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MIT OpenCourseWare | Urban Studies and Planning | 11.965 Reflective Practice: An Approach for Expanding Your Learning Frontiers, January (IAP) 2007 | Readings

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Donald Schon (Schön) - learning, reflection and change

Tags: reflection, technology on 2007-10-09 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (33) -About

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His first book, Displacement of Concepts (1963)
(republished in 1967 as Invention and the Evolution of Ideas)
dealt with ‘the ways in which categories are used to examine
“things” but are not themselves examined as ways of thinking’ (Parlett
1991, quoted in Pakman 2000).
He was invited to give the 1970 Reith
Lectures in London. His focus, ‘Change and industrial society’, became
the basis for his path-breaking book: Beyond the Stable State. Schon’s
central argument was that ‘change’ was a fundamental feature of modern life and
that it is necessary to develop social systems that could learn and adapt.
There is a concern with professional learning, learning processes in
organizations, and with developing critical, self-reflecting practice.
Frame
Reflection (Schon and Rein 1994) is concerned with the ways in which
intractable policy controversies can be reconciled.
his
exploration of the nature of learning systems and the significance of learning
in changing societies has helped to define debates around the so called ‘learning
society’.
Hutchins, in a book first
published in 1968, had argued that a ‘learning society’ had become necessary.
‘The two essential facts are… the increasing proportion of free time and the
rapidity of change. The latter requires continuous education; the former makes
it possible (1970: 130). He looked to ancient Athens for a model. There:

education was not a segregated activity, conducted for
certain hours, in certain places, at a certain time of life. It was the aim of
the society. The city educated the man. The Athenian was educated by culture, by
paideia. (Hutchins 1970: 133)
Hutchins’ argument is that ‘machines can do
for modern man what slavery did for the fortunate few in Athens’ (op. cit.)
Donald Schon on learning and the loss of the stable state

The loss of the stable state means that our society and all of its
institutions are in continuous
processes of transformation. We cannot expect new stable states that will endure
for our own lifetimes.

We must learn to understand, guide, influence and manage these
transformations.
firms moved
from being organized around products toward integration around ‘business
systems’ (ibid.: 64).
Donald Schon makes the case that many
companies no longer have a stable base in the technologies of particular
products or the systems build around them.
A firm is:

… an internal learning system
internalise processes of
information flow and sequential innovation which have traditionally been left to
the ‘market’ and to the chain reactions within and across industry lines –
reactions in which each firm had only to worry about its own response as one
component.
Classical models for the diffusion of innovations
Learning systems’ models around the diffusion of innovation
The unit of innovation is a product or technique.
The unit of innovation is a functional system.
The pattern of diffusion is systems transformation.
The pattern of diffusion is centre-periphery.
Relatively fixed centre and leadership.
Shifting centre, ad hoc leadership.
Relatively stable message; pattern of replication of a central message.
Evolving message; family resemblance of messages.
Scope limited by infrastructure technology.
‘Feedback’ loops operate local and universally throughout the systems
network.
The opportunity for learning, Donald Schon suggests, is primarily in
discovered systems at the periphery, ‘not in the nexus of official policies at
the centre’
‘Central comes to function as facilitator of
society’s learning, rather than as society’s trainer’
his critical analysis of systems theory substitutes
responsive networks for traditional hierarchies
his theory of governance
remains locked in top-down paternalism.
Paulo Freire
focus on learning
webs, the debilitating impact of professionalization,
Ivan Illich
championship of dialogue and concern
to combat oppression
Double-loop learning
people have mental
maps with regard to how to act in situations
the way they plan,
implement and review their actions.
those theories that are
implicit in what we do
can be described as
theories-in-use.
The words we use to convey what we, do or what we would
like others to think we do, can then be called espoused theory.
The reflective practitioner –
reflection-in- and –on-action
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’.
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)
We can link this process of thinking on our feet with reflection-on-action.
This is done later – after the encounter.
Workers may write up recordings, talk things through with a supervisor and so
on. The act of reflecting-on-action enables us to spend time exploring why we
acted as we did, what was happening in a group and so on. In so doing we develop
sets of questions and ideas about our activities and practice.
Schön - Educating the reflective practitioner. Address to the 1987 meeting
of the American Educational Research Association.
Bibliographic reference: Smith, M. K.
(2001) 'Donald Schön: learning, reflection and change', the encyclopedia of
informal education,
www.infed.org/thinkers/et-schon.htm