The Voyage of the Beagle: Field Work Lessons from Charles Darwin

Abstract

A careful reading of the letters Charles Darwin wrote to his family during his five years on the H.M.S. Beagle present a picture of his approach to the nature and problems off fieldwork in natural history-geology, botany, and biology. In this essay, the question is posed of the relevance of his work for those doing field work in education and social science. A dozen issues, ranging from his initial motivation to make the voyage to the development of his professional identity, were raised. They clustered into three groupings-those involving personal characteristics, those reflecting facilitating conditions such as mentoring and resources, and those involving the process of field work such as the open-ended quality of his agenda, the when and how of literature review, and the relation of description to theorizing. Several broader interpretations are raised regarding the degree to which social science concepts and generalizations are time-free and context-free and the relationships among field research methods and biological and historical research methods useful to the student of educational administration.