From the 
Sidelines 

Ernest A. Lynton, 
Editor Emeritus 

DONALD A. SCHON 
(1931-1997) 

In an article in this issue of Metropolitan Universities, Dean Sengupta of the 

School of Engineering at the University of Michigan-Dearborn deplores the fact that: 

[t]he notion that complex, inelegant problems that constitute the 
reality of engineering practice can contribute greatly to curriculum 
and research is difficult for some faculty to accept. At least 
several generations of faculty came into universities after the 
Sputnik milestone when the paradigm of science was accepted 
as an ideal. Simplicity and reductionism triumphed, and synthesis 

and complexity suffered. 

Dean Sengupta goes on to say that "[t]he centrality of practice in engineering 
education must be articulated clearly, repeatedly, and consistently .... " 

In recent years, the individual who articulated this centrality in all professional 
preparation most clearly and most brilliantly was Donald A. Schon, who died on 
September 13 at the early age of 66. His death is a major loss for anyone convinced 
that in this modem age a major role of the university is to engage actively and con-
structively in the ever more complex problems of contemporary society. 

The vast majority of the readers of this journal will be familiar with The 
Reflective Practitioner, published by Don Schon back in 1983, in which he describes 
effective professional practice as based on "reflection-in-action." This work is one of 
those seminal books that completely change the way people look at and understand 
matters, such as Tom Kuhn's The Nature o/Scientific Revolution. One reads it and 
says, "Of course! That's obvious! Why didn't I think of that?" It has to be one of the 
most widely read and quoted books in social science literature in recent years. The 
concept of the reflective practitioner has entered the basic vocabulary of everyone 
interested in effective professional practice, in the preparation for such practice, and, 
increasingly, of everyone interested in the nature of knowledge. 

The wide impact of this book, reinforced and extended by many subsequent 
publications and by Don Schon's many lectures and workshops conducted both here 
and abroad, is because of the way in which he places the concept of the reflective 
practitioner into a broader context of the nature of knowledge and its sources. No one 
has presented more cogently the problem cited by Sengupta, which Don Schon char-



154 Metropolitan Universities/Winter 1997 

acterized as the dilemma of "rigor or relevance." Don also coined the vivid and 

unforgettable simile: 

a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use 
of research-based theory and technique, and ... a swampy 
lowland where situations are confusing 'messes' incapable of 
technical resolution. The difficulty is that the problems of 
the high ground, however great their technical interest, are 
often relatively unimportant to clients and to the larger society, 
while in the swamps are the problems of greatest human concern. 

Central to this image is the recognition that effective practice in the swamp of 

the real world is inevitably a learning process. "When someone reflects in action," 
Don Schon states, "he becomes a researcher in the practice context." The corollary to 
this, of course, is that practice is necessary to learning. Through his work, Don Schon 
contributed greatly to the efforts of individuals like Sengupta to include hands-on 
experience as an integral component of professional education. 

But, of course, such learning can take place only ifthere exist systematic rules 
of evidence and inference that are quite different from those of Technical Rationality 
(as Don called it), which operate in the high place of the laboratory but nevertheless 

are rigorous in their own right. Don Schon has called for a "new epistemology of 
practice" for the swamp-that is, a systematic and intellectually consistent way of 

dealing with the complex problems of the real world. 
Each of these dimensions of Schon' s work on reflective practice is of sub-

stantial significance. Together they add up to a fundamentally new vision of the 

university, an intellectual construct that goes beyond operational definitions. What he 
has been saying to us is that the university-the principal societal mechanism for the 
advancement, dissemination, and application of new knowledge--can fulfill its func-
tion only by means of a symbiotic and two-way relationship with the society of which 
it is a part. Let us think of the university as a learning organism, just like an individual 
practitioner or an individual student. Don Schon' s work forces us to realize that the 
university, like the practitioner and the student, must engage in reflective practice. It 
must focus as much on generating knowledge by means of research in the messy 
practice context as it has, traditionally, concentrated on finding knowledge in the shel-

ter of study and laboratory. It must recognize that the flow of knowledge goes both 
ways between high place and swamp. No longer the city on the hill, it must be the 
intellectual highway linking the abstraction of the former and the reality of the latter. 

Don Schon' s work has provided an exciting and profound inteJlectual frame-
work for the mission of universities generally, and most particularly for our metropoli-
tan institutions. He has contributed to many other fields as well, but for us this is his 
lasting legacy.