The reflective practitioner – reflection-in- and –on-action
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-schon.htm
Technical-rationality is a positivist epistemology of practice. It is ‘the dominant paradigm which has failed to resolve the dilemma of rigour versus relevance confronting professionals’. Donald Schon, they claim, looks to an alternative epistemology of practice ‘in which the knowledge inherent in practice is be understood as artful doing’ (op. cit.). Here we can make a direct link between Donald Schon and Elliot Eisner’s (1985; 1998) interest in practitioners as connoisseurs and critics (see Eisner on evaluation).
The notions of reflection-in-action, and reflection-on-action were central to Donald Schon’s efforts in this area. The former is sometimes described as ‘thinking on our feet’. It involves looking to our experiences, connecting with our feelings, and attending to our theories in use. It entails building new understandings to inform our actions in the situation that is unfolding.
- The practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomenon before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behaviour. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomenon and a change in the situation. (Schön 1983: 68)
- When a practitioner makes sense of a situation he perceives to be unique, he sees it as something already present in his repertoire. To see this site as that one is not to subsume the first under a familiar category or rule. It is, rather, to see the unfamiliar, unique situation as both similar to and different from the familiar one, without at first being able to say similar or different with respect to what. The familiar situation functions as a precedent, or a metaphor, or... an exemplar for the unfamiliar one. (Schön 1983: 138)
