I call your attention to a couple of sites

http://www.secondaryed.ualberta.ca/en/GraduatePrograms/AreasOfStudyOrientationsAndResearchTraditions/ArtsBasedResearchAndParticipatoryResearch.aspx

and a great research blog:
http://unrealnature.wordpress.com/

http://hdl.handle.net/10393/19679



Today we had two Carleton students able to help us in the school grounds that are shared between the two schools. There were three mothers digging the old beds and two new ones to be built. One of the students had been out to Alpenblick farm to get cedar logs for the raised beds and cut them about to size and get them to the schoolyard. Once the new plots were dug and marked out with string we dragged the logs over. There was only one mother working by then, plus myself. Kate and Raymond and two great boys: Bobby, 10 and Noam about 12 years old. We had to use a very old hand drill to bore holes into the cedar logs for the dowels, and a really crappy little handsaw for cutting them. I watched some of the little kids in the other plot shaking off clods of grass to get the earth off. Kate took photos of them holding worms and one of the little girls became emotionally attached to a yucky white grub she was holding. She did not want to leave it behind. “It might get killed” I heard her say to her mom. “…Well…. I guess we can bring it home and put it in the backyard” her mom said. I felt stricken by her sensibility for matters of life and death and remembered my own childhood feelings for living things, even yucky ones. (personal journal entry, May 17, 2008)

Re-reading this entry now, I see the story differently as:

UN-individuated and close to the ground, the child relates to the grub as kin, and takes for granted that they are connected in living and inhabiting the same space of ground; this reflects something I’ve been flabbergasted NOT to have encountered in educational theory (outside of D. Jardine): ” THE UNIQUE INCAPACITY OF THE CHILD TO INHABIT AN ‘ I ‘ WHILE THE PEDAGOGY PRESUMES THEY CAN (OR OUGHT TO)”

The child is a poet before she is a scientist. We need children who feel connected to life; who haven’t be undone by schooling. Why do we want to make them into ego bounded miniature adults with individuated future plans so early in life? The ones who feel connected can tell us what the connections are, where we are dis-connected, and how to build in resiliences. They will show us what they need to know for their future lives, presuming we have the capacity for “heeding” them. Then we might be able to teach them something fruitful.

“The science of the particular” was what started me on the thesis “path”. Qualitative research can be a science of the particular and of experiencing the process of process itself.

Click on the link to read the thesis. Avoid chapter one if you are reference-phobic.

Consult Table of Contents link if you want to skip to a section/page

ThesisTableContentsApr25

This is the cover page. I will attach the body of the thesis. Chapter one delineates source material. Skip it if you find it too convoluted.

“Last February, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, population 2,326, passed an unusual ordinance,” The Boston Globe reports. “Shapleigh sought to protect its aquifers from Nestle Corp., which draws heavily on the region for its Poland Spring bottled water…[The town] tried something new – a move at once humble in its method and audacious in its ambition. At a town meeting, residents voted, 114-66, to endow all the town’s natural assets with legal rights: ‘Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.’ It further decreed that any town resident had ‘standing’ to seek relief for damages caused to nature – permitting, for example, a lawsuit on behalf of a stream.”

Dump Site 41 in Tiny Township on Georgian Bay might consider this too.

See also, Michel Serres: The Natural Contract