THE CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE IN PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION - sudhanshu

GOOD EVENING !!

THERE IS ?CRISIS IN EXISTENCE OF PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS – NEED TO TRANSFORM THEM ..... !!

DO AWAY WITH AXIOMATIC TEACHING & RESEARCH – DEVELOP YOUR STUDENTS INTO REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONERS !!

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BRING IN THE REFLECTIVE BEST PRACTICES OF THE PROFESSION? ............

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The crisis of confidence is seen these days in professional education, and thereby in PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS. If professions are blamed for ineffectiveness and impropriety, their schools are blamed for failing to teach the rudiments of effective and ethical practice. The biggest ?criticism I see these days is in ?the law schools, because trial lawyers are not good at their jobs. In the present climate of dissatisfaction with public schools, schools of education are taken to task. And lastly in my profession - Business schools become targets of criticism when their M.B.A.'s are seen as having failed to exercise responsible stewardship or rise adequately to the real life industry ?challenge. Schools of engineering lose credibility because they are seen as producing narrowly trained technicians deficient in capacity for design and wisdom to deal with dilemmas of technological development.

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Underlying such criticisms is a version of the rigor-or- relevance dilemma. What aspiring practitioners need most to learn, professional schools seem least able to teach. And the schools' version of the dilemma is rooted, like the practitioners', in an underlying and largely unexamined epistemology of professional practice—a model of professional knowledge institutionally embedded in curriculum and arrangements for research and practice.

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The professional schools of the modern research university are premised on technical rationality. Their normative curriculum, as per my knowledge was ?first adopted in the early decades of the twentieth century as the professions sought to gain prestige by establishing their schools in universities, they still embody the idea that practical competence becomes professional when its instrumental problem solving is grounded in systematic, preferably scientific knowledge. So the normative professional curriculum presents first the relevant basic science, then the relevant applied science, and finally, a practicum in which students are presumed to learn to apply research-based knowledge to the problems of everyday practice. And the prevailing view of the proper relationship between professional schools and schools of science and scholarship still conforms to the bargain enunciated many years ago, as I read somewhere is ?by Thorstein Veblen (1918/1962): from the "lower" technical schools, their unsolved problems; from the "higher" schools, their useful knowledge.

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As professional schools have sought to attain higher levels of academic rigor and status, they have oriented themselves toward an ideal most vividly represented by a particular view of medical education: physicians are thought to be trained as biotechnical problem solvers by immersion, first in medical science and then in supervised clinical practice where they learn to apply research based techniques to diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. In this view of medical education, and its extension in the normative curriculum of other professional schools, there is a hierarchy of knowledge:

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Basic science

Applied science

Technical skills of day-to-day practice

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The greater one's proximity to basic science, as a rule, the higher one's academic status. General, theoretical, propositional knowledge

enjoys a privileged position. Even in the professions least equipped with a secure foundation of systematic professional knowledge—what an author Nathan Glazer's called ?"minor professions," such as social work, city planning, and education—yearning for the rigor of science-based knowledge and the power of science-based technique leads the schools to import scholars from neighbouring departments of social science. And the relative status of the various professions is largely correlated with the extent to which they are able to present themselves as rigorous practitioners of a science based professional knowledge and embody in their schools a version of the normative professional curriculum. But, in the throes of external attack and internal self-doubt, the university-based schools of the professions are becoming increasingly aware of troubles in certain foundational assumptions on which they have traditionally depended for their credibility and legitimacy. They have assumed that academic research yields useful professional knowledge and that the professional knowledge taught in the schools prepares students for the demands of real-world practice. Both assumptions are coming increasingly

into question now as I write this today ...... !!

