davis-rhythms of knowing_towards and ecological theory of learning research

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Rhythms of knowing: toward an ecological theory oflearning in action researchRebecca Luce-Kapler a , Dennis Sumara b & Brent Davis ba Queen's University , Kingston, Canadab University of Alberta , CanadaPublished online: 24 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Rebecca Luce-Kapler , Dennis Sumara & Brent Davis (2002) Rhythms of knowing: toward an ecologicaltheory of learning in action research, Educational Action Research, 10:3, 353-372

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Educational Action Research, Volume 10, Number 3, 2002

353

Rhythms of Knowing: toward an ecological theory of learning in action research

REBECCA LUCE-KAPLER Queens University, Kingston, Canada DENNIS SUMARA & BRENT DAVIS University of Alberta, Canada

ABSTRACT This article describes the culmination of a 2-year research study,

where the researchers used writing practices with participants to structure

interpretations of gay, lesbian and transgendered teachers experiences. The

researchers were interested in learning how such work might help the teachers

interpret the ways in which they negotiated minority identities within public

school teaching. For the final aspect of the study, the researchers decided to

move the group from an urban setting to a seaside location, and chose to move

more definitively into a participatory role by inviting a colleague to lead the

group in interpretive research activities through the use of writing techniques

and practices. The three-day writing workshop yielded new insights about the

nature of writing and human cognition and, more specifically, revealed how

events of collaborative research reflect an ecological complexity, where the

outcomes of such work co-emerge and are co-specified by a particular group of

individuals working in a particular place and time. As such, these research

events develop their own patterns and rhythms of insight.

a stone dropped into a still pond begins a wave of concentric circles that ripple water bobbing a resting pair of ducks crest and dip up and down again the pattern spreading like a breeze shivering over the water

ocean breaks against rocky outcroppings spills onto white sand of shoreline rush and swoosh of water echoes through temperate rainforest hushing deeper into the lush green vegetation filtered light at forests edge

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Rebecca Luce-Kapler et al

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In the Spring of 1997, a group of teachers and university researchers gathered at the edge of the sea for 3 days. For the previous 2 years, the teachers participating in this workshop met in an urban setting with the researchers (Sumara and Davis) to discuss common readings in fiction, memoir-fiction and non-fiction. Using literary anthropological reader-response practices (Sumara, 2000, in press) to structure interpretations of gay, lesbian, and transgendered teachers experiences, the researchers were interested in learning how such work might help the teachers interpret the ways in which they negotiated minority identities within public school teaching.

In this article, we look back at the 2 years of research that preceded the retreat and the retreat itself to interpret how research understanding can change over time. A reviewer of an earlier draft of this article was concerned that we had not included some description of what the other members of the original action research group were doing now and of how they might regard our interpretations. For clarity, it is important for us to state that we have not been in contact with any of the former members of the group for several years. We expect that each member of the group has taken her or his insights from our earlier collaboration, and have continued to include these remembered insights into current and projected lived contexts just as we have done. For this article, we are using new interpretive lenses to make sense of our own participation in a collective process. As Carson & Sumara (1997) suggest in the introduction of Action Research as a Living Practice, action research is not only accomplished deliberately within collaboratively developed contexts. The process of reconsidering ones past experiences in relation to new knowledge also can be considered action research, since it is a kind of inquiry that demands changes in thinking and acting. The sort of interpretive work that we are advocating here, then, cannot be confirmed by those who contributed to images and impressions of past relationships and past events that we keep in memory. At the same time, we are attentive to the ethical responsibilities of the action researcher, particularly with regard to protecting and valuing our former research collaborators. It is important to state here that, as part of our early work with the teachers in our group, we all agreed that each of us would be permitted to represent insights from our research in ways that were important and productive for each of us without having to consult with one another. During the action research project, participants represented the effects of research insight in different ways:

through the pedagogical practices of those of us who taught in university

and school contexts; through political activism; through the essays, poems and research reports that some chose to write.

We begin by revisiting our role in this collaborative project, establishing

the context of the study and then focusing on the culminating activity that

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continues to influence our understanding of collaborative research even several years later.

The Queer Teachers Study Group Project

Who are we?

In this section, the pronouns we and us are used to indicate that the research process described in this section included Dennis Sumara, Brent Davis, and a group of eight teachers who participated with them in the action research. Rebecca Luce-Kapler did not participate in this phase of the research and, therefore, is not included in the we referred to in this section.

