In this review article, I examine seven commonly used approaches to research in socio-ecological practice and share insights about their defining characteristics, similarities, differences and connections. I derived these approaches and gained insights through the RWC-Schön-Stokes model, a theoretical framework for codifying, tabulating, examining and comparing multiple ways of methodical knowing in socio-ecological systems. For this reason, I begin with an introduction of the model and, in a chronological order, provide a review of its association with three intellectual ancestors: the Bush linear model (1945), the Stokes quadrant model (1997) and the Schön-Stokes model (2017).