization (WHO) within the ICF (within an inclusive and social approach):

The performance qualifier describes what an individual does in his or her current environment. Because the current environment includes a societal context, performance can also be understood as “involvement in a life situation” or “the lived experience” of people in the actual context in which they live. This context includes the environmental factors - all aspects of the physical, social and attitudinal world which can be coded using the Environmental Factors component. (^{WHO, 2001}, p. 15)

If we share the idea that inquiring in community can be compared to a collective improvisation, we can reason that the inter-participant dynamics developed in a CoI could be understood as a performance, intended as what participants can do in their current environment while they are involved in a lived experience. So, which features does a performative collective improvisation have?

In collective improvisation, silence and inactivity become invested with the same depth of intention as sounds and are a constitutive element of inter-musician communication within the process (^{Scott, 2007}, p. 1). Performance provides a space for improvisers to not only learn and develop new techniques but most of all “socio-cultural skills and interpersonal relationships” (^{Woods, 2022}, p. 2). The methodologies of collective improvisation strongly demand a bodily presence so that new meanings can be made in collaborative musical performance and all the differences can emerge. The negotiation of these differences-musical differences as a manifestation of human differences-is the salient sociopolitical motivation for successful collective improvisation (Scott, 2007, p. 4).

A collective and free improvisation has a strong pedagogical Interaction that involves inventing new codes and inventing the message at the same time as the language (^{Attali, 1985}, p. 134). Musical knowledge-as philosophical knowledge and questions during the community of inquiry-emerges from a communal process of listening and responding to one another such that meaning and music making take place with individual developments of personal techniques following suit (^{Woods, 2022}, p. 2).

Criteria for successful collective improvisation-whether they are ever achieved (or even achievable)-emphasise the relationships that are the barometer of the “wellbeing of the community”. Successful group improvisation is an environment in which everyone is really listening to each other and their impulses and creating an atmosphere of dialogue together, which energetically includes the audience. If I bring my improvising skills to this environment with an honest intention to collaborate and co-create, then there is a good chance that the experience will be successful (^{Scott, 2007}, p. 4).

The responsibility (in the literal sense in which such authority impels a response) of the group once a gesture is perceived is, effectively, to “learn” the proactive player’s micro-idiom (in terms of its form and function/meaning) and to react accordingly in a way that acknowledges recognition of the strong, meaningful idea and the momentary authority it engenders. This process represents the foundation of the pedagogical imperative through which a player works to understand and respond to others during the performance; negotiable spaces between improvisers are founded and developed (^{Scott, 2007}, p. 5).

Although the risk of musical failure is very real during improvisation, whether attributable to basic human fallibility or not, the commitment to an unceasing process of sociomusical learning represents the socially engaged responsibility on which improvisatory success is founded (^{Scott, 2007}, p. 10).

At its best, free improvisation celebrates a set of informal, even loving relationships which can be experienced by everyone present, and brings into existence, at least for the duration of the performance, a society whose closest political analogy is with anarchism, whereby each individual contributes to the wellbeing of the community. (^{Small, 1987}, p. 307)

Sometimes, collective improvisation may not succeed. When authoritarianism episodes occur, they are commonly exemplified by a player’s inability or unwillingness to listen to the other members of an ensemble, often coinciding with their unresponsive, soloistic musical contributions. This type of musical activity constitutes very basic authoritarianism in which the player effectively suggests that “I have nothing to learn from you, but you have something to learn from me”. Since collective improvisation offers the possibility for socially responsible negotiation of musical differences, such insensitivity effectively represents an antisocial negation of this possibility (^{Scott, 2007}, pp. 5-6).

Recalling the brilliant perspective proposed in the ICF (^{WHO, 2001}), we could also have other factors that can be obstacles to the success of collective improvisation as performance or detractors of its quality. These include personal factors (e.g. character, different expertise, different background knowledge, different social structures or cognitive bias) or physical factors (e.g. climate, terrain, space or buildings) if they are transformed into barriers by the contexts. From this “performance” perspective, it is important to remember that the activity promoted (collective improvisation or inquiring in community) has to first protect the opportunity to perform for everyone (novice or expert); otherwise, failure is guaranteed.

