Session Information
13 SES 10, Virtuosity in Teaching: On Judgement, Téchne and Phrónesis in Education
Symposium
Time:
2016-08-25
15:30-17:00
Room:
NM-F104
Chair:
Contribution
Like many other academies for teacher education, the Dutch University of Applied Sciences iPabo struggles to balance the student’s development of teacher competencies (his ability to do things) and the (trans)formation of the whole person as a professional. Despite explicit attention to the student’s personal professionalism, the academy’s curriculum and teaching practices are monopolized by long and detailed checklists of everything students should be (or become) competent in. More specifically, the rubrics, developed to make the grading fair, efficient and transparent to students, dominate the teaching practices and obfuscate the role and importance of professional judgment; the ability to make “situated judgments about what is educationally desirable.” (Biesta, 2014, p. 130)
In order to decrease the hegemony of these checklists and rubrics and to define the student’s transformation to an educationally wise professional as the guiding principle of teacher education, the academy is trying to find ways to focus on promoting judgment and wisdom, thereby taking its first steps toward a judgment-focused teacher education.
Following Kant, Arendt underlines that judgment requires representative thinking; thinking with an ‘enlarged mentality’; thinking with an imagination trained to go visiting. (Arendt, 1992) “I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I represent them.” (Arendt, 1968, p. 241) This representative thinking requires plurality and publicity (the contact with other people’s thinking – Arendt, 1992), but has to be distinguished from empathy: it is not about seeing throught the eyes of someone else, but about seeing “with your own eyes from a position that is not your own – or, to be more precise, in a story very different from one’s own.” (Biesta, 2014, p. 116)
The research presented in this paper explores the way we (as teacher educators) can stimulate our students’ virtuosity in making wise educational judgments. It was carried out amongst a group of bachelor’s students in their final year of teacher education, specializing within the area of Diversity & Critical Citizenship, and makes several contributions to practical wisdom on this topic. For instance, the results illustrate both the richness and awkwardness students experienced from the more open, collaborative educational setting we created. Furthermore, the absence of detailed grading rubrics encouraged students to rely on their own and our collective educational process and the decisions they made throughout it.
References
Arendt, H. (1968). Between Past and Future. New York: Viking Press. Arendt, H. (1992). Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Biesta, G.J.J. (2010). Good Education in an Age of Measurement. Boulder/London: Paradigm Publishers. Biesta, G.J.J. (2014). The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
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