This creative project is a field and laboratory guide major to the study of Marine Ecology in Long Island Sound, Connecticut. It provides students with basic instructions for collecting, preserving, testing, and analyzing data from field and laboratory investigations. The guide is designed as an open-ended investigative approach to the examination of the ecological aspects of the marine environment. It is arranged to incorporate the five ecosystems of the marine environment: salt marsh, estuary, rocky shore, open ocean, and sandy beach ecosystems. Included are techniques for thorough examination of the physical, chemical, and biological portions of these ecosystems.

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

This study set out to explore the possibilities that the Critical Realist concept of a stratified ontology might have for environmental learning and materials development processes. This involved processes of ongoing contextual profiling; the use of picture-based resources and storytelling to support the engagement with the marine harvesting contexts of the villages of Hamburg and Ngqinisa, in the former Ciskei. At the heart of the study was the process of uncovering the empirical, the actual and the real in the context of a community of coastal marine harvesters whose lives and livelihoods are affected by poverty and a history of inequality, and more recently by issues such as HIV/AIDS. Their stories of existing practice changed as we engaged with picture-based narratives, gaining depth and focus in relation to sustainability issues. The learning processes associated with and emerging out of the research processes were enhanced through abductive use of metaphors and graphic illustrations, and through intra- and inter community exchanges, again using picture based narratives. As the study unfolded, the development of environmental education materials receded. Focus turned to how conceptual abstraction processes (of abduction (metaphor) and retroduction) and the stratified ontological framework allowed for learning across epistemological divides.