A searching, not wholly successful attempt to analyze the kind of
intuitive thinking creative professionals bring to their enterprise
- be it psychotherapy, architecture, management, or urban planning;
The operational word here is practice: Schon, presently professor
of Urban Studies and Education at MIT, has been a consultant and
planner; and he first explores the dichotomy between what academics
profess and practitioners practice. He also notes shifts in
American attitudes - from great expectations of experts in a
post-industrial society to rejection of technocrats as begetters of
physical and moral blight. The word "academic" has become even more
pejorative. Successful practitioners, meanwhile, are hard put to
explain how they operate. Schon has studied particular examples of
problem-solving via transcriptions; he describes the verbal and
nonverbal thinking entailed as "reflection in action," and tries to
demonstrate how it operates. Professional practitioners do not
pigeonhole problems in standard categories and apply fixed rules;
instead, they see each problem as unique - a "universe of one," in
Erik Erikson's phrase. They may "frame" the problem, generating
questions that enable them to see likenesses and differences, and
exercising selection and choice to narrow the focus. The process
involves a continual back-and-forthness aimed at changing the
situation and arriving at a satisfactory solution - which, in turn,
can be evaluated using appropriate criteria. The approach is a lot
different from classic Newtonian hypothesis-testing - but it is not
very different from the kind of problem-solving that has been
described by cognitive psychologists Or analysts of creativity.
Still, some of Schon's examples are interesting - a senior
psychoanalyst discussing a case with a third-year resident, for
example, or an architect suggesting ways to construct a school on a
"screwy site." He has also usefully articulated the schism between
what professional schools teach and what practitioners in the real
world require. (Kirkus Reviews)
A leading M.I.T. social scientist and consultant examines five
professions - engineering, architecture, management, psychotherapy,
and town planning - to show how professionals really go about
solving problems. The best professionals, Donald SchAn maintains,
know more than they can put into words. To meet the challenges of
their work, they rely less on formulas learned in graduate school
than on the kind of improvisation learned in practice. This
unarticulated, largely unexamined process is the subject of SchAn's
provocatively original book, an effort to show precisely how
'reflection-in-action' works and how this vital creativity might be
fostered in future professionals.
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