Instrumentos

The tradition of reflective practice provides a suitable theorisation of the learning process through which practical wisdom can be developed (Fischler, 2012;

Forester, 2013; Schön, 1983; Yanow, 2009). The reason for turning to reflective practice, is that this tradition carries the potential to conceptualise the manner in which planners need to turn their gaze towards their assumptions of power, if they wish to learn from their experiences.

2.3.1 What is reflective practice?

It was Donald Schön (1983) who originally developed the ideas of reflective practice, which were later applied and developed by many scholars and practitioners (e.g. Fischler, 2012; Forester, 2013; Yanow, 2009; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). Schön developed his ideas based on his own practicical experiences and close studies of how practitioners go about doing their work.

Importantly, some of his most influential work was done with planners.

Schön drew on the work of Dewey (1933, 1938) and further developed some of his core ideas. Most notably, Schön subscribed to Dewey’s view that learning occurs from the personal experience of puzzling, surprising and difficult situations, which require reflection on habitual ways of thinking and doing.

In general, practicing reflectively means learning by doing and learning from doing;

at best, it means pushing the boundaries of one’s field and questioning one’s role in it.

Reflective practitioners consciously aim to improve their practice by analyzing their own experience. They improve their professional behaviour and ameliorate its effects by sustained inquiry into the causes, meanings, and consequences of their actions.

(Fischler, 2012, p. 314)

Schön (1983) elaborated on his ideas of reflective practice by contrasting it to technical rationality. In technical rationality, professional practice includes instrumental problem solving through the application of scientific theory and technique. It involves selecting the best models and tools to tackle a given problem. In contrast, Schön saw how practitioners, who master their practice rather exhibit an “artful competence” whereby, instead of carefully selecting appropriate tools prior to action, they spontaneously apply their “knowing in action”.

When we go about the spontaneous, intuitive performance of the actions of everyday life, we show ourselves to be knowledgeable in a special way. Often, we cannot say what it is that we know. When we try to describe it, we find ourselves at a loss, or we produce descriptions that are obviously inappropriate. Our knowing is ordinarily tacit, implicit in our patterns of action and in our feel for the stuff with which we are dealing.

It seems right to say that our knowing is in our action. (Schön, 1983, p. 49)

As observed by Schön, our knowing in action is largely tacit. Even if we can put words on the logic underlying what we do, we are rarely inclined to do so in the midst of action. A competent planner might, for example, be capable of enabling a constructive conversation on a difficult planning choice with a citizen, but might not immediately be able to explain how they do it.

Yet, Schön (1983, p. 50) tells us how professionals, stimulated by surprise, puzzles and difficulties, “turn thought back on action and on the knowing, which is implicit in action”. For example, if the the planner suddenly notices that the citizen seems troubled, they might in the moment pause their routinised behaviour, their knowing in action, and become attentive to the way they speak and what they say. In this pause, the planner might reflect-in-action. They might ask themselves and/or the citizen if their use of language is overly technical and thereby makes the citizen feel excluded. This kind of reflection-in-action is important for developing the sensitivity for what a situation requires, which is central to practical wisdom (Bornemark, 2017).

Schön, distinguishes between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.

The latter takes place after a situation when a practitioner thinks back on a situation and scrutinises the way he or she understood the situation. To Schön, this form of reflection was crucial for understanding how practitioners learn from their experience, by questioning habitual ways of thinking and acting and, if called for, change them (Schön, 1983).

In theories of reflective practice, the metaphors frame and framing are used to signify tacit thought models and ideas. These metaphors explain that there is a less visible foundation “that lies beneath the more visible surface of language or behaviour, determining its boundaries and giving it coherence.” (Rein and Schön, 1996, p. 88). Through this language we can see how our frames of

meaning-making, like picture frames, set a boundary within which we focus our attention on what is inside as opposed to what is outside of the frame and thereby make sense of what is going on (Raitio, 2008).

To Schön, practitioners’ artistry, which resembles practical wisdom and phronesis, originates from their ability to be sensitive to surprise and engage in reflection over the usefulness of the frames embedded in their practices.

Surprises and difficulties show a lack of appropriateness between the practitioners’ knowing in action, tacit ways of framing, and the situation at hand.

Practitioners are in such situations, helped by reflecting upon their tacit frames and adjusting them to become more effective in their knowing in action.

According to Schön (1983, p. 50) it is the critical scrutiny of assumed ideas, the reflection-in and on-action “which is central to the ‘art’ by which practitioners sometimes deal well with situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict.” In this thesis, I am interested in analysing and assessing the frames, which inform planners’ understandings of power in participatory planning. By making these explicit I wish to develop concepts that can enable reflective practice.

2.3.2 Reflective practice and power

Notions of power often remain implicit in participatory planning. As research into meaning-making tells us, actors draw on their particular view of “the order of things” most often without making the underlying assumptions explicit to themselves and others (Schön, 1983; Yanow and Tsoukas, 2009). As discussed in my own practice story in the prologue, unspoken differences in understandings might result in ambiguity regarding the purpose of participation and planners’

roles in power relations. It might result in a kind of “unreflective practice” which, according to Schön (1983, p. 289), is equally “limited and destructive” regardless if practitioners follow the conventional ways of their practice or see themselves as progressively pursuing a mission to change their practice.

Arguably, an unreflective planning practice might be equally dangerous regardless of whether it is performed in the name of participation or in the name of technical expertise. Universal aspirations for participation or technical rationality are ill-suited in a practice that requires situated judgements. Presuming that certain understandings and normative aspirations are always valid might deter planners from being sensitive to the workings of power in a particular situation.

From the power literature, we learn that unreflective practice might stabilise power relations by rendering them presumed as a given reality. Thereby, unreflective practice is a vehicle for “reification”, the process by which certain kinds of power relations are seen as given, as objective reality. In the power

literature, reification is a term used to signify one of the most important mechanisms through which power is created by ordering and stabilising social relations (Haugaard, 2003). Critical power analysis tells us that when reification, which is the construction of reality, remains tacit and unquestioned the risk for dominance by powerful actors increases (Lukes, 2005).

Following this reasoning there is a potential for reflective participatory planning practice to “unmask” what is taken for granted about power. Reflective practice provides the possibility to explicate and scrutinise the way that reification stabilises power relations. Opening the process of reification for critical examination carries the potential for assessing the legitimacy of power relations and, if deemed necessary, transforming them.

The links between reflective practice and power will stay in focus throughout this thesis. At this point, it suffices to reiterate that this thesis is intended to enable reflective practice, due to the potential this form of practice carries for developing phronesis by reflection, and for opening power relations to critical scrutiny.

2.4 The fragmented and reductive treatment of power in