Science for practice?

Most university students are being trained in an academic discipline to prepare them for a working life as a professional. The societal practices they will engage themselves with tend to be richer than may be grasped from any disciplinary viewpoint, though. This raises the question how university training may prepare them for this professional reality.
One element to meet this challenge would be that university training should pay at least as much attention to the epistemology and methodology of problem-oriented researchas to traditional research, aiming at universal knowledge. Therefore, drawing on (policy) design literature, students should be enabled to grasp the crticaly scrutinize their own and others’ knowledge on basis of an appreciation of how they relate to the problems studied. Also, they should learn to employ a ‘dual vision’ , iterating between a detached, ‘helicopter’ view, and an actor-oriented, contextual way of understanding that takes into account power relations.