There is a moral framework in which the mutable musical authority must be grounded; it is for this reason that collective improvisation is not merely a metaphorical model of social practice, but also that it is the social practice itself (^{Scott, 2007}, p. 6), as a community of philosophical inquiry aims to be. An improviser must engage in a heuristic search for the means for interpersonal, dialogic communication within an ensemble that, in turn, requires the same heuristic investment. Authentic improvisers emerge not “out of nowhere”, but from the social, pedagogical framework of improvisation itself. Intersubjective communication, articulated in the negotiative space created within performance, is contingent on the recognition of differences (^{Scott, 2007}, p. 7). Collective and free improvisation is essentially a spontaneous form of co-creation (not simply creation) in which a musical form or language emerges through the act of performing (^{Fischlin et al., 2013}, p. 36), articulating the possibility that improvisation offers for the transgression of fixed, hierarchical systems of thought and social/economic control. In collective improvisation, the same principles that rule the community of philosophical inquiry (CPI) are applied in collective governance (^{Kennedy & Kohan, 2021}, p. 10), and as such, the dialogical circle; collective improvisation is essentially a space where relational, sociopolitical, research and philosophical aspects can meet.

However, the inextricable nature of ethics, politics and aesthetics in improvisation cannot be learned as an abstraction, away from the act of collective music making; thus, the improviser’s “goals” cannot be pursued outside of performance. Following this principle, we invited the workshop community of inquiry to perform together, acting as a collective “inquiring-jazzing-thinking” community.

The pedagojazz perspective and the contribution of collective improvisation were offered to the temporary CoI as “stimuli” from which start reasoning together about the three fundamental P4wC dimensions: community of inquiry (^{Gregory & Laverty, 2018}; ^{Sharp, 1991}), collective thinking (^{Lipman, 1995}, 2003), and facilitators (^{Kennedy, 2004}; ^{Kohan et al., 2017}). To sustain the collective inquiry, three different questions were posed, and the Wooclap wall was used to gather the suggestions and reflections that emerged: Which features could have an inquiring-jazzing community? Which features could have inquiring-jazzing thinking? Which conditions should/could we nurture to educate a jazzing facilitator?

The temporary CoI who attended the workshop was composed of about 14 participants. The idea of gathering data and suggestions during the workshop was based on the great opportunity offered by the ICPIC Biennial Conference: the participants know and practice P4wC around the world and understand and reason about Lipman’s theoretical proposals and their implications. It is for this reason that we consider the ideas collected on this occasion to be interesting solicitations and perspectives that can inform complex thinking about the P4wC education of the community (CoI) and the facilitators across cultural, social and political differences.

At the improvisational technical level, we attempted to respect three basic rules of improvisational processes: the “yes, and” (^{Sawyer, 2011}), minimal structure, maximal autonomy (^{Barrett, 2012}) and the safe creativity environment (Weinstein, 2016).

The rule of the “yes, and” in theatre states that with each turn of dialogue, the performer should accept what has been established in the previous turn and add something to it (^{Sawyer, 2011}, p. 34). This rule sustains the idea that participants in a collective improvisation must construct and connect their contributions to the others’: proposals should not be refused or negated and the meaning and sense of what the performance is producing is realised only by listening and answering others. This principle can traduce the groove, swing and fusion aspects of pedagojazz, valorising the collective dimension of improvisation and the rhythmic dimension of the collective dialogue. A methodological rule that oriented the workshop was “minimal structure, maximal autonomy”: jazz works because the process is designed around small patterns and minimal structures that allow freedom to embellish, minimising consensus around core patterns and allowing diversity to flourish (^{Barrett, 2012}, p. 71). This means defining a few limits and shared rules and then leaving participants free to explore and creatively imagine horizons and perspectives that could also be unthought by the proposers. This rule reminds proposers and the community that empty spaces and times can be truly generative (cool) and that exploiting emptiness could maximise opportunities to create momentary, unpredictable and unrepeatable “dialogue phenomena” (improvisation). A “safe creativity environment” must be created in which everyone is accepted equally, regardless of their level of intelligence or ability. In this environment, it is safe for every participant to risk creatively and be free from conventional constraints (Weinstein, 2016, p. 50). It means to use materials, words or exercises that can sustain a warm and inclusive environment and promote an accessible situation for everyone. In this way, all participants can express their authenticity, reveal themselves (soul), experiment with shared freedom (free) and enjoy the activity together while having fun (jazzing).

features of an inquiring-jazzing community

The first activity proposed after the premises were shared was brainstorming to reflect together on the similarities among the three different processes: interplay, improvising and inquiring. Participants were invited to write their contributions in a word cloud (Fig. 1) and to add possibly insightful explanations in chat or in a collective discussion. A collective narration is presented, attempting to express fluid reasoning using the cloud words offered by our temporary CoI.