_______

This research project, which occurred between 1995 and 1997, was organised by Sumara and Davis in response to what we perceived as a need for research that might more deeply represent the experiences of teachers who identified as gay, lesbian and transgendered. In order to help establish a research group, we placed advertisements in local gay and lesbian newspapers advertising our research objectives and requesting that interested teachers respond. Because many teachers who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transsexual feel vulnerable to possible exposure in their school communities, response to the advertisements was scant. Nevertheless, following a process of telephone interviews in which we talked about the collaborative action research model that would be used for the research and explained how meetings would be supported by different reading and writing practices, a group of nine teachers six men (including Sumara and Davis) and three women was formed. Several months into the research a tenth member a male in the process of sex reassignment to female joined the group.

The group defined two major purposes. First, we aimed to create opportunities to examine the relationship between our minority sexual identities and our experiences of working in public schools. A second purpose was to create opportunities for us to develop strategies to cope with the persistent homophobia experienced by non-heterosexual teachers. Following theoretical work in queer theory, which argues that persons who occupy minority subject positions can erode cultural stereotypes by reclaiming language that has been used to disparage these positions (e.g. Morton, 1996; Warner, 1993), we named ourselves the Queer Teachers Study Group. Our group met for a full day, once a month for 2 years.

In order to create a shared place for interpretation and analysis, we used literary texts as sites for critical inquiry. Literary engagement activities require that readers form literary identifications with characters and situations that challenge and expand remembered and currently lived experiences. By working with our fellow researchers to interpret these literary identifications, moments of insight occurred that interrupted the

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transparent structures of our perceptions and our thinking. For all of us, these shared responses to literary texts created possibilities for an interesting literary anthropology an interpretive event, where the relationships among memory, history, and experiences of identity were made available for analysis in ways that are not usually possible outside experiences of literary engagement (see Sumara, 2002, for a fully developed discussion).

Although most of these literary texts were written by authors who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, and featured characters who also identify as such, our purpose in reading them was not to consolidate or affirm our experiences as queer teachers, but rather to wonder what we might collectively learn by critically examining our experienced identifications to and interpretations of these texts. Because we all read the same material, we predicted that our responses would be similar. This did not prove to be the case.

For example, in reading and responding to Audre Lordes (1982) Zami: a new spelling of my name, we discovered that no two members of our group identified similarly. Not only were the responses noticeably structured by learned gender differences, they were also clearly influenced by the members racial and ethnic backgrounds. As well, because none of the group had had histories of coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered in the fifties and sixties in urban USA, there was tremendous dissonance between group members remembered and reported lived experiences, and those of the characters in the novel.

By sharing with one another our individual identifications with and responses to literary characters, we eventually came to experience more deeply the significant differences among different members of the group. This was an important and useful insight for us, since it helped all of us to remember that, while we shared experiences of being marginalised by heteronormative structures that exist in society, we did not experience these structures in the same ways. For example, it became clear that the women in our group, who clearly expressed the influence of patriarchal structures on their experience and the ways these colluded with heterosexist structures, recounted personal experiences of oppression that were, in many ways, much more destructive than oppressive experiences expressed by the male members of the group. At the same time, male members who had been identified as gay by others as children and as adults expressed very different interpretations of their role as male teachers than did other members.

Owing to Sumara and Davis transfer to another academic institution across the country, the collaborative research needed to be concluded sooner than was expected. Although this was disappointing, all members of the group acknowledged that the 2 years of research had provided important insights. In private interviews that Sumara had with all group members at various times throughout the research process, participants continually expressed their satisfaction with their involvement in the group. Not only did

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the group provide an important site to interpret past and presently experienced identities, it provided a useful resource and support group for them to continually negotiate the challenges of occupying minority sexuality categories within largely heterosexist and homophobic public education structures (see Sumara & Davis [1999] and Davis & Sumara [1997] for more elaborated discussions).

At the same time, however, we were somewhat dissatisfied with the results of our work. Although we learned strategies for negotiating our minority sexuality identity positions within a largely heterosexist and homophobic culture of public schooling, we needed a language that represented the complexity of our insights. Our shared reading of research literature in perception and human cognition (e.g. Maturana & Varela, 1987; Varela et al, 1991) helped us to understand that if our thinking was to be elaborated, the structures that conditioned our thinking needed to be interrupted. In order to occasion these interruptions, our group agreed to meet far from their usual urban surroundings in a place where the natural world dominated. Furthermore, we chose to interrupt our usual interpretive structures by inviting Rebecca Luce-Kapler to lead the group in interpretive research activities through the use of writing techniques and practices.

