#1 Virtuosity in Professional Studies? | Gert Biesta
Edited Podcast Transcript:
ResponsAbility
Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies
By Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog
#1 Virtuosity in Professional Studies? | Gert Biesta
00:00:05 Michael N. W.
Welcome to this episode of The Responsibility Podcast with Guro Hansen Helskog as
co-host.
00:00:11 Guro H. H.
And Michael Noah Weiss as the host.
00:00:13 Michael N. W.
The guest of our episode today is Get Bista. Gert, thank you very much for joining us. I'm
not sure whether it is necessary to introduce you because you are one of today's most
well-known scholars within the broad field of educational theory. You are a university
professor and the author of the famous book The Beautiful Risk of Education. You have
published widely on topics like the theory of education as well as on the theory of
educational and social research in the form of many articles, chapters and books, and
so far your work has appeared in 20 different languages. Welcome, Gert.
00:00:58 Guro H. H.
We have come to understand that you prefer to say that you work with educational
theory rather than with philosophy of education. What is the difference between the two
as you see it? And why does your work belong to educational theory rather than to
philosophy of education?
00:01:15 Gert B.
Good question, and the first response is maybe to say that philosophy of education is a
philosophical area where philosophers look at education, and of course they are free to
do that. But for me there is also the question: If you want to look at education, how do
you know what you need to look for? For me that is an educational question that
philosophers or psychologists cannot answer, because you need to be on the inside of
education, of the practice of education. And for me that is where educational theory
place itself. It is on the inside of the practice and the field of education, trying to theorize
and give words to what's going on there. And for me, that is about asking educational
questions rather than philosophical questions. So, in a sense, I'm quite strict about the
difference, also because I sometimes meet people who are doing philosophy of
education, but within 10 seconds they have forgotten about education, and they are
deep into philosophical discussions. And I really want to make sure that that education
is in the center.
00:02:49 Guro H. H.
In your book from 2017 The Rediscovery of Teaching you claim that today's educational
policy and the interest in the teacher and in teaching is being lost. Instead, the students
and the learning of the students is now at the center of attention. However, you argue
that teaching can have an emancipatory power in the lives of students, helping them
find their place in the world, so to speak. Can you elaborate this stance of yours?
00:03:19 Gert B.
I will try. One way to look at what has happened in discussions about education is a
rather simplistic view where people ask “What is teaching? Well, that is to tell students
what they should do and what they should think”. If that's your understanding of
teaching, you can say teaching is an act of power and it has no real space for students.
And then you can say that if we want to make space for students, let us focus on that.
That is how I understand the whole sort of enthusiasm about students. The language of
learning comes into that as well, because you say “what are students doing? They are
learning, so let us focus on their learning”. And in that way of thinking, teaching has sort
of gotten a bad name, like teaching is outdated. It is an act of power and control, and we
shouldn't want that as educators. But for me that is quite sad because you can say that
if you want to learn, you do not need a teacher. You can learn anywhere. So, if we are
just interested in learning, I would say let us close the schools and let us spend the
money on something else. What is special about education is at that at the very least
there is learning in the presence of a teacher, and that there are educational
relationships in which teachers matter. So, you can say everything that matters in
education is about those things that we cannot do without teachers. But then we need
to think differently about teaching and not just have this idea that teaching is always an
act of power or control. That is what I tried to explore in this book The Rediscovery of
Teaching, where I ask, can teaching have an emancipatory quality or potential?
In discussions about emancipation there is also a question that is not often asked, and
that is the question: “Emancipation from what?” As an educator, I would say “What is
educational emancipation? One thing to be emancipated from, let's use the word
distraction. I think in our times, young people, but maybe everyone, is exposed to a lot of
distraction. Social media are really doing a lot there. They are constantly sending all
kinds of images and impulses and advertising to everyone, and in a sense they are trying
to distract us. Because if you don't really pay attention, then you think “oh, this looks
good”. Or “this is the latest fashion, so, I should buy that”. You can look at how social
media try to take that time away to reflect on “Is this what I should be wanting? Is this
what I should be doing?”
So, there is an awful lot of distraction that actually distracts people from themselves,
from their thoughtfulness, from their judgment. And there you can say, what education
can do is maybe to help emancipate people from these distractions, from the forgetting
of themselves. And their teachers can do interesting things, for example by just saying
something like “oh wait a minute” or by having a particular curriculum that focuses the
attention on other things than where students would have their attention. But for me
that begins with a need to think very differently about the importance of teaching.
