8 Donald Schön on the Professions, Reflection, Design, and Ethnography

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, all of the themes we have been discussing– career preparation, ethnographic engagement with the real world, and learning by doing– came together in the work of a Harvard philosopher turned educational reformer named Donald Schön. I am going to say that Schön was one of the first proponents of the higher ed reform movement that gave rise to authentic learning in its contemporary form, even though there seems to be little discussion in support for that. I’m going to say that because Schön advocated for several interrelated ideas that are very popular today in and around discussions of authentic learning, namely reflection, design thinking, and ethnography.

Schön began addressing the problem of relevance in higher education back in the 1960s, long before tech entrepreneurs began dropping out of college, long before students were buried in debt, and long before equity was taken seriously. He focused his attention on the new professionals who were earning new graduate degrees in applied fields like public administration and urban planning. The problem of relevance that Schön saw was essentially this: does earning an applied graduate degree translate into an ability to practice as a profession in the real world? In Schön’s opinion, the answer was no. Applied professionals were being trained using methods meant for academic researchers and the result was graduates who either had to re-educate themselves and discover for themselves how the world really works or spend their days inventing bureaucratic procedures and conducting research projects that contributed nothing to meeting the needs of the people they were supposed to serve (Schön, 2001).

Convinced that the academic research model was inappropriate, Schön began searching for other ways to train practicing professionals. His search led him to discover and advocate for reflection, design thinking, and ethnographic learning. With considerable success, he arguably founded the “reflection” movement (Schön, 1983). With lesser success– perhaps because he was too far ahead of his time– he argued for the importance of design thinking and extended ethnographic immersion. Schön’s work on reflection anticipated contemporary contrasts between “disposable assignments” and “renewable assignments” that become part of a student’s intellectual toolkit (Seraphin, Grizzell, Kerr-German, Perkins, Grzanka, and Hardin, 2019). But, his most interesting work brought together ethnography and design.

Schön discovered ethnography and design simultaneously after he decided to spend months observing a teaching studio. Schön was self-reflective enough to recognize that he had only been able to discover how students learned design by patiently visiting the studio day after day, week after week, month after month. As he observed, asked questions, and talked to students and instructors, he gradually came to recognize that putting instructors in charge of standardized learning was the antithesis of real learning.

He observed that students built mastery through repetition and experimentation. Initially clumsy and clueless, they only slowly and unevenly gained mastery over their materials. Their ability to produce good designs required lengthy practice as well as reflection. Of great relevance to this course, Schön noted that design instructors were put in a difficult position. Students could only achieve mastery over materials through their own efforts. There was no way to learn it for them, and creating structured exercises was counterproductive. Until they reached a certain level of proficiency, instruction was useless. Similarly, students could not understand what instructors meant by good design until they achieved enough proficiency to begin producing good designs. This meant that the role of the instructor was mostly to stand back, watch and wait, and offer increasing feedback as students reached levels where learning by example was productive and articulating verbal knowledge was possible.