Reflections on Schon chapter

Borrowed the book "The reflective practitioner" by DA Schon because it was too long to photocopy and I'm glad I did. It was a really interesting and thought provoking chapter on the evolution of the epistemology (? correct usage here?) of the professions. The chapter itself is called "From technical rationality to Reflection-in-action" and I found it useful to read about the history of the "professions" and how the scientific method was valued above all use, about how basic and general science was "higher" than applied, and the divide between theory (guided by non-contextual research) and practice.

He described a dilemma between "rigor" and "relevance" between which practitioners have to choose when inevitably they encounter situations which are not well-formed and mere repetitions of textbook cases. I reflected that as occupational therapists, because we work with human beings, there is little doubt in my mind that it would be rather useless to "stay on the higher ground" and dismiss everything that doesn't fit into theory and "science" as anomalies. I mean, what's "normal" right?

The author conveyed a reasonable mistrust (or maybe rejection) of the Technical Rationality paradigm and I felt that there is still *some* place for research, although we must be ready to realise that not everything will fit nicely into categories (or maybe few things do!)

I felt this reading contrasted a lot with Rogers' (2004) Occupational Diagnosis, which called for better labelling and categories in order to further the knowledge and the profession! She even said that if we had good categories for labelling impairments and aetiology, we could share knowledge better. I must admit I wasn't terribly excited about the idea that differentiating between patient with 1A (can't shower due to visual impairment) and 1B (can't shower due to muscle weakness) was going to revolutionise our practice. My immediate thought was, well what if the patient can't shower, and he has both muscle weakness and visual impairment, but probably could manage if his wife didn't have issues of anxiety and control?

Rogers, J. C. (2004). Occupational diagnosis. In M. Molineux (Ed.), Occupation for Occupational Therapists (pp. 17-31). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.


Schon, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. USA: Basic Books.

Week 2-3

This is the start of week 3 and I've been keeping busy trying to stay on top of our coursework and prepare for the second honours school next week. (!!!!)

Just did an interesting exercise where we had to identify the different types of clinical reasoning in some case studies. When I first read the article by Fleming (1991) last week I thought I understood the different types of reasoning fairly well, but perhaps initial beliefs are not always true because when I finally managed to get into the wiki today (after hitting a brainwave and trying it out on Firefox instead of my usual Safari) and read other people's comments I thought hmmm maybe I don't understand it that well after all. Not that other people's comments did not make sense, but that they had interpreted the scenarios slightly different to mine. I suppose the point of the Fleming's article was that the three tracks or strands of reasoning are woven together and are not always easy to distinguish; I especially found the more I re-read the interactive and conditional reasoning descriptions the more I found it difficult to differentiate them. Both are about the person's experiences and about their lives and the meaning they find in their condition apart from the symptoms, both are about understanding the person as a person and not just a set of impairments, both have to do with broader therapy than just making up for dysfunction. The main thing I could find to help myself separate them (if they are indeed discrete) would be the temporal factor in conditional reasoning whereby the person is placed and understood in a broad context of time, past, present and future an a visualisation of what "could be" if therapy was "successful".

I need to read more about this perhaps written by others to see if that helps and maybe over time I'll get a better grasp of these concepts. Hopefully!

Hello and welcome!

Working through the learning tasks for this week for the Clinical Reasoning paper, I have decided to start this blog as my reflective journal. Usually I'm an avid journaller and I cover the page with heaps of tiny scribbles (although somewhere along the way I began to type my journal into Word as a private document - simply because I type faster than I write and develop less of a cramp!).

This time, seeing as it's the new year (yes it's already mid Feb, I know) and it's the season for new beginnings and self-improvement challenges and all that, I decided to blog online. It's not the technology part that will be the new challenge (thanks to last semester I took that on with my DiverseOT conference presentation) but it's the blogging publicly. For one thing, I can't just say what I like because my thoughts and conclusions may be questioned and challenged. Of course I'm still going to say what I like :p because it's my journal, but I'm going to stretch myself and think more broadly/deeply/fully about whatever logical fallacy/error of thinking/unqualified statement people care to point out to me. See, I was also reading the PG student handbook earlier, and it mentioned "collegial relationship", which appealed to (the geek/undiscovered intellectual in) me. Esteemed colleagues, we are on a journey!