First Person Action Research

Background to First Person Action Research

Although questions of self and person occupied the greatest minds in Greek philosophy, it was Augustine who, in the fourth century, first engaged in a lengthy and detailed exploration of himself as a knower. His Confessions became a model for autobiographical writing for more than 1,000 years. To understand the human mind, Augustine wrote, ‘Do not go outward, return to yourself. Truth dwells within’.

While Augustine's work introduced a paradigm shift in the ways of thinking about the self, he could not have anticipated the advent of modernist and postmodernist challenges. The modernist epistemology required empirical evidence, something the premodern world view could not provide. As a result, the self was discarded as a reliable source of knowledge. But neither [Page 350]the premodern nor the modernist mind has been able to respond to the postmodern challenge. All knowledge claims are monological, in Jürgen Habermas' terms—that is, they assume that as phenomena are presented to consciousness, the mind is able to grasp their truth. But this ignores the contextual influences on human perception—a critique that postmodernity has levelled with devastating consequence.

As a distinct approach to human inquiry, first person action research formally emerged in the 1980s as a way of doing research that restored the inquirer to the centre of inquiry. While aware of the modernist rejection of the subjective, the pioneers of this approach returned to the grounding of experience in all knowing and argued for a fresh appreciation of the self as both subject and instrument of inquiry. To achieve this, they articulated a critical stance, first proposed by the anthropologist Margaret Mead as ‘disciplined subjectivity’ and described by Peter Reason and John Heron as ‘critical subjectivity’. What is called for in the current intellectual environment is an ability to bring the insights disclosed through reflective participation in experience into critical dialogue with other voices. This process will be discussed later.

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