Exploration 1: Critical Action Research - A Interpretation

What keeps you going everyday? Unless you are some sort of supreme being blessed with an eternal spring of endless intrinsic motivation there must be something that coaxes your feet onto the cold hardwood floors at 6AM  everyday. For some, it's the seductive scent of dark roast coffee. For others, it's the curiosity to find out what this new day will bring. Some people just simply do it out of routine. These are the easy reasons we tell ourselves when we find ourselves hitting the snooze button one too many times, two too many days in a row.

I am the type of person that likes to dig a little deeper. Under all of the easy reasons I believe that we all wake up everyday because we are all still searching for our purpose in life. We wake up everyday asking ourselves the same question, "Will I feel content today?"

As a Femme teacher living in the year 2020 I am sadly not surprised when I find myself answering no to this question over and over again. You could argue that it's just the reality of living life with Complex Post Traumatic Disorder or even my chronic anxiety and depression. However, I would point out that I am not the only one I know that ends the day wondering what is missing.

This summer I picked up the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. For the first time, I found someone who was able to explain why contentment is so difficult for me to grasp. Kimmerer suggests that our feelings of discontentment are instead, waves of loneliness kept rapidly crashing by our failure to build relationships with the world outside of ourselves. As a botany professor who was also raised in the Indigenous culture, Kimmerer sees evidence of this conflict in the educational system. In the chapter, "Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass" she describes her understanding of research.

"Laurie's education so far was full of the scientific method, but I wanted her to live out a slightly different style of research. To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don't speak the same language, I can't ask them directly and they wont answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors. Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask. I smile when I hear my colleagues say "I discovered X." That's kind of like Columbus claiming to have discovered America. It was here all along, it's just that he didn't know it. Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings." 

 As I begin to consider my own understanding of Critical Action Research, my copy of Braiding Sweetgrass lays at my right hand.


KIMMERER, ROBIN WALL. BRAIDING SWEETGRASS: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. PENGUIN BOOKS, 2020.