Reasoning

FOREWORD

“We are in need of inquiry into the epistemology of practice. What is the kind of knowing in which competent practitioners engage?” —Schön (1983, p. vii) In the 1980s, scholars became interested in the epistemology of practice—the way professionals think in action. Donald Schön’s 1983 influential work, explicated in The Reflective Practitioners: How Professionals Think in Action , focused on the competence valued in a range of professional practices. He observed that practice was messy and uncertain and that straightforward standard theories were insuffi cient to address the complexities and demands of practice. Drawing on the work of philosopher Polanyi (1996/2009, p. 4), Schön argued that competent practitioners’ reasoning is complex and tacit, that is, “we can know more than we can tell.” Given that practitioners often know more than they can say, to understand the reasoning processes of professionals, Schön observed practitioners from various disciplines in action as they developed creative responses to address the puzzles of practice. In the same year that Schön published his work, a prominent occupational therapy (OT) scholar, Joan Rogers, used her 1983 Eleanor Clarke Slagle address to the American Occupational Therapy Association audience to propose the first comprehensive exploration of how OT practitioners reason in the situation of prac tice. She challenged practitioners to explain the tacit reasoning behind their ac tions to improve their ability to explain their reasoning, which would also help educate future practitioners. Rogers’ Slagle lecture and Schön’s work became the catalyst for a collaboration among the American Occupational Therapy Association and the American Occupational Therapy Foundation to investigate the “clinical knowledge and expertise within the profession” (Mattingly & Fleming, 1994, p. ix). This investigation, now known as the “Clinical Reasoning Study,” transformed OT practitioners’ understanding of our clinical and professional reasoning. The proj ect was led by Cheryl Mattingly, an anthropologist and, at the time, a graduate student of Schön’s. Together with OT educators and practitioners, Mattingly used action-oriented and narrative approaches to engage OT practitioners in a process of studying their own practice in action. I had the honor of collaborating with Dr Mattingly and other scholars in this research project to closely examine what OT practitioners think about as they are engaged in their work. Serving as the guest editor for a 1991 special issue of the American Journal of Occupational Therapy that

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