For this final retreat, we selected a secluded site on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada, just north of the fishing village of Tofino, where the cabins nestled in the trees, a stones throw from the Pacific Ocean. Although the village was within close driving distance, we decided to cook most of our own meals and eat communally. Rebecca planned a number of activities for the weekend, most of which were focused on learning to pay attention to the details of our geographical context and interpreting these in relation to our research interests. Early in the weekend, for example, she drew attention to the waves sound and rhythm by referring to a passage from Virginia Woolfs novel, The Waves. Woolf wrote this book as an investigation into patterns of thinking (Flint, 1992), using the rhythms of waves, rather than plot to structure the text. She told the story from the point of view of six characters interspersed with interludes that take the reader away from the focus of the individuals and to the larger world, which Woolf attempts to present as unified and coherent through the images and rhythms of the scene. The initial interlude takes us to the sea:

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay in the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and a grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after the other, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave

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paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. (1992, p. 3)

After reading this passage aloud, Rebecca drew attention to the sound of the waves outside, and to the images and rhythms of the natural world. This initial focus began our investigation into language through writing practices that challenged and created our sense of subjectivity. In a later section, when we reflect back to these research experiences, some of these interpretive practices will be described in greater detail.

Changing Rhythms

In the section that follows, we is used to include Dennis Sumara, Brent Davis & Rebecca Luce-Kapler. We acknowledge that the reconceptualising we are doing includes our memories of the persons with whom we worked several years ago. We also acknowledge that they have not participated in creating this interpretation with us. Therefore, the teachers who participated directly in the research cannot be included in this use of we. At the same time, we also understand that our memories of our identifications with members of the research group continue to be influential to us. Nevertheless, we cannot consider this remembered identification identical to the collaborations that occurred when our group continued to meet in person. This does not mean that these remembered identifications are not influential to our thinking. They are similar to those that readers of literary fiction continue to have for literary characters after completing the reading. Relationships that exist in memory, although always changing with time and context, continue to be influential to how we interpret experience. As Kerby (1991) has explained, ones sense of individual and collective identity continues to shift over time, and is shaped by the confluence of memory, current perceptions, and imagination. Our use of we in the next section must be understood as not only shifting, but also as somewhat indeterminate, since as Derrida (1978) and other post-structuralists (Foucault, 1988; Cixous, 1993) have shown, the sense of I you we they are wrapped up in one another and cannot be neatly bounded.

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During a period of time when we were working on another writing project (Davis et al, 2000), we remembered our experience of conducting research by the sea with the other teachers. During our discussions of one aspect of the project, we discribed what had occurred for the three of us during that weekend. Since we focused our current project on trying to develop new theoretical understandings of learning from an embodied, ecological perspective, our memories of learning with others by the sea became newly significant. Although we did not understand this during that time, we began to understand that the waves, in themselves, had created a strong metaphoric presence for our research group. We first recognised their

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significance in the rhythms and images of the participants writing and then, like Woolf, we thought about how waves might suggest something important about human cognition. This section of the article represents our exploration of the nature of waves, and its relationship to human thought, action and identity. Furthermore, the section explores how events of collaborative research, like waves, create patterns that when subject to interpretation practices, become coherent and insightful.

The Nature of Waves

Blue waves, green waves swept a quick fan over the beach, circling the spike of sea-holly and leaving shallow pools of light here and there on the sand. A faint black rim was left behind them. The rocks which had been misty and soft hardened and were marked with red clefts. (Woolf, 1992, p. 20)

The world is immersed in waves: the light that bathes us, the sounds that reach our ears, the water in which we swim, the human bodies that rise and fall around us at a stadium sporting event. Waves begin with a perturbation like a stone thrown into the water, a breath of wind or a hand strumming a guitar string. A medium such as water, air or earth carries the wave, revealing the pattern of the disturbance. By reading waves, one can understand something about the level and direction of energy that has created that disturbance. Being near the ocean on stormy days when strong winds smash the waves against the rocky shore is awe-inspiring in its ferocity, while on calmer days, the steady susurration of gentle surf rolling onto the sand is soothing.

Energy is written on ocean waves for one to read, but these patterns also remind us of a rhythm and a movement of time different from our linear, mechanical notion of clocks and schedules. When one listens to the cresting and subsiding, one experiences a qualitatively different sense of life unfolding and remember that our bodies participate in many rhythms beyond the rushed and constrained demands of modern, corporate time. Virginia Woolf suggested that the real significance of time lies within the realm of the subtle, human interactions and enfolded, multi-layered moments of human contact (cited in Briggs & Peat, 1999, p. 131). Such a notion of time acknowledges that the steady, regular ticking of a clock does not represent our experience of time; rather, one knows that living through significant moments can feel much different from accustomed patterns. When the sensation of time changes, the dimensions shift from a linear perspective to one that becomes more spatial, more fractal. As Tomas Transtrmer writes:

Time is not a straight line, its more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking

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past there on the other side. (Cited in Goyette, 1998, p. 9)

Christopher Bamford, too, describes a different sense of time in his essay about the death of his wife: Time became a set of Chinese boxes, in which each moment, each movement, contained others within others, like a fugue within a fugue, so that I thought if I could but unpack one it would contain all (2000, p. 3).

