From designing the research to letting the research grow: How a PhD that began as a permaculture map came back to mapping two years later

Date: 31st August 2026

When planning my PhD, I began with a map.

It wasn't the four-metre map adorned with children's drawings, leaves, clay, handprints and imagined futures. This was a much smaller map, drawn almost two years earlier, when I was trying to work out what kind of researcher I wanted to be.

In December 2024, my PhD felt enormous. I was thinking about climate justice education, art, community gardens, transformative learning, children's agency, hope, activism and creativity. Everything seemed important. Everything seemed connected.

So, in supervision, we tried something different.

As big proponents of permaculture, we asked, what if I designed my PhD like a permaculture garden? So, I started drawing zones. What needed my closest attention? What could grow together? What belonged at the edges? What were the parts of the research landscape I could not change? And, drawing on the permaculture principle of obtaining a yield, what was I hoping this research would produce? My notes from those early meetings now make me smile:

“Idea of using permaculture principles to design the research: what would research mean using permaculture principles? “STAGE 1: planning a new garden, tools, methods and methodology, plant ideas and manure --> structures literature review.”

“Draw the zoning system: Zone 2: number of articles you will read till the end of the year, etc. Divide into types/categories: the reading, like herbs, tomatoes, education side...”

And my favourite:

“State what kind of garden you are imagining for yourself: this is your abstract.”

One phrase from looking through those conversations from day dot has stayed with me ever since:

“Process is the project; the project is the process”

I didn't realise then quite how true that would become. I didn’t realise it then, but those initial conversations planted the principles I would use throughout the project.

Alongside the map, I developed my own set of permaculture-inspired research principles. They were part methodology, part manifesto and part reminder of the researcher I wanted to become:

•     Observe and interact became propagate: begin with curiosity, creativity and imagination.

• Catch and store energy became create: build spaces where young people’s emotions are acknowledged, and agency flourishes.

•     Obtain a yield became harvest: listen to children's stories and continually ask what, if anything, the research was producing.

•     Self-regulate and accept feedback reminded me that the research needed to respond to communities rather than arrive with all the answers.

•     Use and value renewable resources became water: draw on hope, empowerment and collective action.

•     Produce no waste became recycle: carry previous experiences and learning forward rather than continually beginning again.

•     Design from patterns to details reminded me to move between the enormous problem of climate change and small, embodied experiences. Integrate rather than segregate asked me to think relationally.

•     Using slow and small solutions became a commitment to small groups, time and community-based research.

• Valuing the edges became a garden: pay attention to the people, places, and stories that might sit outside the boundaries of formal education.

I was trying to design not only what I would research, but how I wanted to research. There was just one problem. I was still doing all the designing.

Then the garden got overcrowded.

For the next year, my PhD grew. And grew. And grew.  Every new book, conversation and meeting seemed to add something else: socially engaged art, transformative learning, co-design, participatory action research, place-based education, arts-based research, community gardens, hope, resilience, climate justice education. Each made sense. Together, they were becoming impossible to sustain.

My notes and questions started sounding suspiciously like conversations among too many gardeners with strong opinions in the gardens.

“Too many frameworks and ideas.”

“Does the ecosystem collapse?”

And, at one memorable point:

“Could it be that SEA [socially engaged art] … is an invasive species?” So, we started pruning.

We removed permaculture itself as a formal framework. Socially engaged art moved away from the centre. Co-design went too. I was repeatedly encouraged to stop trying to make every interesting idea translate onto the page. My people-pleasing, offensively friendly personality was translating itself onto the page as a thesis with too many best friends!  

This felt uncomfortable. I had spent so much time growing these ideas that removing them could feel like losing parts of the research and the PROCESS.

But another piece of supervision advice was: “Give it space to breathe.” That may be what the research needed.

The strange thing is that although permaculture disappeared from the formal methodology, its principles didn't disappear from how I was learning to research.

Especially one: Self-regulate and accept feedback. I just hadn't realised how much of that feedback would eventually come from the children themselves.

What happens when children take you off plan?

By early 2026, I had a workshop. I had a very planned workshop—five days of activities. Creative exercises. Reflection questions. Mapping. Gardening. Opportunities to notice, connect, care, imagine and act.

Then one of my supervisors asked: “What principles will you have in mind when students start taking you off plan? How will you judge when to follow them and when to take the lead?”

That question lodged itself in my head. Because a contradiction sat underneath my research. I wanted children to have agency. But I had somewhat over-designed the activities. I wanted them to determine what mattered. But I held very strong opinions about what I wanted them to decide. I wanted the research to be participatory. But I had spent nearly two years deciding what participation would look like. Then the children arrived.

