Introduction to the third edition
The text presented here originally took the form of a small booklet. The First Edition was published in 1995, and since then the booklet has travelled far, appearing in professional education courses in universities, schools and workplaces around the world.
I am placing the work here in celebration of two special events. The first event is that I have (finally!) succeeded in establishing a web site. The second event is that this year marks the twenty-first anniversary of my learning partnership with Jack Whitehead.
This text is as much Jack’s as mine. For the last 21 years, Jack has been a major influence in my life of education. During that time our ideas have developed through our own caring, creatively critical conversations. While some specific ideas that appear in this text belong to one or other of us (for example, Jack’s action plans, his ideas about the living ‘I’, about experiencing oneself as a living contradiction, and about the nature of living educational theories; and Jean’s ideas about the generative transformational nature of the evolutionary processes of human enquiry), many of the ideas have been developed collaboratively. It is a remarkable partnership, especially in light of the fact that we don’t see each other that often, given that Jack lives and works in Bath, and Jean commutes from her home in Dorset to work in Ireland. When we do see each other, therefore, it is an all the more intensely rich experience, for we have much to catch up on and new ideas to talk through.
Both Jack and I are passionately interested in issues concerning knowledge, especially the forms of knowledge and knowledge creation that action research embodies. I have learnt from Jack the power of sharing ideas to generate new on ...