Like fractal images, fractal time reveals the complexity of form and process. For much of the last millennium, Euclidean geometry has influenced human thinking (Davis & Sumara, 2000). One need only think about the architectural forms and organisational structures that exist in our daily lives to note its predominance. We have described elsewhere how schools with their rectangular shapes and curriculum grids reflect such geometry as do research methodologies that privilege categories of data and straightforward reporting (Sumara et al, 2000). With the emergence of fractals and chaos theory (Gleick, 1987), a greater appreciation for the diversity and complexity of form and process has influenced a number of fields, including education.

Fractals abound in nature from coastlines to trees to the human nervous system identifiable by their two principal characteristics: scale independence and self-similarity. With scale independence, a fractal reveals the same level of complexity no matter what the perspective. Viewing a river delta from the hilltop displays the same intricacy as if one crouches at its edge and follows the small trickles of water that branch off, albeit at a different scale. At each of these scales, the self-similarity of fractal design enables one to see a similar pattern repeated. A floret of broccoli, for example, resembles the entire head and breaking smaller pieces from that floret continues to show the same form. This fractal form emerges from recursive processes, where an action repeats, but always in a repetition that plays on what has come before to develop a pattern. Understanding this quality of fractals has enabled researchers to use recursive processes to address complex problems and has been an important metaphor for the recent development of Complexity Theory (Waldrop, 1992). Complexity theorists have recognised that living systems are closer to fractal geometry than the more mechanistic analogies used for life forms in the past both in the scale-independence of their subsystems and in their recursive processes. Fractal geometry has opened up new possibilities for recognising the design of the universe as being complex, ever unfolding, self-transcending, and relational (Sumara et al, 2000, p. 539).

Fractal time, then, like fractal geometry is a more complex form. It is commonplace to speak of life forms having their own clocks a way that the passing of time is measured whether it is a cell, a tree or an ecosystem in a recursive process that has an identifiable rhythm or pattern. In the mechanical interpretation of time, humans have regularised rhythms so that quantitatively every second, minute and hour is the same length, but in

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doing so human beings have lost the sense that one moment exists within another. The present moment contains infinite moments past, both remembered and forgotten, making possible the multiple interpretations of memory and history.

Staying by the sea for the workshop, our research group was reminded of the fractal nature of waves with their ripples on ripples and their fingers upon fingers of broken crests all building to the grand movement of tides. Listening to waves, our group dropped senses of appointment, obligation and hurry, and began to live in fractal time, remembering that moments could linger all night as in a dream or flash by in a second of ecstasy. We became part of the earths measure, its natural geometry, by attending to the rhythm of the living planet.

Writing by the Sea

This section reverts to the third person narrative voice to describe events of the writing retreat as Rebecca Luce-Kapler experienced and interpreted them. Because Luce-Kapler was not involved in the 2-year action research project and is considered a facilitator, rather than a collaborator in the action research project, it is important that the interpretations presented here be understood as primarily hers, and not ones that were sponsored by the action research group. Nevertheless, in the years following the action research project, considerable conversation between Luce-Kapler, Sumara and Davis, including a large shared writing project have strongly influenced Luce-Kaplers interpretations. So, while the third person is used, the section must still be considered a collaboration among Luce-Kapler, Sumara and Davis, but not a direct collaboration with the other participants of the action research. Instead, the collaboration with these persons occurred through remembered identifications and the ways these were supported by our notes from that weekend retreat by the sea, and our reading, writing and thinking since then.

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Their spray rose like the tossing of lances and assegais over the riders heads. They swept the beach with steel blue and diamond-tipped water. They drew in and out with the energy, the muscularity, of an engine which sweeps its force out and in again. (Woolf, 1992, p. 81)

Complexity theorists, in their investigations of living systems, explain how such systems self-organise to maintain an internal equilibrium, while remaining open to the external environment. In creating larger systems, smaller systems will couple together, each with its own rhythm that co-emerges with other rhythms to become part of the larger systems measure

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of time (Briggs & Peat, 1999). The human body is an example of a system that has a number of internal clocks. Human cells respond to various biochemical processes and, when organised into various organs, they are a dynamic for various functions of the body, such as the beating of the heart, metabolic rates and the electrochemical activities of the brain.

