Session Information
13 SES 10, Virtuosity in Teaching: On Judgement, Téchne and Phrónesis in Education
Symposium
Contribution
In his book The Beautiful Risk of Education (2014), Gert Biesta attempts to salvage education from what he refers to as learnification. The discourses and practices of learning have come to dominate our discussions of education and of teaching, transforming teaching into a practice that is managed, systematized, and regulated by a series of quantifiable measurements related to student learning outcomes. As an alternative, Biesta proposes to interrupt the learnification of teaching in order to return teaching to its intrinsic risks, difficulties, and aporias. To invent a new language of teaching, Biesta therefore returns to the essential, ontological question of teaching itself. He proposes that teaching could be conceptualized as either poiesis (making action) or praxis (doing action). Poiesis is the creation of something through technical skill. Praxis on the other hand does not concern itself with creating something so much as with promoting eudemonia or human flourishing. Key here is the connection that Biesta (2014) draws between poiesis and “effectiveness” (p. 133). When effectiveness is extended to the social realm or to educational relations between teachers and students, teaching becomes reduced to a version of learning. In light of these dangers, Biesta turns toward teaching as a praxis. Praxis affords him the opportunity to move beyond teaching as a merely technical endeavor concerned with the relationship between inputs and outputs. Education should be a virtuous practice and the teacher a phronimos. Teacher education should concern itself less with acquisition of technical skills and knowledge and more with existential, political, and ethical questions. In this paper, I would like to do is problematize Biesta’s turn toward teaching as a praxis. His wholesale emphasis on teaching as a doing action does not actually solve the central problem: the problem of aligning teaching with effectiveness. Instead of competencies we have virtues, instead of empirical tests we have hermeneutical judgments. In both cases, what is emphasized is the operativity of teaching. Using Giorgio Agamben’s genealogies of operativity, duty, command, and efficacy, I will argue that Biesta’s rehabilitation of teacher education from learnification remains trapped within the very same ontology of efficacy from which he is trying to escape. To move beyond the ontology of operativity and command, we need to see how praxical readings of teacher education miss what is essentially inoperative about teaching. It is my conclusion that teacher education should be reconceptualized as a studious practice (rather than a virtuous one).
References
Agamben, G. (1999). Potentialities: Collected essays in philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2013). Opus dei: An archeology of duty. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Biesta, G.J.J. (2014). The Beautiful Risk of Education. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Lewis, T. (2013). On study: Giorgio Agamben and educational potentiality. New York: Routledge.
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