Response to Comments: Practical Wisdom in the Service of Professional Practice

Abstract

The work of both scholarship and practice progresses as a consequence of dialogue, debate, and exchange. I am grateful to Rodney Evans (“Existing Practice Is Not the Template,” this issue of Educational Researcher [ER], pp. 553–559) for his comments on an earlier ER article that I cowrote with three colleagues at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Shulman, Golde, Bueschel, & Garabedian, 2006, “Reclaiming Education’s Doctorates: A Critique and a Proposal”).1 It is gratifying that Evans took our work seriously enough to prepare a carefully argued and passionate critique of our proposals for reclaiming the education doctorate. When the dust settles, I anticipate it will be clear that we agree far more than we disagree. Much of our apparent disagreement is a consequence of our uses of language, our backgrounds, and the sources we regularly use. I am also grateful to the editors of ER for encouraging this exchange of ideas and proposals. Evans’s critique is based largely on a misreading or misrepresentation of our argument, its rationale, and associated proposals. The critique employs a familiar set of rhetorical devices. It begins by summarizing the essence of the earlier argument in terms that are readily attacked, by transforming the original set of ideas into their caricature. This is an important move, not only because it sets up the critique so beautifully. It is quite possible that the misreading at the heart of the caricature is one that other readers (and our critic, as well) might indeed have made, and thus it is useful to have the caricature before us so we can clarify and elaborate the original argument rather than merely attempt to refute the criticism. The Evans critique is beautifully summed up in the title “Existing Practice Is Not the Template.” Evans argues that our emphasis on the “wisdom of practice” is an insufficient, overly narrow, conservative, and ultimately regressive basis for designing a doctoral program for educational leaders. Our work, he maintains, rests on a simplistic distinction between theory and practice. He argues that ideas of theory and practice are not truly separate (I agree), that their integration or synthesis in the traditions of praxis constitutes a more solid basis for imagining new approaches to the doctorate in education (I agree in part),2 and that taking seriously our emphasis on the wisdom of practice would lead to a perpetuation of robotic, conservative, and uncritical local and national education policies (I disagree). There is an important distinction to be made between existing practice, that is, what practitioners already do, and wisdom of practice, which refers to the full range of practical arguments engaged by practitioners as they reason about and ultimately make judgments and decisions about situations they confront and actions they must take. Evans writes as if he believes (and I can’t believe he does) that there is a simple, monolithic, unitary, and internally consistent set of actions called “practice,” which will be documented and then mindlessly imitated in the design of programs. But of course, practice neither is nor ever has been monolithic. To take seriously the world of practice and the intelligence that guides it is to recognize the stunning range of practices that characterizes the work of educators. To interrogate both practice and the wisdom of practice is to confront the kinds of rich, nuanced, contextually varying worlds that ethnographers and other qualitative researchers, such as Evans, write about eloquently. To put it in statistical terms, the wisdom of practice is of interest because of its variance, not its mean. We are inspired by its range, not its median. Evans ascribes to us a unidimensional, stripped, and dumbed-down conception of practice and its wisdoms that we do not espouse. Evans also asserts that the wisdom of practice is only about concrete practical action-in-the-moment (he refers somewhat derisively to Schon’s phrase “reflection-in-action” as critiqued by van Manen) and ignores the central functions and interactions of both abstract theoretical constructs and normative value-laden commitments in the thought and actions of practitioners. The conception of practice that we employ draws on a set of philosophical traditions quite different from those that inspire Evans. We build our own work on a broad, eclectic, and extended family of conceptions of practical reason that begin with Aristotle and are further developed by Thomas Green (1971) and Gary Fenstermacher (1994; Fenstermacher & Richardson, 1993) on teaching; Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (1990) on ethics and medicine; and William Sullivan (2004) on the professions. At their heart is a recognition that practical reason and practical arguments are not limited to premises that derive from practical experience and action alone. The premises of practical arguments are replete with theoretical, descriptive, critical, and normative assertions as well.