D)+Major+Personalities


 * Major Personalities **

**Kurt Lewin **

(September 9, 1890 - February 12, 1947): was a German-Americanpsychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology.

Coined ** Action Research ** Kurt Lewin coined the term Action Research in 1946. He practiced action research in the 1940s and 1950s. Lewin was a Jewish psychologist refugee from Germany, who worked with Community Groups in the USA to resolve social problems such as prejudice (Somekh, 2005). He thought that research which produced nothing but books is inadequate. Lewin worked to change the life chances of disadvantaged groups in terms of housing, employment, prejudice, socialization, and training.

He believed that it is only in __ changing social situations that we begin to understand them. __

[[image:bob_stevenson.jpeg caption="Bob Stevenson"]]
Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Promotes ** Educational Action Research **
 * Co-edited //Educational Action Research: Becoming Practically Critical// (1995) for educators who are interested in linking theory with practice.
 * //**"**////action research offers a systematic process for students to monitor their actions in carrying out an environmental inquiry, for teachers to monitor their pedagogical actions in facilitating student inquiries, and for teacher support personnel to monitor their efforts to help teachers use action research for understanding and improving their teaching.”//
 * "Instead of collecting data in order to decide what actions to take later, the action researcher is studying the intentions, consequences and circumstances of actions he or she has taken, as well as using the information to influence further actions.”

John Heron


A facilitator and trainer in co-operative inquiry and a wide range of personal and professional development methods. He is the author of //Helping the Client// (Sage, 2001), //The Complete Facilitator’s Handbook// (1999), //Sacred Science// (1998), and //Co-operative Inquiry// (1996). Proposed (1971)** Cooperative Inquiry or Collaborative Inquiry ** John Heron CV available at [].
 * “research ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people.”
 * active participants are fully involved in research decisions as co-researchers.
 * Cooperative inquiry creates a research cycle among four different types of knowledge: propositional knowing (contemporary science), practical knowing (doing what you propose), experiential knowing (feedback through interaction) and presentational knowing (the process through which we try new practices).
 * The research process includes these four stages at each cycle with deepening experience and knowledge of the initial inquiry, or of emerging inquiries, at every cycle.

**Lawrence Stenhouse **
( 1926-1982): Scottish educational thinker and teacher who sought to promote an active role for teachers in educational research and curriculum. Promoted ** Teacher As Researcher **
 * teacher research = action research
 * //“a theory of education and teaching which is accessible to all teachers.”//
 * feeds the teaching practice; essential //"if education is to be significantly improved"//
 * “//Real classrooms have to be our laboratories, and they are in the command of teachers, not of researchers.”//
 * **//“It is teachers who, in the end, will change the world of the school by understanding it.”//**
 * //“it is not enough that teachers’ work should be studied; they need to study it themselves”//
 * //"... all well-founded curriculum research and development, whether the work of an individual teacher, if a school, of a framework of a national project, is based on the study of classrooms. It thus rests on the work of teachers."//

﻿Terry Carson (Edmonton)
Professor of the Department of Secondary Education in the Faculty of Education of Education at the University of Alberta since 1982. Co-edited //Action Research as a Living Practice// (1997), //Collaborative Action Research: Experiences and Reflections// (1988) and presented the paper //Exploring Collaborative Action Research// (1990). A detailed list of accomplishments is available at http://www.ualberta.ca/~tcarson/. [|Terry Carson CV]

Promotes ** Collaborative Action Research; Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice **


 * His courses explore possibilities for using action research in one’s life whereby participants are asked to critically evaluate the traditions, the methods, and the practices of action research in the light their own interests and situations.
 * He asks: "What kind of knowing is critical //action research//?"
 * He answers: "Despite the different forms it takes, all action research has a common intention: the belief that we may develop our understandings while at the same time bringing about change in a concrete environment.”

[[image:featur2.jpg width="157" height="213" caption="Stephen Kemmis"]]
Professor of Education, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga campus, Australia Professor Emeritus, University of Ballarat Adjunct Professor, Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, 2008-2011

Promotes ** Emancipatory Action Research as a participatory form of research **

[[image:image_proxy.php.jpeg width="139" height="235" caption="Robin McTaggart"]]
Executive Dean of Education and Indigenous Studies, James Cook University, Australia Promotes ** Participatory Action Research as a way to democratise educational enquiry **

Together, Kemmis & McTaggart published: Books - The Action Research Planner (1988) Chapters - Critical educational research. In D. Smith (Ed.), __Australian Curriculum Reform: Action and Reaction__ (1993)

In 1992, Kemmis and [|McTaggart] argue that "to do action research is to plan, act, observe and reflect more carefully, more systematically, and more rigorously that one usually does in everyday life". They think that Action Research is equally concerned with changing //individuals// as it is with the //culture// of the groups, institutions and societies to which they belong. They advocate for emancipatory action research as a participatory form of research. They view action research as being collaborative but is achieved through the critically examined action of individual group members.

**Wilfred Carr**
 Professor of Philosophy of Education, University of Sheffield Promotes ** Critical Action Research **

1985 Carr, W. and Kemmis, S., //Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research,// Falmer Press, Brighton, (Reprinted 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1998), 249 pp.

2005 (with S. Kemmis) `Staying Critical´, //Educational Action Research,// 21, 3, 347-357.

In 1986, Carr (from UK) and Kemmis regard action research as a form of self-reflective inquiry by participants, undertaken in order to improve understanding of their practices in context with a view to maximizing social justice.