The second map

The map began as a stark black outline of the Randwick Sustainability Hub and its surroundings. A thick 4m-long canvas (whose size seemed only to keep getting bigger in preparations) lay as an open invite at the centre of an open, windowed space as rain pattered on the tin roof. Speckled light bounced across the blank canvas as students poured in.

On the first day, we sat around it in a circle. I introduced the students to the idea that they would join me as co-researchers for the week, exploring questions about their climate future and their education. The question was big, open, and daunting. I was riddled with nerves.

Before we began the activities I had planned, I asked about their relationship to the Sustainability Hub. One had been born nearby. Another lived around the corner. Some rode their bikes through the area. For others, this was their first time there.

Without thinking much, I said, “Put it on the map.” So, they did. Some drew their homes. Some drew bike rides. Others drew themselves at the Sustainability Hub. The first things the children put on my environmental map were not the environmental relationships I had planned for them to investigate. They put themselves on it. And that small moment began to change the research.

“Put it on the map”

Over the next five days, the phrase became a refrain. Students explored the garden and returned with leaves, lavender, rocks and plants. Then drawings. Rubbings. Handprints. Clay.  Research. Observations. Questions.

Some became fascinated by native plants. Some followed bees and animals. Others followed smells, materials, or an idea that had caught their attention. The map became a home base for these investigations. But it didn't look how I had imagined it would. Things crossed the boundaries I had drawn. Objects appeared in geographically "wrong" places. There was no consistent key.

Students sometimes wanted to create separate posters and defer to their known classroom ways of documenting their own INDIVIDUAL work. And I kept saying, "Put it on the map." I wanted the map to show connections. I wanted it to remain collective. And, if I am being reflexive about it, I also wanted it to look coherent.

This was the question my supervisor had asked me, now spread physically across the floor. When do I lead, and when do I follow? I realised I was forcing an aesthetic that came from me, not them, and I needed to let them decide their representation.

Gradually, I started stepping back. And the map got messier. But it also got more thought-provoking. Ideas and language started to seed as the students took real ownership of their representation of their learning, experiences and relationships with each other and the more than human world.

This is where I started returning to those old permaculture principles. I had begun my PhD with observe and interact. Now the students were deciding what deserved their attention. I had begun with integrate rather than segregate. Now homes, bike rides, friendships, bees, plants, clay, memories and future actions occupied the same surface. I had begun with valuing the edges. I saw silence to reflect.

Now some of the most interesting things were happening beyond the literal boundaries I had drawn. Students' interests decided the action. We built native bee hotels and created a large “Randwick Beetopia "; students seeded native wattle to take home, and friendship formed with gardeners and community volunteers.  I had begun with self-regulation and accepting feedback. Now participation itself was giving me feedback.

And I had begun by asking: What is the yield? That question was becoming much harder to answer.

From mapping what is there to imagining what could be

As the week progressed, the map changed again. Students began adding not only what they noticed but what they wanted for the future. Goals appeared. Ideas. Things they cared about. Ways they might contribute. Importantly, they didn't all imagine the same future.

One of my post-workshop reflections became preoccupied with this. I had been trying to separate children's connection to "nature" from their relationships with other people. My supervisor challenged me on that division. Why was I separating the social from the ecological when the research itself was increasingly showing them as intertwined?

That pushed me towards a different understanding of what the map was doing. It wasn't creating one shared vision that everyone had to agree on. It created a place for different visions to meet.

This aligns with Vera Caine's (2018) work on visual narrative inquiry and the possibility that creative narratives can generate new social stories. Children's creative work need not remain a representation of what they already think or experience. It can enter conversation with others and help imagine what might happen next. Mapping a future is powerful precisely because nobody has to imagine it alone.

What was there that already existed

I was learning to read the method we were creating together rather than “making visible”. At first, I kept writing that creative mapping made relationships visible.

Then through supervisory discussions I became uncomfortable with that phrase. Nothing in the garden had been invisible until my research arrived. The plants, histories, relationships and practices of care already existed. The land was certainly not a blank canvas waiting for me—or the children—to give it meaning.

My own journal caught me in this contradiction: “Even my own use of universal map symbols is representing a very western way of seeing the world.”

I started thinking less about mapping as revealing relationships and more about mapping as learning to read relationships differently. The children were producing different readings of the place. And because those readings occupied a shared surface, they could encounter one another. That distinction now feels important.

