Donald A. Schon

Donald A. Schon Donald A. Schon was born in Boston and raised in Brookline and Worchester. He graduated from Brookline High School in 1947, and Yale, Phi Beta Kappa in 1951, where he studied philosophy. During that period, he also studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and Conservatoire Nationale de Music where he studied clarinet and was awarded the Premier Prix. After graduating, he received the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and continued at Harvard where he earned his Masters and Doctorate in Philosophy in 1955.

Terms/Contributions The heart of his life's work was the constant notion of being effective in practice and of helping educators to teach professionals how to be effective in practice. Donald Schon's work in The Reflective Practitioner (1983) provides a useful beginning in that his focus on professional practice relates so well to the missions of the university: the ways in which we prepare students for the professions and the ways in which we position the university as an intellectual resource to the broader community. Schon essential forcasted the current need to reexamine our perspectives on learning by looking at how the model of "technical rationality" has dominated the relationships between research, practice and teaching "technical rationality" has dominated the relationships between research, practice and teaching during much of the century. Technical; rationality, emanating from a positivist philosophy may be defined as "instrumental problem solving activity made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and techniques.

Schon goes on to point out that technical rationality depends on agreement about ends-about the problem to be solved. Yet practitioners cannot get to problem solving without first engaging in what is clearly a non-technical process; the business of deciding the boundaries to be investigated, naming the problem and framing the context in which it will be approached.

Two features of Schon's analysis seem important in the context of the current Strategic Self-Study. One concerns the way we view professional knowledge and practice. This influences the messages our students receive and the ways in which they attempt to fashion lives and careers. The second concern of teaching and its relationship to the learning environment within typical teaching bureaucracies. Schon felt as John Dewey that people learn by doing. People learn together with one another who are trying to do the same thing. Where they learn by doing in a practicum which is really a virtual world. A virtual world in the sense that, in that world, students can run experiments cheaply and without danger. That doesn't actually have to go out and build a building to learn about designing a building. They learn by doing with others in the virtual world of the practicum in interaction with someone who is on the role of a coach, more like a coach than like a teacher. Schon felt that the experience of the students in any reflective practicum is that they must plunge into the doing, and try to educate themselves before they know what it is they're trying to learn.

Major Publications

- Beyond the Stable State

- The Reflective Practitioner

- Educating the Reflective Practitioner

Additional Accomplishments Schon taught Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1953 followed by two years in the US Army. Concurrently, he lectured at University of Kansas as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. He worked from 1957-1963 as senior staff member in the industrial research firm, Arthur D. Little Inc., where he formed the New Product Group in the Research and Development Division. Under the Kennedy administration he was appointed Director of the Institute for Applied Technology in the National Bureau of Standards, Department of Commerce, where he continued through 1966.

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