Historical Perspective

After World War II there were strong and well-deserved feelings against notions of totalitarianism of any kind, and there was profound interest in creating democratic social environments in many parts of the world. In this context the social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1946,1948) considered ways to improve programs intended to assist the most troubled or deprived populations in the United States (Beattie, 1989). Although influenced by the work of others, Lewin is most often credited for creating the idea of practitioner action research, or what he called action research, to be used collectively by community workers as a strategy for solving problems. As Kemmis and McTaggart (1988) explain, “It was tried in contexts as diverse as integrated housing, equalization of opportunity for employment, the cause and cure of prejudice in children, the socialization of street gangs, and the better training of youth leaders” (p. 6).

Practitioner action research as conceived by Lewin provided legitimacy to this enterprise of collectively solving problems as a form of real research, offering an acceptable alternative to the orthodoxy of formal experiments and the like. However, this new area of professional self-study lost favor during the 1950s, in part because it usually consisted of such traditional applications as teaching elementary statistics to nonresearcher professionals and expecting them to produce studies (House & Lapan, 1988).

Renewed interest in practitioner studies was slow in coming. In the United States, for example, only a few organized training programs were reported (see, for example, Rogge, 1967), although it gained a firmer footing in Britain as a substantial part of the school curriculum reform movement in the 1960s (Elliott, 1988). An examination of the world's largest educational research association's annual conference program (that of the American Educational Research Association [AERA]) reveals a keen interest in research-based improved practice by 1973, but AERA listed no papers or presentations specifically related to practitioner research. Eighteen listings for the topic can be found in 1993, however, and in 2010 sixty sessions or papers were listed.

The revival of practitioner action research in the latter part of the twentieth century has many potential explanations, but Donald Schön's studies (1983) of successful professional practitioners represent a key contribution. Schön determined that the most effective professionals engaged in what he called move-testing, trying out small changes to obtain desired effects, then trying again with an altered move in the form of a new experiment. This kind of reflective practice, Schön explained, is an informal version of practitioner action research that has a direct influence on the overall quality of a professional's work. Those who regularly employ practitioner reflection, Schön discovered, were also found to be decidedly better at their profession (cited in House & Lapan, 1988).