Developing an understanding of phronesis

I was initially introduced to the concept of phronesis, (which is frequently translated as ‘practical wisdom’) by Judith Everington, one of the researchers in the REDCo Community of Practice, who recommended John Loughran’s book, Developing a Pedagogy of Teacher

Education (Loughran, 2006) to assist my reflections on the process of teacher education. Her

interest was in Loughran’s discussion about the relationship between theory and practice and how theory could be used to influence classroom practice positively (Loughran, 2006). Loughran raised the issue of student teachers’ attitudes towards theory and their lack of use of theory in their practice. The identification of theory and practice which he uses with his students was applied in Everington’s research for REDCo with secondary subject teachers in RE (Everington, 2009a). Everington was using the Interpretive Approach as a means of introducing theory which ‘might contribute to the students’ professional development’, thereby both expanding and interrogating the relationship between theory and practice in her students’ thinking (Everington, 2009a,101). I could see the relevance of her dilemma about theory as I considered how a relationship between theory and practice could be developed in my module. I had a potentially concept-changing theory which had strongly influenced my understanding of teaching, which I wanted to teach, but I also needed to respect the students’ varying stages of development (Everington, 2009a, 102). Everington was engaged in

62

so her feedback on her project was particularly rich for me as a new researcher. I also felt strong connections to the socio-constructivist approach she took to her sessions, where she encouraged students to share their experiences, beliefs and ideas (Everington, 2009a, 103-4).

Aristotelian Phronesis

The Aristotelian concept of phronesis is used to question the nature and role of knowledge in professions such as teaching and nursing, where practitioners are creating and applying knowledge, often rapidly, in the process of making professional decisions (Korthagen et al, 2001; Loughran, 2006; Russell and Loughran, 2007; Kinsella and Pitman, 2012; Orchard and Winch, 2015). In such professionally-charged situations individuals are drawing on a range of different knowledges and understandings, selecting and rejecting ideas to assist in making appropriate decisions and practically applying them. If asked, practitioners will sometimes talk about using their ‘common sense’, but in reality the sense they are using is often not ‘common’, but very specific to that profession and is built up through observations of more experienced practitioners, shared understandings, past experience and specific assessment of the particular situation they are responding to.

I became particularly interested in how my students learned to make judgements about the needs of classes and individual children and reflected these in their teaching. As a link tutor I saw students developing their skills in decision-making, in particular through discussions with their class teachers and mentors, which then resulted in more nuanced attempts to promote children’s learning. These moments of decision were informed by a mixture of knowledge of how children learn, subject knowledge which enabled them to apply next steps to assist a child’s development, knowledge of how the individual child and the group within which s/he was working were likely to react to the teacher’s intervention, pupil readiness, awareness of what else was occurring in the room and knowledge of how the class teacher supported individuals and groups fairly and professionally. All these knowledges were in play at the moment of decision, so how did they manage the tensions which arose between them? When asked, the students could justify their decisions and responses to children and frequently used moral reference points to justify their actions. Equity and fairness frequently played a part in their decision-making, as did awareness of individuals’ educational needs and how fairness could be applied to them. If students were able to be so nuanced and inclusive about educational needs, could they also develop and employ phronesis when responding to

63

children’s cultural and religious understandings, using their knowledge of children’s development?

Drawing on Aristotelian thinking in particular, the dimensions of episteme, phronesis and

techne all have a role to play in exploring what supports such decision-making, even if these

terms have evolved differently from Aristotle’s original thinking, because of individual and cultural developments in understanding and ontological positioning.

Episteme, Phronesis and Techne

What might be the nature and possible hierarchy of knowledge? In Book VI of the

Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses his understanding of different types of intellectual

virtue and knowledge making (Aristotle, 1999). He examines both the relationship between different forms of knowledge, including ‘theoretical wisdom’ (episteme), ‘practical wisdom’ (phronesis), and ‘craft expertise’ (techne), and the nature of action within and between them. Of these three types of knowledge, Aristotle values theoretical or abstract wisdom over practical wisdom, arguing that practical wisdom is used in achieving theoretical wisdom, and he contrasts techne with both, as being more context-related (Kessels and Korthagen, 2001). Within this hierarchy, Aristotle’s overarching view is that all forms of knowledge should be related to what is good for humankind, thereby contextualising and valuing knowledge in relation to human understanding.

In Aristotle’s conception, … episteme is characterised as scientific, universal, invariable, context-independent knowledge… Techne is characterised as context- dependent, pragmatic, variable, craft knowledge and is oriented toward practical instrumental rationality governed by a conscious goal… Phronesis, on the other hand, is an intellectual virtue that implies ethics. It involves deliberation that is based on values, concerned with practical judgement and informed by reflection.

