Exploring cases of practical wisdom (phronesis) in postsecondary teaching.

摘要

Despite growing interest in improving postsecondary teaching over the past two and a half decades, evidence suggests that these efforts have not made much difference in faculty teaching practices and their effects on student learning. One purported reason for this lack of success is that postsecondary instructors are not formally trained as teachers and instead base their teaching approach on personal, non-scientific forms of knowledge---namely, emulation, trial-and-error, and habit. The prevailing view in higher education holds that postsecondary instructors should learn to teach through the proper application of scientifically derived theory to practice, and that the best source of knowledge about effective teaching practices is education researchers rather than the instructors themselves. In contrast to this modernist view about pedagogical knowledge, this thesis argues that teaching should be viewed instead as what Aristotle called praxis (morally appropriate action), for which phronesis, or practical-moral judgment, is held as the most important form of pedagogical reasoning and knowledge. On this view, good teaching combines practical knowledge of certain educational "goods" or values with sound judgment about what, in a particular situation, constitutes an appropriate expression of those values.; To illustrate how teaching is an activity dependent upon practical-moral judgment, the study investigated teaching-related dilemmas of three science professors at a research-extensive university through classroom observations and interviews. An analytic lens of agency stances (Pendlebury, 1995) used the interplay between the respondents' teaching-related aims and the particulars of the "problem" at hand as a way of discerning instances when respondents took a phronesic (practical-moral) stance to their teaching. The study suggested that the three respondents took different approaches to making sense of contextual particularities and balancing competing teaching-related ends.; To help those who view teaching as an instrumental, technical activity move toward a notion of teaching being primarily a practical-moral activity, the different purposes of means-end reasoning and practical-moral judgment must be made explicit. Current approaches to improving postsecondary teaching, such as the scholarship of teaching and learning, can be leveraged as sites for the exercise and cultivation of phronesis.