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In the acknowledgements of Lewin's place as the father of action research, his work on reeducation is rarely cited. Yet it is clear that much of what he understood to be central to the complex process of reeducation is critical to the process of change and underlies the philosophical principles and practice of action research. This article presents Lewin's generally neglected paper on reeducation to enable action researchers to build on and use this important paper of Lewin's.
Keywords: Kurt Lewin; action research; reeducation
Lewin's contribution to social psychology has been well documented and described (Burke, 2002; Burnes, 2004; Coghlan & Brannick, 2003; Moreland, 1996; Patnoe, 1988; Weisbord, 2004). Lewin's work inspired and directly initiated the creation of an approach to learning about groups, participation in groups, interpersonal relations, and change through action research through the T-group and its development into laboratory learning, which is a primary antecedent of organization development. For Lewin, it was not enough to try to explain things; one also had to try to change them, and one had to involve others in that process of understanding and change. It was clear to Lewin and others that working at changing human systems often involved variables that could not be controlled by traditional research methods developed in the physical sciences. These insights led to the development of action research and the powerful notion that human systems could only be understood and changed if one involved the members of the system in the inquiry process itself (White, 2004).
One particular paper of Lewin's, written with Paul Grabbe in 1945, contains 10 general observations about the process of reeducation (Lewin, 1997c). These observations grew out of his reflections on work he was engaged in with Alcoholics Anonymous and other training programs. This paper has received relatively little attention, apart from Benne's ( 1976) exposition that reflected on it in the light of the T-group and laboratory learning and from Coghlan's (1994) and Brace and Wyman's (1998) respective applications to organization development. The two major treatises on Lewin's work, Cartwright (1959) and Deutsch (1968), exclude any discussion of this paper. Commemorative volumes on Lewin's work (Bargal, Gold, & Lewin, 1992; Patnoe, 1988; Stivers & Wheelan, 1986; Wheelan, 1996; Wheelan, Pepitone, & Abt, 1990) are...