Figure 1 CoI word cloud 

Interplay, improvising and inquiring were observed by participants as superpositional processes that share some common features. All the processes need training/education for listening, because those who act and participate in these processes need to feel the silence and the invisible as a fundamental part of them. Being in the interplay, as well as improvising and inquiring, valorises the moment, the accident and the contingency of every instant. What happens during the process needs to be caught, received in a community that perceives and feels the common engagement, the reciprocal collaboration and inter-esse, that trusts the process (interplay, improvising and inquiring) and the scenario of pedagojazz. As collective processes are based on harmony, fun and games, they develop rhythm (African rhythm) through the fluid contamination of proposals; the process emerging is like a bricolage. Even if harmony characterises these collective processes, they also live in dynamic tension: the community moves in a common direction, but it can also get lost; the movement seeks balance but also discord and revolution. To develop interplay, improvisation and inquiry, participants need to learn and prepare themselves, but these processes enhance learning spontaneously during practice (learning by doing). They can be observed as performative arts in the way participants dance and co-dance together or act as though in a theatrical comedy. Interplay, improvising and inquiring are all processes in which participants need to be prepared to be unprepared, to receive what comes even if it is silent and invisible. As Thelonious Monk’s famous quote says: “Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by… What you don’t play can be more important than what you do”.

Table 1 lists the possible features of a community that develops and educates these superpositional processes.

What emerges from the collective reflections is that an inquiring-jazzing community is educated to understand the importance of silence, and all the sounds emerging (voices, noises, whisperings and body movements) from participants and environment; it is used to feel joy working together and to be willing and open not only towards the inquiring process but also towards embracing the unknown. An inquiring-jazzing community is comfortable with mistakes (it embraces what comes) and also with the boredom that might come from repetition, because it knows that repetition is an essential dimension of improvisation, as well as variation. We need to repeat to catch the unrepeatable, to look with an insightful glance at minuscule things. Improvisation is a usual practice that emerges in the ability of the community to order chaos and to create or find a common rhythm among all the different questions or interventions without surrendering to the frustration of nonsense. An inquiring-jazzing community is not scared of the possibility of putting different-and probably unwanted-instruments together; it is used to taking others’ points of view through dialogue and fragments of communication because fusion and groove are their essential constituents. It is a chronologically timeless community because the collective heritage it produces can connect the past, present and future of every participant, as well as the community of philosophical inquiry itself. An inquiring-jazzing community needs time to do some meta-thinking about dialogue and practice, to better their reasoning or to recognise some critical points. Documenting the session as much as possible with mind maps, pictures and drawings can help a group grow as a community. To answer the final question: Is the community (or the facilitator) able to adjust the jazzing and improvisational complex process? Collective improvisation, as in P4wC, is a multi-narrative environment that enables those who engage in it-facilitators and students-to tolerate multiple perspectives. It values questions over answers and feelings of uncertainty and contingency over comfort (^{Kizel, 2021}, p. 13). To take such a perspective, the community needs to be familiar with this practice and have an inquiring and improvising habitus (^{Bourdieu, 1992}). It is a way of looking at the unforeseen that implies the ability to decide on the spot that something warrants collective thinking, that an unscheduled suggestion deserves to be the focus of an inquiry, that it should be investigated, explored, discussed and clarified further (^{Zorzi & Santi, 2020}).

