Hilary Leighton (hilary.leighton@royalroads.ca) is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability, Royal Roads University, Victoria BC Canada.

“Scholarly knowledge is a vertigo, an exhausted famousness. Listening is better” (Rumi & Barks, 1995, p. 242).

Rationale

While important learning can accrue through more traditional methods coursework, meeting on an individual level with graduate students about conceptualizing their research presents an invitation for the supervisor to critically ‘listen in.’ When a supervisor resists the urge to pin things down too quickly, refrains from prescribing a standardized method, and picks up on cues and clues made evident by the student’s spoken and body-held language for what wants to be researched, the supervisor provides necessary time and space to track and trace ‘best fit’ where method of inquiry and topic find congruence. In turn, the student can produce fresh and extraordinary results. Examples in this chapter, used with permission of the students, illustrate what can happen when we pay attention, discern, and respond heuristically to what is already on its way in the student’s life, just waiting to be found. Pseudonyms have been applied.

For the supervisor to make time to be present to the student’s passions, longings, fears, worries, and often tears: to hear what is affecting the student most, (including what is confusing or frustrating them about their research) entails having the ability to set aside any preconceptions and just listen. To act as a kind of echolocator for the student so they may hear their own words repeated back to them can seem revelatory. Not least of all, it encourages confidence and enthusiasm toward work they may begin to recognize as their own. To offer authentic, active feedback is to make provision for what is possible but perhaps not yet fully realized by the student. While first meetings are not always fruitful, in my experience students almost always know what it is they want to research, yet it might be only barely surfacing into their consciousness, first appearing as repetitions and bright threads in the conversation. Often, students do not have access to the any sort of ‘map’ to show them how to get from here to there (for that matter they may not yet know a ‘map’ exists). By ‘map’ I mean method. This is where we must slow and listen closely because as poet-philosopher Mark Nepo (2012) suggests, “listening is a doorway to everything that matters” (p. xii). If we can tune into what is alive to the student and what insists on being heard, the supervisor-student exchange can be a vital and instructive way-finding moment.

Research methods courses can offer a wide and rich overview of traditional inquiry, yet they cannot depict an adequate array of what is possible beyond convention, especially when methods can prove to be as unique as the student themselves. Sometimes, methods coursework is offered too early for students to be able to conceive of appropriate methods for research of which they may only have an inkling. This infers a responsibility on the part of the supervisor to resist any sort of early advice-giving before bringing their listening ear to the supervisory conversation and allowing ideas and aspirations to develop into fuller thought. Like fractals that repeat in natural systems, critical information can be found within the particularities of each student’s unique interests, a kind of holograph of the whole of their research represented within the smaller constituent part (Capra, 1996, Oberg, 2003). To be less prescriptive and more of a good guide in this capacity then, is to be discerning of the patterns found in language, to pick up on metaphors, attune to the inflection in tone and timbre of the student’s voice, and be attentive to the dialectics found in their body language. Educator Antoinette Oberg (2003) found “The presence of this patterning was signaled by the fact that without a formal research method, each student already knew how to proceed. Each was reproducing a pattern that existed elsewhere in their lives…”(p. 126). However, many students are unaware of this larger pattern or question its legitimacy within academic research. What is needed is a long view from a ‘super-visor’ (read: over-seer) with a keen ear and perceptive heart.

Overview

Looking deflated, low-slung on a chair in my office, Sara was on the verge of tears. She sensed her classmates had all landed on their thesis topics and methods and as class research presentations loomed, she feared she was behind and worse, lost. She told me that she really wanted to stitch together the stories of the lived experience of other outdoor environmental educators so they might tell firsthand of the benefits of teaching in nature as a counter-argument to dwindling resources for outdoor learning for youth. She didn’t know how or even if this could be done. I heard “stitch” twice before asking, “Do you sew?” She nearly leapt from her chair, “I am a quilter!” Well, there it was. The pattern already existed in her life. She already knew what she wanted to do and yet she didn’t think quilting could be considered a valid research method at university (see Ball, 2008).

Her skilful means meant she could deftly and imaginatively depict the essence of her interviewee’s connections with nature, work, life, and teaching by stitching fabric, while simultaneously crafting a thesis to allow meaning to materialize through an emergent, twinned, highly creative, arts-informed process. After Sara had conducted eight interviews and then designed and sewed each unique and elaborate panel to re-present those individual stories, she carefully placed them together, blocked the quilt and bound the edges, yet found herself blocked too. How could she write this up without losing the aesthetic nature of the quilt itself? I then asked, “Tell me how you make a quilt.” Sara’s explanation allowed her to realize she could use the quilt as a metaphor to write up and connect the stories (through theming) just as she had repeated colours and fabric themes to connect each of the panels to the whole. She recounted how she had selected fabrics, designed blocks, stitched, tore out and re-stitched the quilt. Now that was being mirrored in her writing process by gathering and theming stories, writing and re-writing, tearing out and rewriting again, moving back and forth from text to textile as complementary forms of expression.

