Action Research as Spiritual Practice

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Action Research as Spiritual Practice

Peter Reason

Prepared for the University of Surrey Learning Community Conference

May 4/5 2000

For me spiritual life is not an interest, it's a way of life, of being in the world, the foundation of everything. bell hooks, (hooks, 1991:218)

One of the interesting debates within the family of methods which we call action research--co-operative inquiry, participatory action research, action science, action inquiry, appreciative inquiry--has concerned what we mean by validity. Positivist science is (relatively) clear that validity is about epistemology, about truth in some sense, a correspondence between theory and empirical evidence. However, in action research, as we have explored these questions, we have realized that validity, or a better term may be quality, is a rather different, and more multidimensional, notion.

There is clearly an epistemological dimension to quality in action research. Action research is an approach to the generation of knowing which aims to bring ideas and knowledge and action together, to produce practical knowing. There is a huge debate, to which I have contributed, about the nature of such practical knowing, and the epistemological changes that the action research perspective brings to the academy (Heron & Reason, 1997).

Action research has over the years also addressed political questions. The argument from the PAR community is that the processes of knowledge creation have been monopolized by those who have power, and thus they create knowledge in the service of their own interests. What is the point of findings that are 'true' if they have been produced in circumstances that disempower people, that distort social relations, and add to the monopoly power of dominant groups? So validity or quality in action research is also about political relations, it is fundamentally about democratizing ways of creating practical knowing (Chambers, 1997; Fals Borda, 1995; Fals Borda & Rahman, 1991; Gaventa & Cornwall, 2001; Selener, 1997). And action research has also asked pragmatic questions concerning whether the outcomes of action research projects are 'useful' whether they work in practice (Greenwood & Levin, 1998). And of course, part of the postmodernist contribution has been to emphasize the links between power and knowledge (Foucault, 1975).

Today I want to explore another dimension of quality in action research: action research aims, I think, to develop practical knowing in the service of worthwhile human purposes. In the Introduction to the Handbook (Reason & Bradbury, 2001a) we placed a set of quotes which showed that while action research practitioners suggest slightly different emphases in their work--'quest for life,' 'make the world better,' 'loving,' 'freer'--there is broad agreement that the purpose of human inquiry is the flourishing of life, the life of human persons, of human communities, and increasingly of the more-than-human world of which we are a part. However, Hilary Bradbury and I were struck we are struck that while all contributors are concerned to address questions they believe to be a significant worth, few pay explicit attention to inquiring into what is worthy of attention, how we chose what is worthwhile. We wondered if action researchers espouse high values without having relevant disciplines to inquire into this process of valuing?

So today I want to play with the idea that we can see action research as spiritual practice, for as Matthew Fox tells us, the questions we address in our practice tell us what matters (Fox, 1991a). Now, when I speak of spiritual practice, I want to be taken as speaking of an everyday spirituality. For just as it is widely argued that action research is a way of life--for example in Judi Marshall's recent paper Living Life as Inquiry (Marshall, 1999)--so to for the mystic and prophet spiritual practice is not esoteric and otherworldly, but is similarly part of everyday life. Meister Eckhart said that 'God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk'--spiritual practice is about returning home, coming back to now; Jesus said the Kingdom/Queendom of Heaven is among you; or as the Buddhists say, Nirvana is here, we are all Buddhas, we have to learn to recognize this truth! As John Heron put it 'simple openness to everyday participative experience, feeling that subject and object are in an inseparable seamless field of imaging and resonance--a field with infinite horizons--is itself a spiritual experience' (Personal communication, 1997).

I asked Wolf Storm (Storm, 1972, 1994) to tell me what he, as a Medicine Wheel teacher, meant by prayer. I understood from his reply was to pray was to approach life as sacred, to call to living things, to feel one's relation to them, from the four great directions, as spirit, body, emotions, and mind. When the Lokota people end their prayers, they say, 'All our relations': spirituality is about all our relations, as Thomas Aquinas, said, spirit is the capacity to relate to the totality of things.

If we see action research as spiritual practice, we may thereby discover ways in which we can inquire together into worthwhile purposes. We may also come to understand action research in a deeper and more profound manner.

Spirituality is a life-filled path, a spirit-filled way of living... A path is not goal oriented. A path is the way itself, and every moment on it is a holy moment; a sacred seeing goes on there (Fox, 1991a:11-12, original emphasis)

I have argued before that one of the great tasks of action research is to heal the splits that characterize western experience [Reason, 1994 #30;(Reason & Bradbury, 2001a)]. One of the great splits, which can be seen as taking place just 400 years ago with the burning of Giordano Bruno (de Quincey, 1999b), has been between inquiry and religion: science got to study 'things material' and religion 'things spiritual', splitting up the world into different packages which is the root, I would argue, of our current predicament. Maybe this consideration of action research as spiritual practice will contribute to healing of that rift and allow spirit into our science and inquiry into our spiritual practice!

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