It is pragmatic, variable, context-dependent, and oriented toward action. (Kinsella and Pitman, 2012, 2)

Phronesis is therefore of particular interest because the development of student teachers

requires them to become increasingly competent in making decisions which are appropriate to their pupils, but which are not clearly defined or pre-ordered because they are dependent on the student’s ability to read and react to individual situations. In general, the response of a teacher will be influenced by their perception of a particular child’s needs and understanding. So as students became more confident in their phronetic decision-making, I was interested to see if this understanding and confidence could be extended to teaching RE.

64

Aristotle differentiates between two different types of action, poiesis and praxis. Poiesis is seen as action which produces something which ‘did not exist before’ and praxis as action which brings about ‘human flourishing’ (Biesta, 2013,132-133). Techne is used in relation to

poiesis, in that it is concerned with ‘how things should be done’ or technical knowledge. Phronesis, in contrast, is related to praxis, in that through moral judgement the actor

determines ‘what is to be done’ (Biesta, 2013,133). In the context I am researching, praxis is the area in which I am more interested, because moral judgement is what students are

demonstrating through their discussions of developing classroom management. However this contrasts with many student teachers’ anxieties about teaching, which can focus on poiesis, through their anxieties about the appropriate delivery of their teaching, particularly in areas of weak subject knowledge.

Aristotle’s division of aspects of knowledge is also helpful in considering objective and subjective understandings of the nature of knowledge. An objective, scientific claim sees knowledge as true, independent of human understanding. It can be tested and discovered through deduction. This is seen as episteme, or as Kessels and Korthagen, call it ‘Theory with a capital T’ (2001, 21) in their discussion about the relationship between theory and practice. A hierarchy in value terms between abstract knowledge or theory and practical knowledge, following Aristotle’s understandings, can be asserted not only in scientific, but also in educational research (Kessels and Korthagen, 2001; Loughran, 2006); although alternative constructs of knowledge are found through reflexivity (Schön, 1986), Geertz’s (1973) understanding of reality as reported through ‘thick ‘ descriptions, or Lyotard’s discussion of the values of narrative and scientific knowledge (Lyotard, 1984). These all demonstrate ‘alternative models of understanding’ (Kessels and Korthagen, 2001, 21) which challenge Aristotle’s hierarchy, but the privileging of episteme over phronesis is frequently maintained, especially in positivist thinkers, because of its pure, more general and abstract, deductive form.

The problem of episteme in terms of the education of student teachers is that theory is, by its nature, general and student teachers frequently need a more practical and flexible form of knowledge which is ‘essentially perceptual instead of conceptual’ (Kessels and Korthagen, 2001, 25) to help them understand and act in specific situations. This type of knowledge can be extrapolated to differing contexts by the student if they perceive, subjectively, that its application can assist them to improve a situation. Therefore, if a student teacher can engage with their knowledge of particular children’s religious understanding and backgrounds in

65

their teaching, they are more likely to teach effectively. Recognising diversity is a first step, because then the student teacher is more open to listening for nuances of understanding. This replaces the non-specialists’ tendency to deliver knowledge, of which they are often

themselves insecure, from planned lessons which do not seek to reflect children’s own understandings.

Aristotle’s analysis of phronesis, as described above, has value for those who consider knowledge to be more subjectively created. His definition has a particular relevance for the lecturers of student teachers. Teaching is value-rich and highly ethical, in that teachers

consider the value and good of what they do, both to the individual and to the community. To teach students about teaching is to both share and develop a mutual understanding of the values that teachers require as part of their professional role. Even in a performative climate such as the one teachers operate in today (DfE, 2010; Bryan and Revell, 2011; Biesta, 2013), values are at the centre of the process of becoming a teacher and frequently sustain students when teaching becomes challenging. ‘Making a difference’ matters to student teachers, but their knowledge of how to do this is not purely theoretical; teachers operate in practical and emotionally-rich environments, making decisions in response to changing situations. Here

phronesis or practical wisdom has particular resonance, because of its situated ethical nature.

Aristotle’s third type of knowledge, techne, also has relevance in teaching, in the context of knowing how to technically proceed. Techne can be seen as craft knowledge which is essential to new teachers to build up their confidence in being able to teach. Competence in the classroom is judged through the Teaching Standards and, as Biesta identifies, ‘has a certain rhetorical appeal (Biesta, 2013,122). Being perceived as incompetent is the worst nightmare for a student teacher, so being shown what to do and how to do it are high priorities in their understanding of training. Requests for technical know-how can mask the importance of phronesis, because it is less clearly defined or acquired. It is not enough to know how to do a practical skill, it is essential teachers become skilled in decision-making, because this is central to the quality of their teaching. Reading a situation and reacting, so that pupils are supported, encouraged and challenged, requires recognition of possible choices and sometimes split-second decisions which can influence a learner’s future. This is the expert

phronesis that experienced teachers exercise continually and students need to develop. There

has recently been considerable debate about the future of teacher training informed by the idea of teaching being a ‘craft’ (Gove, 2010; DfE, 2010); however, techne lacks the ethical

66

dimension of phronesis, which assists the student not only in doing, but in making decisions as to what is the right thing to do, thereby creating teachers rather than technicians.