Improvisation is a process in which participants are asked to connect what is happening with what has gone before and/or with what will follow, find a sense and lend value to the whole. Flexibility must be nurtured to enable an improvising inquiry in the community (^{Zorzi & Santi, 2020}, p. 10). An inquiring-jazzing community can be preparatory for wandering because in jazzing and improvising, individuals educate themselves on the unrepeatable and find meaning together in the small sounds, voices and ideas, even when they get lost, and this can also sustain the wonder of the philosophical inquiry.

features of inquiring-jazzing thinking

P4wC practice places learning in a space of questions rather than in a corpus of answers, promoting a community that facilitates a form of thinking and learning that resists an educational hierarchy that claims omniscience. Improvisation is regarded as a better way of learning than predetermined content, liberating the learner from disciplinary boundaries (^{Kizel, 2021}, p. 5; Kizel, 2016). Focusing on the verb “to improvise” leads us to consider how every CoI discussion and reasoning can hide an improvisational window that can be transformed into an opportunity for inquiry, in the sense of a deeper investigation, knowledge co-construction, discussion and negotiation of meanings (^{Zorzi & Santi, 2020}). Table 2 lists the features that inquiring-jazzing thinking could have.

Inquiring-jazzing thinking is reasoning that always promotes the search for the minuscule, because every word, sentence, and most of all also every question can hide more than what is explicit: minuscule glances can be observed and valorised in this kind of inquiry. It is a brave process able to elicit discordance and dissonance because it considers many possible and valuable perspectives in time, space and culture; it is chronologically timeless thinking. Reasoning in an inquiring and jazzing way means constructing questions and answers between sounds and within silences, having confidence that every participant respects and looks for (or invents) the rhythm and pace of collective thinking. It means to generate something that can be re-generated and rethought differently, with different minuscule glances, even if the community is the same.

The whole process allows for opening conditions that allow for improvisation as a foundation for free thinking and creativity based on imaginative and inventive thinking (^{Kizel, 2021}, p. 10). Improvising is a feature of inquiry in the community and a representation of the community research effort. The improvisational opening is intrinsic in the P4wC way of promoting inquiry in the community. Recognising, interpreting and promoting the improvisational perspective in the community philosophical inquiry helps to protect its dialogical and democratic nature by opposing the need to obtain preconceived results (^{Echeverria & Hannam, 2017}). Following ^{Gur-Ze’ev (2010}), the heart of improvisation lies in the movement of co-poiesis prompted by the love of life, giving birth to the totally new and wholly unexpected as a form of non-instrumental playfulness that manifests responsibility to live at its best. It thus combines non-dominating dialogical relationships with experience and openness.

Maybe an inquiring-jazzing community can be a space that allows every individual to express their “wind of thinking”, a space in which “uncomfortable” questions could also emerge and not just questions about how knowledge is built. A space where one does not necessarily get to a dialogical synthesis or an absolute truth but manages to face the possibility that there is no synthesis and deals with the anguish that derives from it. This space is a dialogical but unforeseeable and unexpected intersection, a space that cannot even be thought of without interlocutors (^{Demozzi & Ilardo, 2020}, p. 13). To educate inquiring-jazzing thinking, we need to be capable of acting, exploring and provoking, pushing our reasoning in unknown, absurd, unconventional and imaginary directions, letting even meaningless and pointless variations occur (^{Zorzi & Santi, 2021}, p. 11). We need to foster creativity in inquiry (^{Santi, 2017}), because creativity is a human expression of a disposition to wonder, wander and respond to novelty. This is possible if the adult starts from the assumption that the unknown related to the exercise of thought (which becomes “unforeseen”) can take place and should be included in the practice (^{Demozzi & Ilardo, 2020}, p. 14).

conditions we should/could nurture to educate jazzing facilitators

If we accept the idea that collective improvisation can inspire and add something more to CoI because of its specific performative features, we must then ask how we can educate facilitators to improvise and promote collective improvisation in a CoI.

