Action

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In this blog post I write about the approach and the methods used when I went back into the woods with my fellow researchers (MA students approaching graduation) for this Action Research work. As explained in the Cycle blog post, I see our action and research as symbiotically linked at this moment. 

1. Learning : We are using Participatory Action Research (PAR) in response to the research question, in part to: shake-up the power structures inherent in the roles acted by ‘teacher’ and ‘student’; make more plural the process of academic knowledge creation; bring all researcher’s positionalities and intersecting identities into the gathering and analysis of data.
   
2. Action : By exploring the above methods, we are also exploring a future methodology for our Forest School dream. 

Between this blog post and my previous one I intend to respond to learning outcome 3 : Design, implement, and review research methods and instruments appropriate to your question.

Participatory Action Research, as Caroline Lenette explains in her 2024 training video, is a practice with strong anti-colonial potential. It first asks us as researchers to think deeply about how we situate ourselves in relation to our work, how our affordances and privileges affect ourselves and others, and importantly why we might be interested in participatory methodologies. “A heightened sense of self-awareness is crucial for an approach like participatory action research to be meaningful, effective, and ethical”. (Lenette, 2024).

Why did I lean towards a PAR approach:

• We talk about co-design, collaboration and collective action within our curriculum. We believe in the power of the collective imagination, and anti-colonial dreams. But how can I practice this more fully and authentically in day-to-day life and learning with our students?
• I recognise how my academic role at LCC can create a barrier between me and others. People might perceive me in a certain way, and alter their behaviour around me, I might use the power within my role to make decisions on behalf of others, and make assumptions about what people need. Can PAR create a structure to challenge an academic’s power and an academic’s conditioning? 

Instead of gathering / mining / extracting data and taking people’s stories for our own academic gain. PAR involves people as researchers in the project. Lenette calls this the role of ‘co-researchers’, suggesting there is still a lead ‘researcher’. Language matters (see Question blog post), so I would argue the application of ‘co’ compounds an idea of knowledge and power hierarchy. For the purposes of my work, I am calling everyone involved ‘researchers’.

Another challenge I see in this approach is how you build a genuine connection to the why this research matters (to the individual as much as to society). I believe all researchers involved need to feel that the work matters to them on a personal level, that it will benefit them, and they can speak to their own personal reasons for doing it. I attempt to address this below.

This Action Research project is a tiny speck of dust in the PAR universe, but here is a summary of my approach:

1. Inviting researchers to re-connect with woods together for a day and prototype the Forest School dream. The student group who have been with us since Oct 2023 were about to hand-in their final work and have their final show at the end of November. I felt an opportunity to bring this group cyclically back to the woodland space in which they started this MA. I also knew two of them had been developing their own research and practice in a creatively and academically aligned space.
   
   > One looking at ‘learning in the wild’ where they are creating space for students to meet alongside our MA, which purposefully aims to dismantle the outdated and damaging colonial and patriarchal pedagogies that have been inherited and internalised by students, and replicated by university structures.
   
   > One looking at ‘Ecofeminism and climate activism’ where they are sharing and making tools and strategies for softer more inclusive forms of climate activism. They are exploring pace, quietness, wild spaces, and interdependence.
   
   We spoke together about our work as three different yet interconnected inquiries, and I asked them if they’d like to join me for a day in the woods to enhance all our three different research projects. We agreed on a date which worked for us all, November 4th 2024. Meaningful participation, as Lenette describes (Lenette, 2024), does not mean consultation after the fact. It means truly setting up processes where co-researchers are acknowledged and responded to as full versions of themselves with their own ideas, experiences and motivations. The researchers consent to be named in this process, they are Sharmila Gnanakumar Malathi and Stephania Bohorquez Diaz.
   