Reflecting on episteme and phronesis clarified two contesting problems for my module: How could students learn about world religions in such a short space of time? How could I teach students how to teach this subject, acknowledging its problematic nature and bringing some of the recent areas of scholarship to assist students in finding their own understandings and practice?

All subjects have their own subject knowledge and pedagogies. In this case what would I emphasise? Given the brevity of my course, my own phronesis assisted me in looking at how I could develop layers of teaching, differentiating material and approaches so that students could engage with the subject by harnessing their developing understanding of what were appropriate and good decisions for pupils’ education. I wanted to produce a transformative course but as the research progressed, it also became clearer that I needed to consider more deeply the unstated assumptions which lay behind my teaching and behind the students’ learning, in order to begin to tease out the different dynamics I was using and building in my classroom. The problems for RE initially seemed to be with the nature of the subject and the lack of time to spend developing student knowledge and understanding. But, although these issues are important, other more complex concepts underlie them, leading to questioning about the relationship between subject knowledge and pedagogy.

I found Flyvbjerg’s use of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model (1968) helpful, in that it encourages consideration of five stages of development towards phronetic competence. These develop from ‘novice’, through ‘advanced beginner, competent performer, proficient performer’ to ‘expert’. (Flyvbjerg, 2001,10). Although I question the idea of stages, seeing development as less structured and more dependent on circumstance, the progression described by both Dreyfus and Dreyfus and Flyvbjerg, has immediate resonance with the development of student teachers. Flyvbjerg’s description of the ‘novice’ is that of one who learns the rules for action but has not yet grappled with the influence of context on the application of those rules. In the student teacher this results in, for example, knowing that inclusion is theoretically important, but not yet understanding how that idea can transform their actions. In RE this can equate to the student or teacher who knows how to plan an RE lesson theoretically or deliver a plan given to them, but is not able to adjust the lesson content to the pupils in front of them. For the ‘advanced beginner’, in contrast, context has become much more significant and is mediated by personal experience. Some students are sufficiently

67

empathetic to be able to use this filter from early on in their training. With undergraduate student teachers in their first and second teaching experience there is usually a movement from novice to advanced beginner, as students recognise the need for phronetic judgements which help them to vary their responses to individuals’ needs in the class. During their subsequence practices, student teachers can begin the move through ‘advanced beginner’ towards ‘competent performer’. This is, for the majority of students, the development which is taking place during the phase of training when my module is taught. The sense of

responsibility identified by Flyvbjerg is central to the decision-making students are making. They are interpreting evolving situations and recognising their role in managing them

professionally and morally, through their use of personal judgement. The students’ discourse becomes more assertive in terms of what is ‘right’ for the pupils and they can make

judgements based on past experience and professional training, while maintaining the flexibility required in managing individuals in their care.

By identifying the idea of diversity in religions early in the module, I provide an opportunity for students to develop a new dimension to their developing phronesis, that of including religious identity as part of their knowledge of the children they teach and the subject matter they engage with. Becoming skilled in making appropriate and valid decisions based on holistic and interpretive assessments of situations takes experience, and, as part of that developing expertise, they are encouraged to re-imagine the religious material they are teaching in the context of their pupils. This places the children at the centre of their learning, rather than the subject-matter and ensures that the teacher does not ‘deliver’ a lesson, but rather crafts the lesson around the understandings of the pupils. This is not, however, mere techne. The underlying reasoning is that of a different relationship between the material and the child, where the inclusive instinct of the teacher enables him/her to engage the children in investigation, triggered by their own interest in others. It requires teachers to create opportunities which value the process of thinking and where children can reflect and philosophise.

This is a far remove from some of the RE opportunities that students get on teaching practice. They are frequently asked to teach without proper reflection that they may have children from differing traditions and non-believers in their class and how this material might be interpreted by them. Unfamiliarity with the material can also undermine their confidence if the children begin to question what they are learning. This results in anxiety about what is to be taught, how it is to be taught and what to do if the children are more knowledgeable than the teacher.

68

Such anxieties are addressed through promoting pupil dialogue and modelling the value to teachers of learning from their pupils in an open enquiry-led classroom. In addition, by referencing how they would manage such situations in other subjects, the students are reassured that their ‘teacher-craft’ can guide them in making appropriate educational

decisions and managing pupil knowledge positively. So emphasis changes from what to teach to how to teach, which places them on more familiar pedagogical ground. Reminding them of their growing expertise closes the gap between RE and other subjects and ensures they

engage with phronesis in RE as well as elsewhere in their teaching.