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Re: [xmca] Read the introduction to the special issue on CHAT/AR



Philip
Thank you for this post. A wonderful lead and I share your passion for
*intermediate* community.  I'm a child of the 60's who wandered around
searching and visiting *utopian* face to face communities that were
attempting to *transform* the world.

My inquires and thinking out loud are a contnuation of this *calling*.

I appreciate that a few people share a perspective that this *quest for
community* must also include public school settings.

I'm printing out your recommendations, and will follow up.

Thanks Philip

Larry

On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 6:48 AM, White, Phillip
<Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>wrote:

>
> Larry, you wrote, as a follow-up to Mike's recommendation:
>
> "I followed up on your recommendation to read the introduction and was
> intrigued by their referring to an article, "Philosophy, Methodology, and
> Action research" by Wilfred Carr [The Journal of the Philosophy of
> Education, Vol. 40, No. 4, 2006.
>  On p. 95 Bridget and Morten suggest it is "quite legitimate to turn praxis
> against the straightjacket of any normative theoretical methodology."
>
> Carr, in his 2006 article locates AR as a modern manifestation of the
> pre-modern tradition of practical philosophy conceptualized in ancient
> Greece.  I found this an enlightening expansion of perspective in locating
> the roots of AR."
>
> may i suggest an alternative perspective in locating the roots of AR, which
> is a bit closer to CHAT through the College de France and Janet, as well as
> Kropotkin (a name rarely noted on XMCA.
>
> Smekh and Nissen assert the common belief that Kurt Lewin is the founder of
> Action Research, and note that Lewin and Vygotsky were friends in Moscow.
>
> however, at the time Lewin and Vygotsky were together in Moscow, James
> Collier was already advocating and practicing Action Research in Native
> American communities in south-western United States, in the 1930's.
>
> In the 1940's, when Lewin first broaches the topic, he qualifies his
> practice as “a type of action-research”,  using a hyphen, as well as
> suggesting that there are already other forms of action research, as in the
> following quote:
>
> “The research needed for social practice can best be characterized as
> research for social management or social engineering. It is a type of
> action-research, a comparative research on the conditions and effects of
> various forms of social action, and research leading to social action.
> Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice” (Lewin 1946,
> reproduced in Lewin 1948: 202-3)
>
> Stephen M. Corey (1953), possibly the first university level advocate of
> teacher research, preferred the term “action research”, without the hyphen,
> attributing it to John Collier since Collier “used the expression action
> research and was convinced that ‘since the finding of research must be
> carried into effect by the administrator and the layman, and must be
> criticized by them through their experience, the administrator and the
> layman must themselves participate creative in the research impelled as it
> is from their own area of need’” (p.7, author’s italics).  Corey’s citation
> of Collier is “United States Indian Administration as a laboratory of Ethnic
> Relations.” Social Research, 12:265-303, May 1945.”  However, K. R. Philp
> (1979) writes that John Collier had long been working in socially active
> groups before he became commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
>  Collier was educated at Columbia and College de France, where he studied
> under Janet.  Beginning in 1907 when he was civic secretary for the People’s
> Institute in New York City, he began a long struggle to preserve and build
> community life based on Gemeinschaft, of shared obligations.  These beliefs
> he attempted to implement within the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  As
> commissioner, he ordered the closing of numerous boarding schools.  To
> replace them, day schools that also served as community centers were built,
> and a new curriculum that emphasized skills connected with rural life “such
> as care of livestock, homemaking skills, and personal hygiene” (pg. 276)
> appeared.  From this effort came his call for action research.  Bilingual
> programs were implemented to improve Indian literacy.  He brought in
> anthropologists and removed missionaries.  Collier (1949/1962) had a deep
> belief that for modern culture to survive the “wastage of cultures and value
> systems which ages have made, wastage of natural resources stored by the
> organic life of a billion years, wreckage of the web of life” (p. 160), it
> needs to return to its roots of small communities, rather than continue “a
> world of social isolates” (p. 160).
> Collier, an admirer of Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and the essential human
> value of primary social groups, wrote:
> That thesis was that democracy – political, social, and economic democracy,
> complexly realized all together – is ancient on earth; that cooperation and
> reciprocity were the way of men through many thousands of generations; that
> the conserving and cherishing of earth and its flora and creature life were
> man’s way through these long ages; that the art of education – the art of
> informing, enriching, tempering, and socializing the personality, and of
> internalizing the moral imperatives – was practiced triumphantly by village
> communities in every continent, without ceasing for tens of thousands of
> years; and that like countless flowers in a long April of our world, human
> cultures, borne by memory alone, illuminated with all rainbow hues the
> almost unimaginable thousands of little societies wherein immensities of
> personality development were achieved across the aeons of time. (p. 160-161)
>
> from the perspective of the early 21st century, what at first seems to me
> to Collier's utopian, naïve romanticism, I also find myself admiring his
> passionate commitment to a particular vision of life from which he informed
> all of his activities.  For it is out of this belief in value of small
> communities that the practice of action research was formed, and I admire
> this.  As a result, I have continued to inform my own practice of teacher as
> research through my own particular vision of life, taking into account
> life’s political, social, emotional and economic constraints.
>
> at the same time, it's important to recognize that it was also the work
> that Shirley Brice Heath (1983) did during the late 1970"s in the piedmont
> area of the south-eastern united states, where in "Ways with words", her
> final chapter was on what she labeled "teacher research", which, as she
> related to me, reinvigorated the practice of action research within
> educational institutions.
>
> phillip
>
>
> Collier, J. (1949/1962). On the gleaming way: Navajos, Eastern Pueblos,
> Zuni,
> Hopis, Apaches, and their land and their meanings to the world. Denver, CO:
>        Sage Books.
>
> Corey, S. M. (1953 ). Action research to improve school practices.  New
> York:
> Bureau of  Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University.
>
> Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in
> communities and
> classrooms. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
>
> Lewin, K. (1948) Resolving social conflicts; selected papers on group
> dynamics. Gertrude W. Lewin (ed.). New York: Harper & Row, 1948.
>
> Philp, K. R. (1979). John Collier: 1933 – 45. In Robert M. Kvasnicka and
> Herman
> J. Viola (Eds.), The Commissioners of Indian affairs, 1824 – 1977. Lincoln,
> Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
>
>
>
>
>
> Phillip White, PhD
> University of Colorado Denver
> School of Education
> phillip.white@ucdenver.edu
>
>
>
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