Technical Rationality versus Reflection-in-Action
Donald A Schon's book "The Reflective Practitioner" examines how most professions still use a learning model based on the 19th Century: ie that general principles and professional knowledge are applied to concrete problems. There is a hierarchy implicit between research and practice - "first, the relevant basic and applied science; then, the skills of application to real-world problems of practice". And there's the idea that "if unlimited resources could be poured into the necessary research and development (of whatever), then any such objective could be achieved."
But! he cites Nathan Glazer's view that this only works with higher professions such as medicine or law which "operate in stable institutional contexts". Minor professions such as education (charming!) "suffer from shifting, ambiguous ends and from unstable institutional contexts of practice, and are therefore unable to develop a base of systematic, scientific professional knowledge."
"In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is a swampy lowland where situations are confusing "messes" incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that the problems of the high ground...are often relatively unimportant to clients or to the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of greatest human concern".
"There are those who choose the swampy lowlands. They deliberately involve themselves in messy but crucially important problems and, when asked to describe their methods of inquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error, intuition, and muddling through."
"Other professionals opt for the high ground. Hungry for technical rigor, devoted to an image of solid professional competence...they choose to confine themselves to a narrowly technical practice."
What is Reflection-in-Action?
Like children trying to balance randomly weighted building blocks, positive and negative results in business should be taken "not as signs of success or failure in action but as information relevant to a theory of balancing" (metaphorically speaking!)
When something falls outside the range of ordinary expectations..."the practitioner allows himself to experience "surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation."
When someone reflects in action...
- he becomes a researcher
- is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case
- does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation
- does not separate thinking from doing, rationalising his way to a decision which he must then convert to action
- his experimenting is a kind of action, therefore implementation is built into his inquiry
Reflection-in-action may be rigorous in its own right, bridging the creative art of practice in uncertainty and uniqueness to the scientific art of research.
Reflection-in-action can proceed , even in the shifting sands of education, because it is not "bound by the dichotomies of Technical Rationality".
Food for thought...
