Field Study proposal excerpt
This student will be more fully realizing her connections to cycles – inhalation and exhalation, consumption and elimination, solitude and community, inspiration and disillusion, night and day, spring and autumn, gathering and dispersing, and listening, holding and creating. In this contract, C is for Cycling, the student will gain new perspective on her basic needs and passions through bicycle travel, and immersion in Intentional Communities, Eco-Villages, and small farms across the United States.She will interview the people who live in these communities that live closely with cycles. In order to conduct interviews with the people she visits, and to share with others what she learns, the student will be completing a Human Subjects Review, learning basic interviewing, camera and sound recording skills. After she returns, this student intends to share what she has gathered by weaving these pieces into a cohesive whole, in the form of a short film.
My Blog: cyclingandrecyclingblog.wordpress.com
See full proposal and weekly logs
ABCs and 123s – weekly log and field notes
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Bachelardian Reverie
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Poetry
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Poetry Observed
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Term Paper Abstract
Goethean science is an approach to observation that allows the observer to see the connections between him or herself and the chosen phenomenon; to acknowledge and explore the environment’s effect on the observer, and the observer’s effect on what is observed. Through a field study in the class As Poetry Recycles Neurons at The Evergreen State College, I have used this phenomenological method to study cycles. I have spent the last two months bicycling down the west coast of the United States, visiting places where people choose to live more closely with cycles – including farms, intentional communities, and retreat centers. While cycling around to these various communities, I have used this approach, as described in Craig Holdrege’s paper Doing Goethean Science, to observe and interact with many cycles. I use his ideas along with the model of Buhner’s blend of poetry and prose in The Secret Teachings of Plants as a framework for this paper, as I seek to explain and illustrate this method. The Goethean practice begins with curiosity, a riddle, moves into observation or conversation with the phenomena, recycles the mind through exact picture building, and finds its completion in seeing the whole. Throughout this paper I have sought to bring my prose (in standard font) and poetic voices (centered and in Italics) into conversation with the voices of experts. Through this paper, it is my hope that the reader is able to understand and grasp Goethean science, and then apply this method of engaging the world to more deeply understand any question or phenomenon.