I went back to the literature and saw that I was using forms of a very well-worn method in social justice practice called participatory mapping. This method, I read, does not tell us what a place is but connects young people’s lived experiences of place with the research and process (Logie et al., 2023). It is a form of what Gruenwald (2003) describes as a ‘critical pedagogy of place ', where place-based education is linked to the active process of questioning social and ecological conditions.

So, we created a space to ask: What do you notice here? What do I notice? What matters to us? What might we be missing? And what could we do next?

The map leaves the garden.

On the final day, families, gardeners and community members gathered around the map. I started explaining what had happened during the week. Then the children interrupted eagerly. They pointed to things. They told stories. They remembered experiences. They explained their contributions.

Then we started talking about where the map should go next. Could it go to their schools? Could they show it at the adjacent animal rescue centre? Could other people see it? Could other people contribute? The map was no longer something I needed to interpret for them.

And suddenly I had another problem: What happens when a participatory project ends but does not feel finished? This question followed me into conversations after the workshop. The map sat in my study, haunting me with unfinished stories.

Researchers asked about impact. Community partners asked what could happen next. Eventually, in conversations with local government about displaying the map, I was asked a deceptively simple question: Why repeat it? Why should another group make another map? That question changed how I understood the whole project.

Because the answer wasn't the map; the map is not the outcome. It is the beginning of a conversation. The value is in what happens while people map together.  People stop. They notice. They listen to what somebody else noticed. They decide what matters to them. They encounter what matters to someone else. They imagine where they would like to go.

And then they can begin asking: What part might I play in getting there? Who gets to shape the future? This is where my PhD now feels very different from the project I originally designed.

Climate education often tells children what the future will look like and then asks what they are going to do about it. My own journal became increasingly resistant to that idea: “Children get told what the future is. [They're] told that they've got to fix it.”  I want to ask something different. How do we create opportunities for children and communities to stop and consider what future they want to live in? And then: How do we recognise that shaping that future is a collective responsibility?

This resonates with Malafaia et al.'s (2025) argument for climate education that crosses the boundaries between the places where climate knowledge is produced, schools where it is often consumed, and the public sphere where knowledge can be used and reinvented as part of societal transformation.

The map began crossing some of those boundaries. Children made it. Families encountered it. Gardeners contributed to the experiences it represents. Community organisations entered the story.

What’s next?

Now it may hang in a public space. What interests me is no longer whether each child left the workshop with the "right" climate action. I am increasingly interested in whether participatory mapping can create a space in which people imagine themselves as part of a collective capable of shaping what comes next.

And that brings me back to December 2024. My first map asked: What matters? What needs attention? What belongs together? What can this system sustain? What should we grow? And what will be the yield?

Almost two years later, the children's map was asking remarkably similar questions. What matters here? What needs attention? Who and what are we connected to? What future do we want? What can we contribute? What can we do together?

And: When do we come back and ask again?

I started this PhD trying to design the right research. I drew the garden. I chose the principles. I decided what I hoped to propagate, water and harvest.

Then other people entered the garden. They drew beyond my boundaries. They planted things I hadn't planned for. They changed what I thought the yield might be. That may be what methodological emergence has come to mean to me. Not abandoning design and not pretending that the researcher disappears.

But designing something carefully enough to begin and remaining open enough for other people, places and relationships to change where it goes. The first map helped me imagine the research I wanted to grow. The second reminded me that I would never be the only gardener. And that is also the bigger lesson for climate education.

We do not need to ask children to fix a future they did not create individually. We can create spaces where people stop, notice, listen, imagine and decide what they care about together. Without giving young people opportunities to imagine where we want to go, we risk becoming passengers in futures decided for us.

But when we imagine with other people, our futures are also changed by theirs. The value was never the map itself. It was creating a process through which we might learn to shape a future together.

References

Caine, V., Steeves, P., Clandinin, D. J., Estefan, A., Huber, J., & Murphy, M. S. (2018). Social justice practice: A narrative inquiry perspective. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 13(2), 133–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/1746197917710235

Gruenewald, D. A. (2003). The best of both worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3–12.

Logie, C. H., Van Borek, S., Lad, A., Gittings, L., Kagunda, J., Evelia, H., Gachoki, C., Oyugi, K., Wanjiru Chege, M., Omondi, B., Okuto, M., & Taing, L. (2023). A creative approach to participatory mapping on climate change impacts among very young adolescents in Kenya. Journal of Global Health Reports, 7. https://doi.org/10.29392/001c.77885

Malafaia, C., Diógenes-Lima, J., Pereira, B., Macedo, E., & Menezes, I. (2025). Collaborative climate labs: A youth-led methodology for co-creating community responses to climate change. Research in Education, 121(2), 192–216. https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237241288407