- Interdependence: “[E]cological research envision[s] research as a web of interlocking social, material, and semiotic practices…. [or] as symbiotic clusters: knots of nonhierarchical, locally enacted semiotic-material practices that inform each other in multiple ways” (394). A research paradigm (and methodology, methods, and techniques (395)), then, is “an ecology of reinforcing activities, artifacts, and language” (394). Interdependence also helps the researcher acknowledge his/her own immersion in the environment and that he/she “is an active gent not only in the research process but also in creating the conditions – the environment – that serve as the exigency of the research process” (396).
- Feedback: “Feedback, the flow of information between organisms and between organisms and their environment,…implicates two moves in ecological research. It suggests the scholars draw a circle around the pertinent feedback pathways to delineate the span of the research ecosystem and that the circle is always mutable and permeable” (396). “An ecological orientation enables a shifting circumference; it invites the researcher to define a research project by means of the relationship – the networks – feeding into a particular phenomenon” (398). “The circumference of context can expand or contract as necessity demands” (399).
- Diversity: Diversity “operates on two levels: the global and the local. The global level concerns the disciplinary welcome of different approaches…On the local level, diversity involves the reliance on multiple research approaches in a single” (402). Even if a researcher believes he/she is only using one approach, “such diversity…is inescapable because no research practice is ever pure; it is always subject to the intricate relationships that constitute it. Thus, hybridity is an inevitable result of any research endeavor” (402).
The authors also argue the research should be guided by:
- Possibility: the idea the we can make changes to our material environments (406)
- Kairos: the idea that research (change) is needed in a particular area/situation (407).
- To prepon (decorum): the idea that research methods match with research contexts, needs, and questions (410).
- Rigor: “Rhetorical rigor simply means the degree to which the different practices on which a searcher draws have been interlinked, applied, analyzed, and presented to form internally consistent, contextually appropriate, and methodological persuasive story” (412). The more linkages, the more rigor. The authors link rhetorical rigor to the sustainability of composition studies (411).