Introducing “In Their Own Words” Special Series

Each article would be derived from the transcripts of TCS sessions by behavior analysis leaders and pioneers who are no longer living to allow individuals who entered the field after they had died to hear their voice, so to speak. In a post on the Association for Behavior Analysis International’s History of Behavior Analysis blog, Critchfield (2023a) noted that for many behavior analysts (myself included), the history of our field used to be a living history, meaning that many of the discipline’s founding members were still alive and teaching courses, presenting at national conferences, and corresponding (with pen and paper through the “snail mail” system) with each other. The symposium consisted of multiple presentations on both the value of and potential structure for embedding the history of behavior analysis across the curriculum in course content.2 The symposium arose out of concern that courses on the history of behavior analysis were themselves becoming history (Morris, 2022a). [...]it is important to know where we came from.