As a living system, human bodies also respond to the external environment. When human beings live in a busy and crowded city, working specified hours and scheduling recreational and meal times to the clock, they become attuned to a monolithic rhythm that dominates their lives. It is not surprising, then, that many of daily conversations include the weariness of living with such time demands and announce a yearning for another sense of rhythm.

Leaving behind the work and the urban environments to relax by the ocean or a forest, human bodies enter a harmony of diverse rhythms. They notice the workings of their bodies, the sound of the waves, the wind through the trees and how their internal clocks harmonise with those of the space in which they are living. Artist Emily Carr, writing about her work in the rainforests of the Canadian west coast, explained that one could discover such rhythms by waiting on her campstool and watching patiently:

Slowly things begin to move, to slip into their places. Groups and masses and lines tie themselves together. Colours you had not noticed come out, timidly or boldly. In and out, in and out your eye passes. Nothing is crowded; there is living space for all. Air moves between each leaf. Sunlight plays and dances. Nothing is still now. Life is sweeping through the spaces. (1966, p. 193)

Carr understood that she became part of that rhythm, a breath that draws your breath into its breathing, a heartbeat that pounds on yours, a recognition of the oneness of all things (p. 215). Such a measure of time becomes fractal, becomes a rhythm of being.

In choosing to spend several days by the ocean at the edge of a forest, the researchers changed the usual external rhythms. Writing particular interpretive pieces meant participants could focus not only on these natural clocks, but also on their own sense of body rhythm and their responses to being in such an environment. They had time to sit and wait for things to slip into their places. Not only did writing require that individuals pay attention to their patterns of being in this location, such activity also included group readings and discussions where they had to attend to each others work. Listening to one another, writing in response and sharing insights meant that over the course of several days, a productive group rhythm emerged.

In The Waves, Woolf writes about such a pattern. While each of the six characters in the novel has his or her own patterns of consciousness, Woolf brings those individual rhythms into play with the larger cycles of nature: the rising and falling of the sun, the shift in seasons, and the cadence of waves on the sea. Like Emily Carr, Woolf appreciated the inter-

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connectedness of living systems and understood that one could trace the energies of living just as one could follow waves on water.

From the initial responses of the writers, the importance of inviting them to work in a place where the rhythms of the natural world were so insistent and present was clear. When asked to search for an object and prepare to tell a story about its finding, everyone went outdoors and almost everyone chose an object of nature. One listened to the waves and made a tape recording; another collected bark from a spruce covered in lichens; still another described the objects she found in a tidal pool. Many of them described how spending time in that space brought back memories of childhood or other visits or pleasant moments in their work. Within those moments of reflection, they had noticed how they were making connections across time and how the rich unfolding of relationships were recognised, acknowledging the entanglements of human and natural history. One woman wrote:

I knew I was looking for Old Mans Beard before I left ... because the last time I was here I walked along the beaches and just picked it up off of the sand. I took it back to my classroom and last year my kids did a science fair and they dyed with these natural plants. So I knew I wanted to get some more off of the ground. ... When youre going over the rocky head where you go through the trail parts theres always trees up there that Old Mans Beard is hanging off of or coating the branches. I always find it in places where its really perfectly still and totally quiet ... It just feels really ancient to me, and really old. This can grow in amidst all this change and turmoil ... it grows so slowly and takes years and years. ... Its just been there forever.

As the workshop progressed, their writings reflected a deepening sense of the interconnectedness of the human world with the non-human through the rhythmic attention echoing the cadences of the waves, similar to Virginia Woolfs text cited in the opening section. One woman wrote:

I breathe the sky. Stand in her. Heave my spirit in the trees. My body is an open current. My breath cooked air. From my minds eye there is no limit I tell you. The jade blue arches through conundrum leans into delft white court sky. The ocean snores fitfully. The milky tip-most tops of waves force the issue. Ghosts fold into one another becoming other. Pull me out of dream from Cats Ear Creek to rainforest path. For spruce towers are great cathedrals. Rain faints. Hold fast to the vulnerable sky.

Another participant wrote:

If you listen, through the waves, you can hear the earths vibration. The resonance. Like a bow being drawn over a violin. Its

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hiding beneath the sounds made by the breakers. Those whose crest reach over and spill, slapping into themselves, building to muffled thunder that fades or blurs into the roar of another wave ...

