Alphonsus Chong's Personal Wiki

The Crisis of Confidence in Professional Knowledge

From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in- Action

Design as a Reflective Conversation with the Situation

Psychotherapy: The Patient as a Universe of One

The Structure of Reflection-in-Action

Reflective Practice in the Science-Based Professions

Town Planning: Limits to Reflection-in-Action

The Art of Managing: Reflection-in-Action Within an Organizational Learning System

Patterns and Limits of Reflection-in-Action Across the Professions

Implications for the Professions and Their Place in Society

• Professions: professional knowledge, but also professional art
  • professional knowledge (specialized, stable, firmly bound, standardized) p.24
• “crisis” because epistemology cannot explain or describe this art

I have become convinced that universities are not devoted to the production and distribution of fundamental knowledge in general. They are institutions committed, for the most part, to a particular epistemology, a view of knowledge that fosters selective inattention to practical competence and professional artistry.

“We conduct society's principal business through professionals specially trained to carry out that business”

“Our principal formal institutions - schools, hospitals, government agencies, courts of law, armies - are arenas for the exercise of professional activity”

- “claim to extraordinary knowledge in matters of social importance” Everett Hughes
granted “professionals extraordinary rights and privileges”

“Professional careers are among the most coveted and remunerative”
“few occupations that failed to seek out professional status”

“We are bound to an epistemology of practice which leave us at a loss to explain, or even to describe, the competences to which we now give overriding importance.”

Professional knowledge held as the reason professions “fulfill the espoused purposes of the professions” p 13

• but all fields are VUCA – “complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict”
• adaptability is key – as knowledge cannot keep up with demands of practice – Harvey Brooks p.15

Russel Ackoff: “Managers do not solve problems: they manage messes”

Erik Erikson: “a universe of one”

“If it is true that there is an irreducible element of art in professional practice, it is also true that gifted engineers, teachers, scientists, architects, and managers sometimes display artistry in their day-to-day practice. If the art is not invariant, known, and teachable, it appears nonetheless, at least for some individuals, to be learnable.” p. 18

“finding the right problem”

• Rising and decline of the professions
• Major and minor professions
• Professions and technical rationality/ expertise
• Divide between the “basic scientists” and practitioners - university and the practice → a RIA –> a new form
• Bureaucracy and professions
• A new epistemology of practice: reflection in action

• 2020-08-15 Created
• 2020-12-10 Finished first reading

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Temple Smith.