The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action

Schon, Donald A.

ISBN 10: 0465068782 / ISBN 13: 9780465068784

Published by Basic Books / HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, 1983

About this Item

374pp., x. Later printing with '18' in number line. Notes, pp. 355-364; Index, pp. 365-374. Glossy dark gray wraps with title lettering in white letters across top half front cover, above subtitle in yellow across middle front cover; author name lettering in light gray across lower middle. Previous owner name, date and purchase location discreetly on inside front cover top left, else no signs of use: tight binding (NO cracks; NO corner bumps; NO rubbing wear); square cover corners (NO bumps or curls); black remainder mark along lower edge. Clean text. Light uniform toning to text, else virtually As New, appears Unread. Lovely testimonial to Schon in Boston Globe by David Warsh laid in ("Economic Principals" column, "The Giraffe", 12 28 97): "The creature with whom he identified was the giraffe: long-necked, graceful, curious, aloof. In Boston, a city famous for its brains, he operated or almost 30 years near the pinnacle. It is worth thinking about exactly what that might mean. / Donald A. Schon, who died in September [1997], was a philosopher of the professions: medicine, law, art, architecture, engineering, education, politics, management, music . . . His gospel was identified widely with a single catch-phrase, the "reflective practitioner." Since the best professionals inevitably knew more than they could say, Schon argued, it was their duty to reflect on how it was that they solved problems, in order to broaden and deepen the reservoir of knowledge through which professionals serve their communities . . . Schon was interested in anything and everything: the design of a washing machine agitator; the pension system in Germany; the computer wiring-up of MIT; a program for homelessness in Massachusetts; the process by which corporations present themselves through the use of space. / Mostly, however, he was interested in teaching. / He died in September at the age of 66. He was calm and curious about death, too. For a time, when he was thought to have a good chance of surviving the cancer that killed him, he resumed piano lessons. When the illness turned into leukemia and hope gave out, he spent his time tidying up his work and seeing friends. At the end, he died surrounded by family members singing rounds, piping Brahms through a lap-top computer. . . Don Schon was the consultant's consultant -- a giraffe among the other animals, forever on the outlook for something new.".

Seller Inventory # 002026

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action
• Publisher: Basic Books / HarperCollinsPublishers, New York
• Publication Date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465068782
• ISBN 13: 9780465068784
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

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 Schön 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 Schön'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.

About the Author

Donald A. Schön is Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.