Coupled with this rhythm was an awareness that time was unfolding differently and in their writing the researchers heard murmurs of many pasts: personal, historical, cultural and mythical. Margaret Laurence describes this rich evocation of time in texts in her essay, Time and the Narrative Voice. Laurence explains that:

The time which is present in any story, therefore, must by implication at least include not only the totality of the characters lives but also the inherited time of perhaps two or even three past generations, in terms of parents and grandparents recollections, and the much much longer past which has become legend, the past of a collective cultural memory. (1983, p. 155)

The writers connection to this more complex shape of time came to the fore when Rebecca asked them to choose from a list of natural objects and write about their memories relating to that choice. Afterwards, she gave them details about the mythical significance of their object and suggested they respond to this additional information. Several of the participants explained that singling out that one aspect of their object was not as interesting as the thinking or writing they had done initially, which seemed to them more complex. One explained:

I picked wind and I wrote about wind in the lake ... I didnt get as much out of the reference to wind as I thought I might have ... When I was writing about wind I didnt think of it so much as a malevolent force. I thought about the first time it came up with rain when I was in Hawaii, and how beautiful that wind felt ... Then I thought about meeting my last partner and how we were walking up the street and the wind was blowing so fiercely. We were freezing but laughing.

Distilling the mythical-historical sense from their objects removed the personal and cultural connections that they brought to their writing and excluded its significance for the few minutes that they considered the ideas. What such an activity helped them realise, however, was that within their texts were connections beyond what they had first imagined: connections to past stories, to shared cultural understandings, to family histories, and personal experience. Like the pattern of the waves moving through water, they could see the pattern of their lives moving through the language on the page:

Simple, complicated, confused, organized, logical, compulsive, practical Gemini. Matted and stringy lichens. Smooth silky velvet shells caressed on lips. Rough spiky barnacles painful to fall on. A million years of sand and wind. Awakening of desire. Longings. A

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charcoal pencil to capture the swirl of the sand around a rocky pool. A camera to capture the waves as they form curves on the sand like my lovers body.

The returning again and again of the group members to the cabin where they met to read their work, to talk about writing in this location, to talk in small groups with one another emphasised the emerging rhythms and images of their particular writings, but this continual recapitulation had its own rhythm that created the character of the group. The event that highlighted this aspect most clearly was an activity called The Exquisite Corpse.

The Exquisite Corpse is adapted from a game developed by surrealist painters during the 1920s where they folded a sheet of paper so several people could contribute to the drawing of a figure without seeing what the others had already drawn (Hofmann, 1996). The results often were unusual and interesting sketches. In using this idea as a writing activity, each person began with a sentence and passed the paper to the individual next to her or him. That person wrote something to follow and then folded the paper over to hide the first sentence. They passed the papers onward until every writer had contributed sentences on each paper several times. Never did the participants see more than the previous sentence.

After finishing the writing, each participant silently read the page that he or she had started. At first there was some consternation that the story had taken such a strange direction. The authors of the initial sentence were disappointed that their interesting thought had not been developed and taken up in the way that they had imagined. Then the group read each page aloud, one after another. What began to emerge were the connections and rhythms that worked across texts to bring all of the pages together into an interesting and somewhat sensible group story. One participant explained that she was surprised at how easily it flowed and that the connections were there. Another noted that its interesting that theres a trace of almost everything in each of those. Things weve talked about here and words that have come up. In some way it becomes represented in each of those pieces. The participants, through such comments, revealed a sensibility to the ecological character of their work. That is, they were illuminating how the thinking of the group, arising from their interpretive work was co-specified, co-emergent and co-dependent, creating a rhythm particular to that group in that time and place.

Just as water is a medium that reveals the patterns of waves, so does writing reveal the character of writers and the writing group. Individuals, through their interpretive work, made particular connections to the place in which they wrote and their experiences. Themes and images appeared in their writing, and were revisited and reinterpreted as the workshop continued. For example, the woman who began the weekend in search of Old Mans Beard continued to find objects in the environment that she connected to her students, her work as a teacher and her partner. Most of

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her writing worked to relate the creative feelings that the ocean stimulated in her to her life back in the city:

A teacher, stifled, creativity on hold. Lost somewhere if it exists. Red algae on purple starfish. Green sea lettuce on orange shells. Grey sand on grey black volcanic rock ... Lover, teacher, lesbian, mother, feminist, friend ... Jagged and lined shaped like a wedge of clay ... Broken. Disjointed. Chaos and yet, order.

The group served as a site where these expressions of self were tested against the awareness of flux (Flint, 1992, p. xi), enabling those rhythms to weave into the interpretive processes as images and ideas reverberated through the group, revealing the patterns of identity that were emerging through the writing.

