How Deep Ecology and Critical Social Theory Come Together in Outdoor Travel Guiding: On theDiscovery of Being a Researcher

The author describes planned research: With 10 years of reviewing and keeping selections from the travel journals of over 50 trips, winter and summer, it seems appropri­ate at this time to address an Outdoor Edu­cation Research Symposium with a story of realization and research findings that speak to a liberation from oppressive cultural forces for a radically new conception of self (of being a researcher ). Influences of nar­rative inquiry, emancipatory research, fem­inist theory and perspectival heuristic studies are all involved in shaping the ways of knowing, ways of teaching, and ways of valuing presented here as a new approach to travel in terms of cultural theory. The re­search design might best be termed an inter­theoretical pragmatism combining a collec­tion of post-positivist thought: specifically, interpretive, narrative and constructivist the­ories (McDermott, 1993). I plan to tell a re­searcher\u27s story supported by student writ­ings between 1982 to 1993