ABSTRACT
I must write about my own perspective, passions, and limitations before attempting to off er a response to a chapter in some ways out of my fi eld. I “do” educational philosophy, meaning that I work to engage students in thinking about their own thinking with regard to the surrounding culture and its symbol systems, centrally involving the arts. In the process, I am concerned about the connections between such concerns and various modes of praxis within and outside of classrooms. I do not consider myself a researcher, although some of my writing falls under a qualitative rubric; and, sympathetic as I am to action research, I cannot claim to have participated in it. Since high school days, however, I have thought of myself as an activist, beginning with work in support of the fated Spanish Republic in the 1930s, including much anti-war and anti-fascist activity, campaigns against capital punishment and censorship, and (obviously) as much intellectual and physical resistance as possible to this administration’s and its allies’ undermining of whatever remains of our democracy. I say all this in order to communicate my support of the principles guiding and underlying the action research described in the chapter to which I am responding. A research project lacking an action component always has seemed to me a more or less useless undertaking . . . Like Dewey, Freire, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and many others, I think ideas are of little moment if they exist abstractly beyond the world of human experience; and this seems particularly the case when it comes to educational research and the actualities of teaching and the schools.