Writing Identities

The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping. (Woolf, 1992, pp. 112-113)

This particular project contributed to the researchers ongoing work investigating the formation of identity as it co-emerges within complex systems subhuman, social collectives and the more-than-human moving beyond the socio-cultural emphasis of the post-modern to the ecological postmodern. Rather than seeing identity as an individual designation, such a perspective broadens identity to be the individual-as-part-of-the collective (Davis et al, 2000, p. 176). A crucial aspect to the formation of these identities is the language through which humans shape the world and create realities. Language spoken, written or read has a rhythm. While every individual reveals a particular pattern to her or his speaking and writing, this pattern is one that is shaped by being part of a sea of voices. The voices and their rhythms contribute to and are influenced by this sea, unfolding a universe of meaning.

Language brings forth the sense of who we are, but while subjectivity is inherent in all expression, it can neither be controlled nor stabilised. As Jeannette Winterson wrote, The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once (1989, p. 80). Language, then, becomes a medium revealing the traces of identity, just as the water ripples with waves that appear and disappear in a coherent pattern, and because language is shared, identities flow and merge into each other. The image that Flint uses in her reading of The

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Waves illuminates this process: These divergent elements which make up the individual voices in The Waves are like the components of a tidal sea: the same molecules, in constant process of rearrangement, directed, like waves, by forces beyond themselves ... (p. xxvi).

The workshop reminded the researchers that writing becomes a way to recognise the coherent pattern of identity as emerging from biological and phenomenological possibilities. While each piece of writing was particular and individual, each revealed images and rhythms that drew it into the collective work of the group, each contributing to the coherence of the whole. Within the workshop context, participants shaped and reshaped their writing, serving to heighten their consciousness of the self and the group. Writing made possible such understandings because, as Olson (1994) explained, the emergence of writing enabled human beings to have an idea about an idea; that is, our consciousness of words created a distinction between the words themselves and the ideas they express. Such capabilities mean that humans can use written language as an object of reflection and analysis.

In writing, we describe an I who is distinct from our material body. Through recognising this other, Bakhtin (1981) explained, we find ourselves in mutual reflection and perception. The I who writes can trace some of the complicity, influences and possibilities in the I who is written about. It is this ability of language to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers that gives it vitality (Morrison, 1993, p. 20).

While the writing activities during the workshop enabled the participants to discover the relationships between their work as teachers and their sense of identity, it was when reading the transcripts that the researchers could trace the relationship between identity and the broader contexts in which they emerge. For instance, one woman wrote:

Pearl morning. A raucous caucus. I enter the earth mouth gorged with choice. Shades of grey splayed on her sandy tongue. Flies ricochet off my cheeks. I wave my hand over my face. Fingers spread in a circular motion like my mother when mosquitoes draw near ... Choose she who wails the loudest. Watch her rise. Wash her down. My child getting ready for Sunday mass. Stone within stone within story within star. Cold against ear I hear the sea, the whole story. See it crease. Rumble through your viziers. Wrinkle your face. Shove coarse white light in places unprepared. Leaving you some 160 million years later pocked, scarred, scared. The taste of salty tears on your earlobe. Above exploding star, the redeeming stellar halo.

In their writing, the participants drew from their memories of being in the natural world threading them through their current experiences by the ocean, using them to interpret their lives and sense of identity.

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Humans struggle to find some sense of unity in the many experiences that make up their lives, creating narratives about their selves to develop a pattern of identity (Kerby, 1991). While events are continually occurring to shift that story, over time there is an ever-emerging coherence to that process as we do have a sense of who someone is. Only when a radical occurrence disrupts that pattern, do we realise that the individual is not herself or himself.

In writing, an author who returns to a work will find it familiar yet already removed from the present sense of who she is; nevertheless, writers do develop a consistency or coherence in their work, something identified as their style. In the writing from the workshop, the teachers had the opportunity over several days to begin to follow the pattern of their thinking and recognise how engaging in a variety of experiences in a new interpretive location further shaped their identity. They listened to the natural rhythms of the ocean and rainforest, they responded in writing and through oral story, they created a group rhythm reflected in the work they did together, and they came away understanding their relationships to each other and to the world differently. Even as writing takes individuals away from lived experience, it reminds them of their grounding and calls them to notice how deeply they are entangled in the life forces of the world. As Flint tells us, Virginia Woolfs desire in writing The Waves was to notice and investigate her own patterns of thought, particularly when faced with the problem of understanding the nature of identity (p. ix).

By bringing together a group of writers by the ocean and focusing on interpretive events, the researchers were able to notice the patterns of identity that emerged from the participants as they wrote together. Seeing the relationship between identity and the coherence of waves also suggested to the researchers that this occasion asked them to reconsider their understandings of research.

