Week 2: Schon (1987) Preparing Profesionals for the Demands of Practice

Tension between two areas of professional practice:

1. the 'high ground' of problems that are relatively unimportant to the majority of people and which can be solved by applying research-based theory and technique (rigour), and
2. the swampy lowlands in which lie the messy, confusing problems which defy technical solution but are of the greatest human concern (relevance).

'Technical rationality' suggests that practitioners are problem solvers who solve problems by applying theory and technique derived from systematic, preferably scientific knowledge. But the problems of real-world practice do not present themselves to practitioners as well-formed structures.

Depending on our disciplinary background, organisational roles, past histories, interests and political economic perspectives, we frame problematic situations in different ways. Often a problematic situation presents itself as a unique case which falls outside the categories of existing theory and technique, meaning that the practitioner cannot treat it as an instrumental problem to be solved by applying one of the rules in her store of professional knowledge. Instead she must deal with it competently by a kind of improvisation, inventing and testing in the situation strategies of her own devising.

Some problematic situations are situations of conflict among values (often stemming from differences in people's professional background). Competent practitioners must not only solve technical problems by selecting the means appropriate to clear and self-consistent ends, they must also recognise, integrate, or choose among conflicting appreciations of a situation so as to construct a coherent problem worth solving.

But it is just these indeterminate zones of practice, however, that practitioners and critical observers of the professions have come to see with increasing clarity over the past two decades as central to professional practice. When professionals fail to recognise or respond to value conflicts, when they violate their own ethical standards or seem blind to public problems they have helped to create, they are increasingly subject to expressions of disapproval and dissatisfaction. In defense, professionals themselves argue that it is impossible to met heightened expectations for their performance in an environment that combined increasing turbulence with increasing regulation of professional activity.

 

The crisis of confidence in professional education

If professions are blamed for ineffectiveness and impropriety, their schools are blamed for failing to teach the rudiments of effective and ethical practice. Underlying such criticisms is a version of the rigour-or-relevance dilemma. What aspiring practitioners need most to learn, professional schools seem least able to teach.

The greater one's proximity to basic science, as a rule, the higher one's academic status.

The normative curriculum of the modern research university still embodies the idea that practical competence becomes professional when its instrumental problem solving is grounded in systematic, preferably scientific knowledge. However, the assumption by university-based schools of the professions that academic research yields useful professional knowledge and that the professional knowledge taught in the schools prepares students for the demands of real-world practice are increasingly being called into question.

In recent years there has been a growing perception that researchers...have less and less to say that practitioners find useful. At the same time, professional educators have voiced with increasing frequency their worries about the gap between the schools' prevailing conception of professional knowledge and the actual competencies required of practitioners in the field, e.g. Dean of a school of management: "we need most to teach students how to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, but this is just what we don't know how to teach".

Dissatisfaction with a professional curriculum that cannot prepare students for competence in the indeterminate zones of practice. But: can the prevailing concepts of professional education ever yield a curriculum adequate to the complex, unstable, uncertain, and conflictual worlds of practice?

Turning the problem upside down

The difficulty is not that critics fail to recognise some professional performances as superior to others...but that they cannot assimilate what they recognise to their dominant model of professional knowledge. So outstanding practitioners are not said to have more professional knowledge than others but more "wisdom", "talent", "intuition" or "artistry".

The question of the relationship between practice competence and professional knowledge needs to be turned upside down. We should start not by asking how to make better use of research-based knowledge but by asking what we can learn from a careful examination of artistry, that is, the competence by which practitioners actually handle indeterminate zones of practice - however that competence may relate to technical rationality.

• Inherent in the practice of the professionals we recognise as unusually competent is a core of artistry.
• Artistry is an exercise of intelligence, a kind of knowing, though different in crucial respects from our standard model of professional knowledge. It is not inherently mysterious; it is rigorous in its own terms; and we can learn a great deal about it...by carefully studying the performance of unusually competent performers.
• In the terrain of professional practice, applied science and research-based technique occupy a critically important though limited territory, bounded on several sides by artistry. There are an art of problem framing, an art of implementation, and an art of improvisation - all necessary to mediate the use in practice of applied science and technique.

Just as we should inquire into the manifestations of professional artistry, so we should also examine the various ways in which people actually acquire it.

Learning by doing

Schon makes significant reference to Dewey's philosophy of experiential learning, in which students learn by practicing the making or performing at which they seek to become adept, and they are helped to do so by senior practitioners who...initiate them into the traditions of practice. The student cannot be taught what he needs to know, but he can be coached: "He has to see on his own behalf and in his own way the relations between means and methods employed and results achieved. Nobody else can see for him, and he can't see just by being 'told', although the right kind of telling may guide his seeing and thus help him see what he needs to see" (Dewey, 1974, p.151)