   
2. The day collectively imagined
   I shared my research question with my new research group, and we talked about a plan for the day and for the preparation. My initial thinking was to spend a day in the woods using a semi-structured interview method in relationship to the research question: What can we all learn with and from the forest to develop a more embodied understanding of eco-social justice? But my Research colleagues challenged me and suggested they all bring their own research question and research method into the day. I really appreciated this challenge, and it reminded me how many decisions I make daily on behalf of others. How much unlearning and de-conditioning I have to do. My collaborators used the PGCert research question as a starting point, and it was agreed we would each bring our own question and our own research method into our day.
   
   Lenette describes this flexibility with the research question, and relevance of the question to all researchers, “there is no point in producing research that has no bearing whatsoever on the lives of people at the centre of the research”, or that is not based on the perspectives and the needs that are identified by co-researchers, in my view.” (Lenette, 2024).
   

A summary of the methods we each brought into the woods:

We each brought a research method into the woods with us. Here I explain each method, and what was discovered through our engagement with it. The reflections and analysis below have been done by myself in conversation with my researcher collaborators.

Walking and talking : this method emerged organically, as we took our steps through the woods together. We found ourselves drawn to the paths which spoke more quietly, the overgrown and spiky ones. We got snagged on the branches. And we felt like the first feet who had disturbed the dry autumn leaves. Our conversation held a pace in unison with our walking. The pauses felt natural and thoughtful. We built on each others words and ideas in a way that felt more tender and generous than conversations that happen on chairs and in rooms. We weren’t competing for space. The book Walking Methods: Research on the Move (O’Neill & Roberts, 2019) emphasises how the sensory and kinaesthetic aspects of walking facilitate deeper connections with lived experiences, memories, communities, and identities. A central focus is the Walking Interview as a Biographical Method (O’Neill & Roberts, 2019, chapter 3), which brought to mind the Sensing Workshop I did with our new students, discovering how the majority of them had been transported to stories of themselves in their childhoods as they meandered through these same woods. The challenges here are the inherent ableist assumptions, and the inaccessible nature of the landscape to people less confident or able on their feet. This research therefore is flawed in that it is made by people who share the same physical access to these spaces and conversations.

The conversation was rich with ideas and references and the intertwinement of our different positions in relation to the trees and our practices . We choose not to take notes in the moment, and not to audio record. Because we wanted the conversations to be held by the three of us equally. So the question arose for me of how we hold and remember what is being said in a way that will help us in our research practice. This is also a question for how we create neurodivergently inclusive research practices, where memories are differently accessed and recalled. My instincts for control emerging here, the researchers reminded me to trust my mind and my body to absorb what it needs to.

Climbing trees : One of the researchers brought the methods of play and enchantment into our time together. They spoke of their own memories playing in the wild, and mourned the loss of these playful practices in adulthood (something explored within PGCert term one). She asked us to climb a tree together, to balance on the edges of a branch, and feel the tree holding us and talking back. One of the researchers fell off a dead branch (they were ok) but it made us think about how the knowledge in our bodies is failing us. As children (and see this with my own) we communicate with the world around us using our full bodies. Feeling the balance, reading the early indications of a loose branch, testing the wet moss for traction against our wellies before we continue. This is about the value and role of embodied practice, it is also about joy.

Being joyfully engaged with our surroundings is key to what Jane Bennett (2001) calls enchantment. Wonder-at-and-with our world. It is a disruption – Noora Pyyry (2017) talks about in their article Thinking with broken glass: making pedagogical spaces of enchantment in the city – that can open up new reflection. Pyyry writes about dwelling with – making a home for oneself in the world, with the world. And it stuck me how deeply this connects to a desire in all this work to dissolve the boundaries between grown-up humans and their surroundings.