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In recent years there has been a growing perception that researchers, who are supposed to feed the professional schools with useful knowledge, have less and less to say that practitioners find useful. Teachers complain that cognitive psychologists have little of practical utility to teach them. Business managers and even some business school professors express a nagging doubt that some research is getting too academic and that [we] may be neglecting to teach managers how to put into effect the strategies which they develop. Policy makers and politicians express similar doubts about the utility of political science. Martin Rein and Sheldon White who I read have recently observed that research not only is separate from professional practice but has been increasingly captured by its own agenda, divergent from the needs and interests of professional practitioners. And Joseph Gusfield my favourite author in social science, addressing himself to

sociology's failure to provide a firm and useful grounding for public policy, has written a passage that could have a much more general application: "The bright hope had been that sociology, by the logic of its theories and the power of its empirical findings, would provide insights and generalizations enabling governments to frame policies and professionals to engineer programs that could solve the exigent problems of the society and helping intellectuals to direct understanding and criticism. Our record has not been very good. In area after area—gerontology, crime, mental health, race relations, poverty—we have become doubtful that then technology claimed is adequate to the demand. ... It is not that conflicting interests lead groups to ignore social science. It is rather that our belief in the legitimacy of our knowledge is itself in doubt." At the same time, professional educators have voiced with increasing frequency their worries about the gap between the schools' prevailing conception of professional knowledge and the actual competencies required of practitioners in the field.

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An eminent professor of engineering, commenting on the neglect of engineering design in schools devoted to engineering science. observed nearly twenty years ago, when I was new to my academic career said ?that, if the art of engineering design were known and constant, it could be taught—but it is not constant. Another dean of an engineering school said, at about the same time, that "we know how to teach people how to build ships but not how to figure out what ships to build" (Alfred Kyle, personal communication). The dean of a well known school of management observed a decade ago that "we need most to teach students how to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty, but this is just what we don't know how to teach" (William Pownes). Law professors have been discussing for some time the need to teach "lawyering" and, especially, the competences to resolve disputes by other means than litigation. A major school of medicine is undertaking a pilot program one of whose goals is to help students learn to function competently in clinical situations where there are no right answers or standard procedures. In all these examples, educators express their dissatisfactions with a professional curriculum that cannot prepare students for competence in the indeterminate zones of practice.

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Awareness of these two gaps, each contributing to and exacerbating the other, undermines the confidence of professional educators in their ability to fulfill their mandate. Nevertheless, many professional schools—certainly those of medicine, law, and business—continue to attract large numbers of students in search of the traditional rewards of status, security, and affluence. Self doubt coexists with pressure to provide traditional services to students who seek traditional rewards.

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Thoughtful practitioners of professional education have tended to see these problems in very different ways. Some, in the fields of medicine, management, and engineering, have focused attention on difficulties created for professional education by the rapidly changing and proliferating mass of knowledge relevant to professional practice. They see the problem as one of "keeping up with" and "integrating" into the professional curriculum the stream of potentially useful research results. Others, in law or architecture, for example, have focused on aspects of practice for which traditional professional education provides no formal preparation. They recommend such marginal additions to the standard curriculum as courses in professional ethics or professional/ client relationships. Still others see the problem as a

loosening of earlier standards of professional rigor and probity; they want to tighten up the curriculum in order to restore it to its former level of excellence. These are patchwork approaches to problems seen as peripheral. But another group of critics, including some students, practitioners, and educators, raises a deeper question. Can the prevailing concepts of professional education ever yield a curriculum adequate to the complex, unstable, uncertain, and conflictual worlds of practice? A recent example of this school of thought is a book by Ernst Lynton which I read way back in 1990s when I started my academic career in business science - that links the troubles of the professional schools to a multidimensional crisis of the university and calls for a fundamental re-examination of the nature and conduct of university education. Such commentaries trace the gaps between professional school and workplace, research and practice,? to a flawed conception of professional competence and its relationship to scientific and scholarly research. In this view, if there is a crisis of confidence in the professions and their schools, it is rooted in the prevailing epistemology of practice.

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SO PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS SHOULD ?FOCUS ?THEIR EXISTENCE IN EDUCATING AND DEVELOPING THE REFLECTIVE PRACTITIONER ...... !!

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sudhanshu