﻿Paulo Freire
(September 19, 1921 – May 2, 1997) - was a [|Brazilian] [|educator] and influential theorist of __[|critical pedagogy].__ <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Promoted ** Critical Theory & PAR **

He wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968/1970 (english). Freire differentiates between the two positions in an unjust society, the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire advocates that education allows the oppressed to regain their humanity and overcome their condition; however, he acknowledges that in order for this to take effect, the oppressed have to play a role in their own liberation. As he states: "No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors. The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption" (Freire, 1970, p. 54). Freire believed education to be a political act that could not be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the "politics" that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers, themselves, have political notions, they bring into the classroom He goes so far as to say that “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously students and teachers” (Freire, 1970, p. 72). Freire however insists that educator and student, though sharing democratic social relations of education, are not on an equal footing, but the educator must be humble enough to be disposed to relearn that which he/she already thinks she knows, through interaction with the learner.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Peter Reason
Retired in 2009 from Director of the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice (CARPP), University of Bath <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Promotes ** A Participatory Worldview and Action Research as a lifestyle ** http://www.peterreason.eu/

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">So the mood of participation shifts from control to participation (Goodwin, 1999), from <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">focussed awareness and conscious purpose (Bateson, 1972a) to entering the cycle of <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> emergence, shifting attention to the heart of the interaction, dwelling in the in-between. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> The language gets difficult and sometimes simply doesn’t exist, and one is tempted into <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> either quasi-scientific phrases like ‘cycles of emergence’ or into romantic allusion like <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> ‘dwelling in the in-between’.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">The practice (or, to continue the alliteration, the method <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> ) of participation is expressed in <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> the examples of freefall writing and carving. It is a discipline which paradoxically <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> involves being prepared, with writing tools and time, with sharp carving tools, and <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> creating space, opening to a wider ecology of mind. In participatory practice you no <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> longer know where you are going to end up, and in a sense the very point is to end up <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> with the unexpected. One moves away from the security of what is known to radical <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> uncertainty, to almost a feeling of vertigo in stepping away from well trodden paths of <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> expression. This applies to interactional practices such as teaching, as much as to writing <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> and carving.

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">John Rowan
John Rowan is a qualified individual and group psychotherapist (UKAHPP and UKCP), a Chartered counseling psychologist (BPS) and an accredited counselor (BACP). He works in private practice in [|London].

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Promotes ** Humanistic Psychology, Group Therapy, Collaborative Action Research ** Reason & Rowan wrote: Human Inquiry : A Sourcebook of New Paradigm Research

Sets forth a new paradigm for the philosophy and practice of research in fields of human activity: a collaborative, experimental approach in which inquiry is firmly rooted in subjects' experience of their lives. Covers the philosophy, methodology, practice and prospects of the new paradigm, showing how to do research //with// people rather than //on// people.

http://www.johnrowan.org.uk/

<span style="font-family: Georgia,serif;">Hilary Bradbury


founder and principal of Action Research for Sustainable Enterprise in Collaborative Cities Professor of Management in the Management Division of Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU), in Portland Oregon. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Promotes ** Community Based Participatory Research ** <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">http://arsecc.net/hilary

Action research grows out of a concern for the flourishing of individuals and their communities. Action research is only possible with, for, and by individuals and communities, ideally involving all stakeholders both in the questioning and sense making that informs the research and in the action that is its focus.

These characteristics of action research are not simply questions of methodology. To be sure, one can argue that they lead to “better” research because the practical and theoretical outcomes of the research process are grounded in the perspective and interests of those immediately concerned and not filtered through an outside researcher’s preconceptions and interests. But far more than that, when we assert the practical purposes of action research and the importance of human interests, when we join knower with known in a participative relationship, and as people move away from operational measurement into a science of experiential qualities (Reason & Goodwin, 1999), they undercut the foundations of the empirical-positivist worldview that has been the foundation of Western inquiry since the Enlightenment (Toulmin, 1990) and start exploring the possibility that new worldviews are emerging.


 * USA:** action research flowered briefly in education during the 1950s but declined due to criticisms. Resurgence in the mid 1980s. Development of tradition of teacher research focused on improving learning and teaching. More recently, self-study as teachers.


 * UK:** action research became important in the 1970s as a result of Stenhouse's Humanities Project and Elliott's Ford Teaching Project. (curriculum development, teachign moral issues). Stenhouse saw research as a necessary component of the work of every teacher (Teacher-as-Researcher).


 * Australia**: Kemmis, Robin McTaggart and colleagues established a significant base of action research at Deakin University. Recently (2001) Kemmis has reconceptualized the relationship between action research and critical theory in light of attacks on modernist theory from postmodernists and postructuralists.


 * Austria**: Peter Posch and colleagues at University of Klagenfurt used action research to make significant impact on government policy for education.


 * South America:** Paulo Freire influenced a different tradition of Participatory Action Research. Grassroots movement - started out small scale work and has now become a movement.


 * Swedan:** Somekh (1995) points out that its close links with the values of practice tend to mean that action research methodology adapts and develops in rather different ways within different social groups.

Other Important Places and People from Which Action Research Came:
 * 1) AERA conferences....action research section
 * 2) Educational Action Research (assume know action research history)
 * 3) ideas of group therapy
 * 4) Torbert
 * 5) Somekh (sweden)