“Clean-cut categorizations such as ‘learner’, ‘urban’, ‘nature’, and so on become problematic, and learning is re-conceptualized as an ongoing, non-linear and rhizomatic event in which knowing and being are always tied together. While playing, children are open to the unexpected: they are dwelling with the city and take part in creating new pedagogical spaces of enchantment.” (Pyyry 2017)

Meditation: Another one of our researcher’s brought meditation as a method into the woods. I took us to a special spot in the woods where I had spent some competitive time in the past, it felt like the right place to connect with the sounds of our surroundings. A meditation was read from the book Meandering by Sofia Lemos (2024). And we opened up a space for our minds and bodies to further absorb the thoughts and feelings we’d been gathering from the day so far. Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy explores the intersection of mindfulness practices and anti-oppression education (Berila, 2015). We can explore meditation as a method not just for calming and regulating our tattered nervous systems – and connecting the sound of the birds – but also to become more attuned to our own inner selves, our biases, internalised prejudices, our collective conciseness “Mindfulness offers a way to cultivate awareness of these inner dynamics... unlearning the internalised beliefs and behaviours that perpetuate injustice” (Berila, 2015).

“open the door to collective action that is grounded in deep awareness of the world as it is and how it could be.” (Berila, 2015).

Mirrors: We also bought mirrors into the landscape, as a tool to explore between us. Without pre-described intent or objective, we each took a hand-held mirror and started moving through the woods using these as a way to see differently. Upside down, underneath, close-up. moving slowly. Seeing the reverse of the familiar. It helped us stop and frame a small moment in a vast landscape. And we wondered about the overwhelm people feel when not sure where to start or where to focus in this mostly un-curated wild world. Do frames and lenses help us find a space to start?

I was reminded to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writings in Gathering Moss where she describes ‘learning to see’ (Kimmerer, 2021, p8), trusting your eyess, and keeping a magnifying lens handy around your neck.

“We think we’re seeing, but we have only just scratched the surface… Have we become dismissive of what takes no technology but only time and patience to perceive? Attentiveness alone can rival the most powerful magnifying lens” (Kimmerer, 2021, p8).

Eating food together: We ended our day with lunch. One difference between the three of us was that I was being paid by UAL to do my work, and they were paying the same institution to do theirs. We talked about that, and I spent some of my earnings on food we could all share.

We shared our relationships our different relationships to food, as women from Colombia, India and Britain. We shared space and flavours together, and took the time to listen to our emotions as the winter months were drawing it. It was getting cold. We ate outside. Our bodies were grateful for the soup. Our cold fingers were telling us we’d done a full days work.

Sitting together, sharing food, learning about each other, and paying attention to each other are essential in the development of relationship. Trust is central to it all, and of course it should be in any collaborative work (Lenette, 2024).

Collaborative field notes: We spoke about participatory analysis within this research process. But I need to acknowledge here that the timeline was mine, not theirs. And the PGCert was my goal.

As Lenette describes there is a flex and flow required when working collaboratively with multiple researchers. “Actually it’s impossible to integrate those principles in research projects that are guided by institutional agendas within very short time frames, within limited budgets. So there is this term ‘faux-PAR’ that refers to the fact that you can call something PAR, but the aspects of the project themselves are not aligned with the principles of PAR.” (Lenette, 2024).

Our field notes were built on collectively overtime. I created field notes to remember the conversational themes and topics as close to the day as possible. And the other two researchers reflected on their experiences later on, accommodating for their existing MA Research project hand-in dates. 

I was originally interested to see how my field notes map might grow / get written-over / re-linked through the participation of us all. However sustaining the participatory integrity of the full process was challenging once we left the woods. And this was my concept, not theirs. As our time physically together ended, it became more difficult to work together on the analysis and reflection of this work from a distance. And I didn’t want to force this in any way. But all three of us have participated in the final reflection on learning, and I have curated this within final blog post of this PGCert submission. 

References:

• Bennett, J. (2001). The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

• Berila, B. (2015). Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education. Routledge.

• Learning for Action. [online] Learning for Action. Available at: https://learningforaction.com/participatory-analysis [Accessed 13 Jan. 2025].

• Lenette (2024) PAR (Video).mp4 

• Lemos, S. (2024). Meandering. MIT Press.

• Noora Pyyry (2017). Thinking with broken glass: making pedagogical spaces of enchantment in the city. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1391-1401. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1325448.

• Robin Wall Kimmerer (2021). Gathering moss: a natural and cultural history of mosses. London: Penguin Books.‌

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