Phronesis in teacher education: a critical reexamination

A growing number of researchers have maintained that the Aristotelian-inspired idea of phronesis or 'practical wisdom' is indispensable for understanding and cultivating teacher expertise. Phronesis denotes a synthetic and dynamic intellectual disposition that allows practitioners to perceive the ethical complexities of challenging practical situations and consistently act in a way that realises the goods inherent in the practical environment. Although this is an attractive conceptual ideal, we argue in this article that advocates of phronesis have generally overlooked a necessary prerequisite for developing phronesis: a comprehensive and extended habituation in the ethical virtues (ethismos). Because most pre-service teachers will lack the ethical habituation required for phronesis, we show that phronesis-inspired models of teacher education need to be extended to include experiences we call 'epiphanies'. Epiphanies refer to moments of insight that can jumpstart the ethical habituation process necessary to usher pre-service teachers towards phronetic expertise.