RE: [xmca] CHAT and Action Research: Special Issue

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

In some previous postings regarding action research, connections have been made to Kurt Lewin.  In my work on action research and teacher research, I have found that the work of John Collier predates Lewin's work.    I found Stephen Corey’s work (1953), a professor at Teachers College in the late 40's and later, which set me on a track of finding the historical roots of action research. Stephen M. Corey, possibly the first university level advocate of teacher research, preferred the term “action research”, 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). Corey’s citation of Collier is from an article “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.  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 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.  You can see the practices here of early 20th century educational progressivism that Ravich so dislikes.  Collier 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”.  

He was an admirer of Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and the essential human value of primary social groups.  Collier 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. 

Touched by his, what seems to me to be 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.  It was said the Collier was the only commissioner of the BIA who was ever on the side of Native Americans.

Later,

phillip_______________________________________________
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