Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Chapter 2

What I read

In this chapter, Schön introduces two concepts—knowing in action and reflection in action—to describe one of the ways practitioners conduct their work, and a way to educate future practitioners. The chapter sets the context for future chapters, which will focus on education in more detail.

First, Schön describes the background of knowing in action as an application of tacit knowledge that occurs while a person is doing something (illustrated primarily by problem solving or doing their work of practice.) Some examples are provided, such as feeling through our hands when touching a surface, but not being aware of the actual hand-to-surface part of the experience. Knowing-in-action is introduced as a term to describe "the sorts of knowhow we reveal in our intelligent action—publicly observable, physical performances like riding a bicycle and private operations like instant analysis of a balance sheet. In both cases, the knowing is in the action." This is tacit in that we are rarely actually able to describe what is happening or how it is occurring. Knowing is the dynamic nature of the work, and we convert that to knowledge-in-action as the actual tacit material as it is applied.

During the action, there are occasions where something occurs that is out of the ordinary. "All such experiences, pleasant or unpleasant, contain an element of surprise. Something fails to meet our expectations." This may prompt overt reflection, or it may result in reflection that doesn't interrupt the actual activity. Several examples are provided, such as a baseball pitcher adapting in the midst of a game to the changing nature of their opponent. Jazz improvisation is the reacting and changing in mid action. Conversation is another example. All of these are examples of where "the participants are making something… Their reflection-in-action is a reflective conversation with the materials of the situation."

Next, Schön discusses how this occurs in professional practice, as practice occurs in a community of other practitioners. In this community, conventions are shared, and these include language, tools, and techniques. When working in experience, these often have prepared a practitioner to basic work, but often there are unplanned or unfamiliar situations where this knowledge explicitly does not support the work, but "thinking like a" does: thinking like people who have existed in that community of practice. This is a constructionist view of the reality in which practice occurs. "Through countless acts of attention and inattention, naming, sensemaking, boundary setting, and control, they make and maintain the worlds matched to their professional practice and know-how."

Then, Schön shifts to focus on practicum—how a practitioner is "initiated into the tradition of a community of practitioners and the practice world they inhabit." In an educational setting, apprenticeship offers a way of learning skills through real conditions, but this is not realistic at scale or combined with actual business contexts. Students, then, work through a simulated form of apprenticeship, by "undertaking projects that simulate and simplify practice." The teacher is like a coach, "whose main activities are demonstrating, advising, questioning, and criticizing."

Students also are "often as important to one another as the coach. Sometimes they play the coach's role. And it is through the medium of the group that a student can immerse himself in the world of the practicum… learning new habits of thought and action. [This is] background learning, often proceeds without conscious awareness."

Reflection-in-action is, then, a learning and teaching approach that combines with learning technical skills and reasoning from existing problems and cases. In total, this is the way teaching and learning occurs "in the deviant traditions of studio and conservatory."

What I learned and what I think

Something that stands out to me is the three types of practicum, and how they are differentiated. Schön indicates that there may be a progression in learning through different phases, moving from something like technical knowledge, through patterning, into the reflective process. The technical acquisitions sort of mirrors foundations, although foundations are technical in a general sense and have little to do with technical specifics in a design discipline. The patterning may come across through doing lots of project work in order to "reason from general rules to problematic cases, in ways characteristic of the profession." But if we're going for a literal read of the progression here, it isn't happening.

In interaction design, it might get rid of additive, subtractive, maybe even color theory, and instead look at the basics of behavior, manipulation, observation, modeling, storytelling, but all of these would be unique classes. Then, a second set of classes would be discrete, small projects of combining these things on tiny little activities. I think this is what I was trying to get at in my intro to HCI classes, with working on a photocopier that does 3 things, or a microwave that does 2 things. And then, it would be increasingly complex real-life projects, with specificity. This type of curriculum is not impossible in undergraduate education. It is impossible in a one or two year program, unless you assume the first is already taken care of, and the second is mostly done. There's a real question on "practitioner-focused" graduate programs, or on career shifting. And this way of thinking hasn't even gotten to his whole argument around reflection, it's just structural based on the presumption of staged learning and growth.

Another observation is that the "three stages of learning" don't recognize at all the impact of outside disciplinary knowledge and how that material plays a role here. Patterning from other disciplines is a real and meaningful construct, and only happens if you actually have things to pattern from. And there's no discussion of irrational externalities, like clients.

There's almost no productive way to study and think about this stuff without running head-first into the political and bureaucratic and institutional constraints around higher education. I appreciate this part of what bootcamps were trying to achieve, in extracting the whole conversation from those artificial limits. But they did zero with the benefit, and actually completely ruined it by removing the benefit of all three of these spaces.

Maybe a thoughtful reflection on all of this needs to just ignore "real life" context of how impossible these things are in the current landscape of higher education institutions, at least temporarily, and then put that stuff back on as a lens later. That feels a little irresponsible, though.

I'm struck by how much of his previous work Schön reuses in each of his texts. I don't think I ever read this before, and it's been a while since I read The Reflective Practitioner, but the examples are nearly identical. If I ran this through a LLM and asked for how much was duplicative from his other books, I have a feeling that, so far, it will be ~80%; and I see the Quist examples coming up again in future chapters. Maybe it doesn't matter. I'll keep going with this, in the pursuit of the "why do all roads lead to Schön," until school starts or until I get bored.