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

["White, Phillip" <Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>]

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



 __________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca