In an action-present–a period of time, variable with the context, during which we can still
make a difference to the situation at hand–our thinking serves to reshape what we are
doing while we are doing it. I shall say, in cases like this, that we reflect-in-action.
The simple theory was devised around an understand of learning systems and
drew on Ashby’s (1960) seminal work on cybernetics and the concept of feedback
or what he later called in work with Chris Argyris“double loop learning”differ-
entiating it from“single loop learning”.
Schön had trained as a philosopher and completed his philosophy degrees at
Yale completing his Ph.D. at Harvard on Dewey’s theory of inquiry. From the
1970s Schön devoted himself to the question of what makes professional practice
effective. Working with Chris Argyris at Harvard in thefield of organizational
learning he went on to co-author a series of books that developed an epistemology
of professional practice based on the concept of knowledge-in-action, including
Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness(1974),Organizational
Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (1978),andOrganizational Learning II:
Theory, Method, and Practice(1996).
Beginning with the practice of design in architecture (the reflective practicum in
design studio) he extended his interests to professionals in education, management,
medicine, psychotherapy, law, city planning, and engineering. Reflection-in-action
is what professionals bring to their everyday practices and theories-in-use are tacit
theories of action based on forms of tacit knowledge.
Schön’s ideas developing in the early 1970s were based and brought together
into a new frame and focus the ideas of cybernetic epistemology explored earlier by
the likes of Gregory Bateson, W. Ross Ashby, and Gordon Pask, all part of the
cybernetics group who developed their ideas at the Macy Conferences in New York
during the period 1946–53 bringing together and applying cybernetics, information
theory, and computer theory and constructing a distinctive American social science
in the Cold War. As Steve Heims (1991: 271) puts it:
Feedback has come to mean information about the outcome of any process or activity. No
single word for that general idea seems to have existed in the English language before
feedback was introduced in the context of cybernetics.
The notion of the feedback mechanism was used to describe the process of social
adaptation, of economic activity based on the idea of“information”,oforganizational
performance, and of learning and education.These cyberneticians thought of their work
678 Part VII: Pedagogy in Action