Eloquent Research

The waves massed themselves, curved their backs and crashed. Up spurted stones and shingle. They swept round the rocks, and the spray, leaping high, spattered the walls of a cave that had been dry before, and left pools inland, where some fish stranded lashed its tail as the wave drew back. (Woolf, 1992, pp. 125-126)

The final wave in this ripple moves us beyond the workshop, the consideration of writing and identity and on toward a larger view of research. With the researchers interest in engaging in ecologically orientated research, where one acknowledges that everything matters, it is not surprising that the waves were helpful and offered insight into this work. An ecological sensibility to research suggests that researchers recognise the interdependence and collaboration of systems, which co-emerge and co-evolve. As such, this perspective brings with it the understanding that one

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can only know a small part of the confluence and influence of the research moments and contexts. Therefore, since researchers cannot know the full consequences of their actions, they must proceed mindfully. What winds or storms have characterised the waves? What words spoken have raised a memory and elicited a response from a participant? We cannot always know or see all that produces the patterns of our research.

Mary Rose OReilley writes that Whenever you move any small peg in classroom culture or the culture of any organisation everything you used to take for granted will shift (1998, p. 27). Understanding that each peg chosen and each movement of the peg makes a difference could seem overwhelming, and might suggest that one can never be certain in research work. Instead, though, knowing that it all matters simply means that researchers be attentive, that they watch and listen, knowing that each moment of decision making, each moment of experience in the research is important. Understanding research in this way means that there are no all-encompassing answers sought, but rather patterns of living that can be revealed, helping individuals better understand how to be in the world.

The facilitators become both researchers and participants in this process, as are those with whom they work, creating a vibrant context together, an experience that has its own medium, its own particular rhythm, its own coherence that one can read. Some of the conditions of such research one can create, but the research path or what events might emerge cannot be predetermined. In choosing to spend time by the water and involve individuals in interpretive writing events, the researchers were certain that interesting things would occur that would offer opportunities for insight, but could not anticipate what those would be. What was possible would only co-emerge from people who came together in a particular place to engage in shared activities.

In thinking about the data the transcripts, the writing, the researchers own experiences and journals there were multiple perspectives that could have been taken. A close examination of how the form of writing had shifted the interpretations of the writers was a possibility as was a discursive analysis of the sub-textual elements (see Luce-Kapler, 1999; Luce-Kapler et al, 2001, for example). Or the researchers could have followed one participants responses throughout the entire workshop to develop some insight into his or her interpretations. Instead, the focus came to be how the phenomenon of waves played itself out in the work and in understanding of the writing and identity. Interestingly enough, however, no matter what scale chosen to examine the data, similar patterns reappeared and repeated. Whether exploring one persons writing or the work of the larger group, certain insights about writing and identity became possible.

The writing about the workshop continued this process of research that A. Stairs calls re-creative (personal correspondence, 2001). That is, by returning to the data, reconsidering, writing about it, every wave of work builds on what had gone before bringing a newer and deeper realisation of

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what the research reveals. Rather than isolating ideas for understanding, the researchers drew threads of connection and relationship from the moments of the workshop to the larger world, coming to understand ecological research, then, as not a research genre, but rather as a sensibility that works across the fluid and blurring boundaries of research genres (Geertz, 1988; Richardson, 1997) to recognise the participatory nature of such a process participatory in the human and non-human sense. Lincoln & Guba (2000) have suggested that bringing inquiry to a place that reflects ecological values, and a deeper understanding of our own and other contexts may bring together the sacred and secular in research.

Ending the separations of mind and body, spirit and mind, humans and the world may be the most generative kind of work we, as researchers and teachers, can do:

The rocks lost their hardness. The water that stood round the old boat was dark as if mussels had steeped in it. The foam had turned livid and left here and there a white gleam of pearl on the misty sand. (Woolf, 1992, p. 160)

_______

Who are we? In the writing of this article, this was a continual challenge and question. Shifting antecedents can be somewhat confusing and we had tried to control this problem in our earlier draft by writing the entire article in the third person. One reviewer of that draft wrote: Frankly, the third person bothered me epistemologically and also seemed less clear than we because they could refer either to the three researchers or the teachers. This advice led us to become more explicit about the shifts. In doing so, we realised quite viscerally how complex such work is and how the nature of the collective in collaborative action research changes over time. By its very nature, such collaboration engages multiple voices, multiple perspectives and porous boundaries. To then try to collapse everything into one authorial voice highlights the control bias inherent in such a notion (Foucault, 1984). Instead, we have tried to reveal the shifting perspectives and voices more obviously and, while this may have created a less smooth presentation, we believe that it also has revealed the rich and evocative character of collaborative action research for investigating questions of teaching and learning.

Correspondence

Rebecca Luce-Kapler, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, Canada ([email protected]).

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