Opening
Donald Schön opens by staging a vivid choice professionals face: chase “rigor” on safe, well-defined problems or pursue “relevance” in messy, high-stakes situations. He then flips the question of professional training—rather than forcing practice to conform to theory, he studies how expert practitioners actually think and act in uncertainty, and designs education to cultivate that artistry.
What Happens
Chapter 1: Preparing Professionals for the Demands of Practice
Schön frames professional life with a striking landscape: a “high, hard ground” where problems are tidy and solvable by known techniques, and a “swampy lowland” where problems of “greatest human concern” are indeterminate, value-laden, and resistant to technical fixes. Under the prevailing Critique of Technical Rationality, practitioners feel pressured to stay on the high ground—maximizing rigor while sidestepping the real human problems that matter most.
He shows how this model misdescribes practice. Real problems do not arrive prepackaged; they appear as “problematic situations” that require “problem setting”—an interpretive, world-creating act that precedes any solution. The most consequential zones of practice are marked by uniqueness, uncertainty, and value conflict—precisely where the dominant epistemology has the least to say. The result is a “crisis of confidence” for both practitioners and the schools that train them.
Schön proposes a reversal: study what master practitioners already do in the swamp. Their competence is not just technique but Professional Artistry vs. Technical Skill—a disciplined, intelligent way of knowing in action. To teach it, he looks to “deviant traditions” such as apprenticeships, conservatories, and design studios, which center Learning by Doing and Coaching. These become the template for a Reflective Practicum, an instructional setting built to cultivate artistry rather than mere rule application.
Chapter 2: Teaching Artistry Through Reflection-in-Action
Schön maps the cognition of artistry. He begins with “knowing-in-action,” the tacit, embodied intelligence that appears in skilled performance—like riding a bike or diagnosing a routine case—often without verbal articulation. Practice flows smoothly until something unexpected happens.
The heart of the chapter is Reflection-in-Action. A “surprise” interrupts routine. The practitioner notices the anomaly, questions prior assumptions, reframes the situation, and runs on-the-spot experiments—shaping action while acting. Schön likens this to jazz improvisation or a lively conversation: the practitioner “talks” to the situation, the situation “talks back,” and understanding evolves through this exchange.
Against the rule-bound lens of Technical Rationality, Schön advances a constructionist view: practitioners actively make the situations they confront. Reflection-in-action is how they remake a portion of their practice world under indeterminacy. He then returns to the reflective practicum—not as a place to apply fixed rules, but as a coached environment where students enter uncertain situations, learn to frame problems, and practice their own reflective conversations with a skilled coach who helps them learn what—and how—to see.
Character Development
Schön personifies his theory through two archetypes: the Practitioner and the Educator, each transformed by the shift from technical rationality to reflective practice.
- Practitioner
- Initial: A technician applying established theories to clearly defined ends.
- Developed: A reflective artist who frames problems, experiments in the moment, and engages in a conversational back-and-forth with each unique situation.
- Educator
- Initial: A transmitter of basic and applied science, expecting students to “apply” knowledge in a practicum.
- Developed: A coach who stages practice-like challenges, prompts inquiry, and cultivates students’ capacity for reflection-in-action rather than supplying answers.
Themes & Symbols
Schön’s central theme is a sustained critique of Technical Rationality and its split between theory and practice. He reconceives rigor: not only the application of method to pre-set problems, but also the disciplined, experimental inquiry a practitioner conducts within evolving, uncertain situations. Reflection-in-action becomes the linchpin, making professional “artistry” a teachable, examinable form of intelligence rather than ineffable intuition. This revaluation grounds models of learning that privilege performance, feedback, and coaching—mirroring apprenticeships, studios, and the reflective practicum.
Two core symbols carry the argument. The “high ground and swamp” dramatize the profession’s dilemma between safety and significance: technical solvability versus moral and social importance. The “reflective conversation” models how practitioners and situations co-create meaning in real time—each move elicits a response, and understanding emerges through that dialogic process.
Key Quotes
On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy, confusing problems defy technical solution. ... The practitioner must choose. Shall he remain on the high ground where he can solve relatively unimportant problems according to prevailing standards of rigor, or shall he descend to the swamp of important problems and nonrigorous inquiry?
This passage crystallizes the “rigor or relevance” dilemma and sets the stakes for Schön’s project. By naming the swamp as the site of “problems of greatest human concern,” he reframes true rigor as the capacity to inquire under uncertainty, not just the ability to apply established methods.
Reflection-in-action is a reflective conversation with the materials of a situation.
Schön compresses his epistemology into a single image: practice as dialogue. The practitioner’s moves elicit feedback; surprises prompt reframing; and knowledge is constructed through iterative experiment—making artistry visible, analyzable, and teachable.
Problem setting is the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen.
Here Schön highlights the creative, worldmaking step that precedes any solution. By emphasizing framing as constitutive of the problem itself, he exposes the limits of a model that only recognizes technique after ends and means are settled.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters lay the book’s foundation. Chapter 1 diagnoses the crisis: an inadequate epistemology that drives professionals toward solvable but secondary problems. Chapter 2 supplies the alternative: knowing-in-action and reflection-in-action as the real engines of expert competence, legitimizing artistry as a rigorous mode of inquiry.
Together, they justify the turn to studio- and apprenticeship-style education and the reflective practicum. The argument reshapes how professions define expertise, redesigns how schools teach it, and reorients practitioners toward the swamp—where the hardest, most human problems live.