Embracing our temporary CoI suggestions, we can imagine the educational path of a facilitator as an adventure in which the facilitator is invited to be attentive to all that emerges around them: questions, and microscopical sonorities. They must develop attention towards the environment (the CoI), but at the same time, an a-tension to be comfortable in the inquiring process. They must study and familiarise themselves with the different P4wC approaches, while also remembering that we are all ignorant in front of the inquiry process and all the unknown and unexpected questions that can develop. A jazzing facilitator is educated to embrace and search for the unexpected and this is possible only by fostering an actual CoI and finding time and place to practice dialogue with others. They are educated among friends with whom they can exercise their skills and thinking and with whom they need to take time to rehearse and then reflect. An educational path for jazzing facilitators could invite them to think of musical time as very close to philosophical time, learning to perceive the rhythm of the thinking, the silence and the sounds of every thought, and learning to embrace the possibility of moving in circles (in thinking, with the body, dreaming and hoping) together. A jazzing facilitator learns to be familiar with the variations that are so radically present and (un)systematic in a P4wC session, even if variations are never the same. In the end, a jazzing facilitator is invited to reason about the possibility of becoming autonomous and independent from theories and suggestions learned, but always remembers that to be a facilitator, they must always perceive their dependence on community reasoning and dialogue. An educational path for a jazzing facilitator is preparation to be unprepared (as in improvisation), an educational course to “de-train” cultural structures and fixed preconceptions and to embrace reasonings across cultural, social and political differences.

Free pedagogy and improvisation could support the process of liberation that falls under what Freire (1970) called radical pedagogy-freedom from certainty. The foundational elements in this radical pedagogy process are adaptability and freedom from compliance (^{Kizel, 2021}, p. 7), and facilitators, as active counter-educators, find ways to become flexible, act critically, observe reality from many angles and thus enable participants in the community to do the same (^{Kizel, 2021}, p. 9).

As soon as I realise I am playing a familiar melody, I detach myself from the sax and let a few bars pass. Improvising means intervening with a completely cleaned up score, from the first to the last note. The most important thing is to move away from fixed functions (^{Hamilton & Konitz, 2007}, p. 103).

Some horizons for continued navigation

How can we generate (educate) an inquiring-jazzing community? Improvising and inquiring are two human practices that-starting from our fragility and incompleteness-invite us to always find different and relational ways to be in the world, keeping in touch with others and depending on them to create meaning and sense. “Improvisation” and “inquiry” are collective and communitarian processes that do not exist in isolation and solipsism. These practices are generated from encounters among individuals, among thoughts, among the unforeseen and among voices and aspirations. These processes can educate participants to intone a soul, fusion, cool, swing version of live pedagogy, free from chains and free of wandering and wondering at the world, immersed in the groove of the moment, devoted to risk and open to the infinite possibilities of improvisation. We need to create more and more occasions for inquiring and improvising-most of all in education-to stay in touch, to stay human, to feel contact with one another, to remind ourselves that alone we are finished and fragile, but together we can become an “antifragile” system (^{Taleb, 2012}).

In the end, what can we recognise as particular features of a jazzing community? Many characteristics that emerged from the workshop resonate as characteristics of a good community of inquiry or of an expert facilitator. As in improvisation, “new” does not necessarily mean original or innovative; it means something that comes from the origin, that is new and intimate for participants and for their paths, something that was not there before that performance.

In this sense, looking at CoI as a jazzing community can allow us to reason about its generative process, lighting up a “new” point of view. Collective improvisations occur at a site of cultivation: the performance. This means remembering that every session must be accessible to everyone and must activate participation processes exploiting different and “artistic” languages (sharing the ICF approach). A jazzing community as collective improvisation focuses attention on widespread trust in the process beyond the abilities of participants and facilitators. It does not mean that “anything goes”, but that the improvisational jazzing process will necessarily produce something unexpected, and the community must recognise and valorise its quality and beauty.

Our temporary community used words such as movement, dance and music, remembering the importance of using different languages to warm up the community⁴. Inspired by theatre, music or dance, it is possible to develop active and creative engagement in participants, which can support work alongside critical and caring thinking in philosophical inquiry (^{D’Olimpio & Teschers, 2015}, p. 5). These methods of encouraging students to actively participate in stimuli through physical and dynamic responses (rather than just verbal responses) can diversify the CPI format by allowing new means of physical engagement with philosophical ideas related to participants’ lives (^{Dewitt & Kingan, 2021}, p. 20). Supporting and educating an inquiring-jazzing community could also avoid passive (non)engagement with social and political spheres, because the jazzing perspective makes participants move across cultural, social and political differences in a-tension between a harmonic balance and a revolutionary discordance.

We leave these questions and reflections open to another future collective dialogue, which could start from the word cloud or the tables created by our temporary workshop community and shared here in a narrative but statical way. Thank you again to all the workshop participants for this inspiring dialogue among the past and possibilities, that was the present, and was a present: chronologically timeless.