THESIS - INTRO, METHOD, METHODOLOGY

Introduction

I entered the Master of Arts in Environmental Education and Communication (MAEEC) program at Royal Roads University because of how perfectly I felt the content meshed with my own beliefs, interests, and background. Within the program I quickly ran into discussions of René Descartes. Recurring collisions had me seeking further information about who this person was and his influence. This set of inquiries led only to more confusion and conflict in me – eventually causing me to question not only my motivations and assumptions but also some more closely held beliefs. It was an experience both disorienting and discomforting at times and one that left me feeling unmoored. My exploration of this seventeenth century French Catholic philosopher led me to want to reject nearly everything I thought I knew about him. Even many of the ideas most famously attributed to the man, and as a result much of what I read and believed were his influences and rationale, appeared off – and increasingly so the further I looked. Given how deeply embedded and even foundational Cartesian philosophy is to so much popular and academic work, this disillusion felt less like a forgettable bump along my scholarly path and more like an earthquake with accompanying tsunami. As a result, along with attempting to explain my understanding of who Descartes was and what his influence has been, this thesis also explores what is it like to be gripped by epistemic doubt in grad school.

A more conventional discourse analysis directed at Descartes-related themes within Environmental Education would be appropriate and consequential, and yet this thesis seeks to do more than explain my interpretation of our course readings and Descartes’ writings. Descartes is a central theme and what this research orients around but is not the entire picture. Firstly, on its own such a topic may be better suited to a Philosophy or History of Science thesis. Secondly, in the context of Environmental Education generally and MAEEC specifically, a more conventional and detached approach seems inappropriate to the task. Within our course material and many related works, disenchantment with Enlightenment-inspired methods and methodologies are nearly synonymous with denouncements of Cartesian philosophy and so much of that which it is said to have inspired. Thirdly, attempting to describe and understand one student’s experience first-hand takes what would be a much narrower and limited work and potentially transforms it into something of far broader value to myself while also making it more relatable and potentially beneficial for students, educators, and others.

Methodology and Method

This research aims to explore my encounter with René Descartes and the discourses surrounding this philosopher and his work within Environmental Education, along with my personal experience of this and its repercussions. To do so, qualitative methodologies were employed. This work was primarily inspired by the scholarship of Max van Manen (2016) and the hermeneutic phenomenological approaches and their justifications explored in his Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. Van Manen explains that, “Phenomenology describes how one orients to lived experience, hermeneutics describes how one interprets the ‘texts’ of life…” (p. 4). More daringly, this author suggests:

In doing research we question the world’s very secrets and intimacies which are constitutive of the world, and which bring the world as world into being for us and in us. Then research is a caring act: we want to know that which is most essential to being. To care is to serve and to share our being with the one we love. We desire to truly know our loved one’s very nature. And if our love is strong enough, we not only will learn much about life, we also will come face to face with its mystery. (p. 6)

Though possibly provocative, I intend this work to be just such a caring act toward history, this discipline, and myself. Another impetus for this research and its method came from Case and O’Connor’s (2015) assessment that investigations into information seeking rarely explore the impact of receiving or applying that information or the effect this has on the recipient. Though isolated to just one individual, this thesis investigates just that.

As made clear by Edmund Husserl, principal founder of phenomenology, despite knowledge beginning with experience, all experience does not produce knowledge and mere description is not enough; instead, essential to scholarship and broader understanding is the interpretive element (Smith, 2013). As a result, the desire to share and let experiences speak for themselves is paired with the personal and scholarly need to delve deeper and explicate. To do so, this research embeds reflection and interpretation as essential practice alongside descriptive and investigative elements. Because it focusses on my personal experience, this research is grounded in autophenomenology. Gorichanaz (2017) highlights decades of research beginning in the 1980s arguing for the validity and necessity of such “automethodologies” and the single-case, self-study, and narrative research that enhances or even side-steps more traditional positivist approaches (see Bates, 2004; Bromley; 1986, Bruner, 1986; Lassonde & Galman, 2009; McAdams, 2001). Critically, as explained by Chang (2008), these methods do not merely accept but highlight personal preconceptions and in doing so allow one to explore both a culture and one’s place within it, something this work is ultimately concerned with. These human-centered research strategies are argued by many to be more descriptive and inductive and not merely valid but valuable modes of inquiry (see Michels, 2010; Polkinghorne, 2012).

