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THERE ARE THOSE WHO BEEIEVE that professional education is a corrupting influence that must be kept at bay in order to preserve the purity of the mission of liberal education. At the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, we disagree. We are engaged in a long-term program of research on how professionals are educated, even as we collaborate with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and with the Wabash Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts on studies in liberal education. We pursue these two efforts concurrently and interactively because we assert that each field has much to learn from the other. Professional education poses compelling pedagogical challenges that can and should inform all sectors of education, including undergraduate liberal education. Of course, studying professional education is not new to us. We began in 1910 with the Flexner Report, the first major study done by the foundation, which irreversibly changed this country's education of physicians.
In professional education, it is insufficient to learn for the sake of knowledge and understanding alone; one learns in order to engage in practice. Professional education involves teaching ideas, facts, and principles so that they can contribute to skilled professional practice. Professional pedagogies are continuously attempting to forge connections between key ideas and effective practice. But a true professional does not merely practice: he or she performs with a sense of personal and social responsibility. In the work of a professional, the performances of practice must not only be skilled and theoretically grounded; they must be characterized by integrity, by a commitment to responsible, ethical service.
That said, it's also insufficient to claim that a combination of theory, practice, and ethics defines a professional's work; it is also characterized by conditions of inherent and unavoidable uncertainty. Professionals rarely can employ simple algorithms or protocols of practice in performing their services. How then does a professional adapt to new and uncertain circumstances? She exercises judgment. One might therefore say that professional education is about developing pedagogies to link ideas, practices, and values under conditions of inherent uncertainty that necessitate not only judgment in order to act, but also cognizance of the consequences of one's action. In the presence of uncertainty, one is obligated to learn from experience.
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