Keeping with the generative nature of arts-based inquiry, her evolving quilt method allowed her research to (in)form itself from the stitching of the blanket to the ‘sewing’ of the thesis in order for meaning to be “made” (Ball, 2008; Leavy, 2009). Sara’s final thesis artfully challenged American Psychological Association (APA) style conventions as text faithfully imitated quilt. Context, methods, and literature sections were left-justified; her own more subjective thoughts, insights, final synthesis, and recommendations were right-justified; and the participant’s stories (with thumbnail representations of each panel) were centred on the pages, rendering a quilt-like visual, binding her research all together. When we invite and tend spaces where the patterns that already exist in student’s lives can be revealed and reimagined as methods of inquiry, “congruence runs so deep that the topic becomes the method through which the topic is pursued” (Oberg, 2003, p. 126). Stitching was her method. She already had this pattern in her life, she only needed support to honour her hands-on learning style and let that manifest into method.

Most students feel a great pressure to conform to standard methods, to contort or distort their inquiries to fit conventionalized ways of researching. This can be a drawback to a discovery process that encourages (re)search to draw from the deepest aspects of the self. Ethnographer Laurel Richardson (2000) wisely asks the researcher to “consider a part of your life outside of or before academia with which you have deeply resonated. Use that resonance as a ‘working metaphor’ for understanding and reporting your research” (p. 943). If methods can be born from an “education of attention” (Gibson, 1979), then how one sees, hears, and feels things in response to the world becomes their ‘map.’ Sara’s research did not end with her binding off because not long afterwards, she found that the quilt stitched its own epilogue. Youth in her care took turns wrapping themselves in the elaborate comforter when it was their turn to share their own nature connection stories around the fire. In effect, the symbol-laden, story quilt was being ‘read’ for its beautifully rendered “complex stories and meanings” (Ball, 2008, p. 367) and was in turn inspiring others to tell their stories. Stitching outdoor educators’ life stories into a hand-sewn quilt soon became a potent pedagogical device destined to hold more ‘yarns’ and evoke deeper inquiry as it began to take on a life of its own.

Caron, a French-speaking environmental educator, had a desire to effect behavioural change around overt consumption due to its dire planetary consequences. Listening to the thesis ideas of others did not inspire her. She felt adrift in her process and was ready to leave the program early with a diploma instead of completing her graduate degree. After an initial conversation, I found out her first language was, in fact, photography. She told me she was moved by the work of a photographer (Segal, 2015) who shot people arranged with their garbage in a beautiful way. There it was. With permission from the artist to allow his work to inspire her design, Caron’s arts-based study consisted of five families agreeing to collect and be photographed with their trash over a two-week period. Caron’s stunning photos of the families and their refuse (complemented by her own iconic Burtynksy^[1]-like photos of outdoor markets, grocery store shelves, garbage cans, and used food containers) were blown up and framed for a gallery showing. Feedback from the public and the participating families who saw the show revealed the power that an aesthetic approach to consumption can have when we can see ourselves—our choices, our lives—revealed through our garbage. All the participants reported to Caron they had considered behavioural change at some level through this form of tangible inquiry. Caron’s powers of observation, and her proclivity to see the world (in all its forms) as beautiful, offered a lens of inquiry that asked viewers to look into not just at what and how they consumed (resisting any shame or blame) and to more closely consider, even befriend, what it was they were trying to throw away. By performing research true to herself, this provided an opening for Caron to go on to design and teach a continuing education course on aesthetic consumption and to become a university guest lecturer sharing her unique method of inquiry to help inspire other students to take a leap of faith toward more personally authentic and applied research for a change.

Reflection

Theologian Frederick Buechner (1973) gave practical advice when he wrote, “our calling is where our deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet” (p. 118), where what we love and love to do is met by a world that yearns for just that thing. What if (re)search inquiry was designed not only to seek answers, but for the sake of what we love to do as we try to live into the questions themselves posed by the world (Rilke, 1934)? As teacher-supervisors keen to help students discern what deep values and patterns lie at the core of their true natures—values that may have been temporarily misplaced in their lives, subjugated by more traditional academic traditions—we can provide a kind of co-inquiry, an entry way of possibility to connect the student’s research with their identity and purpose for more novel contributions.

References

Ball, H. (2008). Quilts. In Knowles, G., & Cole, A. (Eds.). Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples and issues. (pp. 364-369). Sage.

Buechner, F. (1973). Wishful thinking. HarperCollins.

Capra, F. (1996). The web of life. Anchor Books.

Gibson, J. (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin.

Leavy, P. (2009). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. Guilford Press.

Nepo, M. (2012). Seven thousand ways to listen. Staying close to what is sacred. Free Press.

Oberg, A. (2003). Paying attention and not-knowing. In E. Hasebe-Ludt & W. Hurren. (Eds.). Curriculum Intertext. Place/Language/Pedagogy. (pp. 123-129). Peter Lang.

Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research. (pp. 923-948). Sage.

Rilke, R.M (1934) Letters to a Young Poet. (M.D. Herter Norton, Trans.). W.W. Norton & Company.

Rūmī & Barks, C. (1995). The essential Rumi. Harper.

Segal, Greg (2015). 7 days of garbage. Retrieved from https://www.greggsegal.com/P-Projects/7-Days-of-Garbage/1/caption