To complement the self-reporting of the autophenomenological approach, this research employs a hermeneutic model. The term hermeneutic derives from the name of the Greek messenger to the gods, Hermes, and originally described a method for teasing out God's intended meanings from scripture. In time, hermeneutics evolved into the study of diverse texts and eventually flowered into a deeply resonant approach to research (Packer, 1985). Although the hermeneutic method lacks rigid formal structure, it tends to involve identifying and challenging assumptions by framing and reframing interpretations in light of differing contextual information, and in so doing can perform as a diagnostic tool for testing validity (Patton & Jackson, 1991). Not only do I believe it is impossible to discuss Descartes’ thinking without bringing up God and interpretations of scripture and other texts, but this research also aims to describe and interpret others’ assessment of Descartes’ writings as well as my own and then consider these in light of further research and reflection. Just as Brown (1976) suggests:

Knowledge of others (and hence of ourselves), is not gained either through introspection or by some direct metaphysical communication with the mind of the other person. On the contrary, it is achieved through the interpretive study of the expressions of that other mind, expressions which can be found in the ‘social-historical world’, the world of art, religion, law and politics, of language and gesture, of the shared community of experience in its living (and hence historical) aspect” (p. 213).

In a similar vein, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), the German hermeneutic philosopher, had a gestaltist perspective on this form of interpretation which this research strongly considers. Dilthey proposed that to comprehend a text, or any other human act, it must be placed in historical context; and, further, that the life history of the interpreter and, really, of all humankind should to be accounted for (Kampis, 1999). The shared world, prior worldviews, and the language and thinking of the interpreter as well as that of the one being interpreted, suggested Dilthey, are all key to understanding and also the very process he called the “hermeneutic circle” (“Wilhelm Dilthey,” 2019). These elements are all essential to this thesis, helping give it both justification and form.

The design of this research takes inspiration from the hermeneutic circle, in which layers of differing context converge to form a consilience of meaning and interpretation. Formatted into four overlapping reflections, this work begins with personal context and life experience and then approaches the present through three subsequent descriptions and reflections, including a final meta-reflection incorporating all the above. To do this, I draw upon course readings and assignments, personal notes and journal entries, along with my own research into the pertinent themes that emerged from my inquiries.

The selected autobiography that begins this research provides some personal environment and education background to situate this research in layers of time, place, and relation. In addition, this first section helps to partially expose how and what I think as well as providing some insight into why. As well as the deeper clarity all of this brings to what follows, offering this background acknowledges those demands for greater context and connection found within the place-based learning, wholeness, complexity, and systems thinking research so common throughout our MAEEC coursework. This highly personal context also accepts the common recommendation to ‘write what you know’ as well as regular prompts from our professors to journal and reflect throughout our time in the program. In so doing, this work also forms a response to the famous Socratic legacy of Athens, found in Plato’s Apology, that a life unexamined is not worth living, while attempting to commit to that ancient Delphic aphorism temet nosce (know thyself). Just as educator and curriculum theorist William Pinar (1988) reminds us in his work Whole, Bright, Deep with Understanding: Issues in Qualitative Research and Autobiographical Method, such inward looking “is not narcissism it is a precondition and a concomitant condition to the understanding of others” (p. 150).

Having oriented around my personal background, this research turns to the relationship I discovered between Environmental Education and René Descartes. In large part I draw upon course readings and assignments along with notes and journal entries from my first year at Royal Roads University. This includes a review of the course readings that discussed René Descartes as well as sharing how I experienced these. In addition to disclosing my own experience, and possibly that of others, this work reveals the volume and variety of material that makes use of Descartes’ ideas as well as the common assessments of the man, his philosophy, and the legacy of both, along with the present discourse as I found it.

The section that follows shows how my own understanding of this seventeenth century philosopher evolved by describing the journey I went on inquiring into the writings, life, and times of this person. I compare the recurrent, and thus presumably important, ideas and themes highlighted by scholars in the previous section with what I learned about these on my own. I also retrace relevant tangents I went on trying to better understand this character, his thinking, and those ideas commonly associated with him. Etymology, literature, history, as well as a translation of Descartes own work all conspire to form a surprising contrast to what I previously understood.

The final section is a return of sorts. Having examined in detail a set of critical relationships, along with some of the background upon which they rest, helps place Environmental Education, René Descartes, and myself in relation to one another. Here, I assess my learning and re-examine the relationship I found between Descartes and the Environmental Education discourse as well as my own evolving relationship to both. Having revealed new and essential context, those networks of inherited and co-created relations, this fourth stage of reflection is undertaken with the potential to unlock new layers of understanding as well as creating space for reorientation and reconnection.