00:07:41 Michael N. W.
If I understand you right, then you are arguing that teaching and learning should be more
world-centered in contrast to – what's very often used today – student-centered, which
means it has to do with a kind of opening up towards the world instead of focusing on
yourself, if I understand you right?
00:08:02 Gert B.
Yes, that's another idea where you have already seen that, I'd like to work with language
and also, introduced new notions because I think that can also help to think or to think
again or to hesitate. Do we really know what we're talking about? So, this idea of world-
centered education is partly to say the discussion is too often just going back and forth
between either it should be the curriculum that's in the center and we should test on
that, or the students should be in the center and they should have the freedom to
explore and learn what they want to learn. And both, again for me, are not really
education. Because education both needs a curriculum and it needs students. You can
say our task in education is to bring the two together.
But why do we bring students and curriculum together? One way to put it is to say that it
is not because the curriculum in itself is important, but because we want to prepare and
equip and encourage students for their life in the world. So, actually the real center of
education should be this life in the world. And if we just keep going back and forth
between the positions that it should be the student in the center or the curriculum in the
center, we missed the real point of education.
But the other thing about world centered education also has to do with “What is the
world? How can we relate to the world?” And again, what I see in a lot of talk about
student-centered education is this idea that students should try to understand the
world, or should make sense of the world, or should construct knowledge about the
world. Or they should learn about the world. And you can say that all goes from the
student to the world. That's fine, but I think that the world is not simply a thing for us to
understand or to master, or to learn about. I find it interesting to also say that the world
actually puts questions in our direction. The world knocks on our door. The world also
want something from us. I think the planet has been knocking on our door for decades
saying “Stop abusing me, the living environment, plants, animals. They are not objects
or our learning or understanding. They need our care. They need our attention. And you
could even say that other human beings are not just objects for our learning. They are
people who speak to us, who ask US questions, who are after us.
Yeah, they're mentioned in this idea of world centered education. Say, look, the world
actually wants something from us. And in that way, to put the world in the center of
education also does something that I think is interesting, but also important. It's very
often forgotten. If the students and their learning or their learning outcomes and the
tests are in the center of education.
00:11:35 Guro H. H.
In the beautiful risk of education, you make an argument for bringing risk taking to the
forefront of pedagogical practice as well. What do you mean by that?
00:11:49 Gert B.
So, the question is about risk and education, and it's it starts from the quite
fundamental assumption that I think that all education should ultimately be interested
in, and concerned about, the freedom of children and young people. If we think that our
task is to control children and young people, then we are in a different kind of job. Good
educators, as I often say, they want to get rid of the students too. They do all the work
because they at some point want that the students to say that “now, now I'm ready.
Now I'm going to lead my own life. Thanks very much for helping”. So the point of
freedom is always on the horizon of all education. That means that all education starts
from the idea that the best education is an education where there is sort of openness
and risk and messiness. However, this is often seen as a problem that needs to be
solved, and that is where I see a lot of risk aversion and instead the need for control.
Sure, we try to know what the most effective interventions are and then we can increase
students test scores. Maybe there is a place for that. But if that is the only thing you have
to say about education, then we're forgetting that human beings will ultimately have to
live their own life. And that is already a reason for saying this. This risk of education, this
openness really belongs to education. And if we try to erase that risk from our practice,
then at some point it is no longer education. Then education comes in doctrine. So, the
the main message of that book is to say, “look, this risk is an integral part of our work.
It's not a problem, it is there. As teachers, we have all kind of fantastic intentions for our
students, but how our students will pick that up, whether they will pick it up, is an open
question. So even though with all our good intentions, we are, as I put it somewhere,
also putting ourselves at risk. And all of those layers of risks are really important in
education.
00:14:23 Michael N. W.
Related to this book, The beautiful risk of education, I have another question which is
about the three main purposes of education that you described elsewhere:
Qualification, socialization into a community, and subjectification. Especially the latter
purpose, namely subjectification, has been discussed by many, and is maybe also
misunderstood. What do you yourself mean by subjectification? We talked about
student centeredness before, and I could imagine that some would misunderstand
subjectification to simply mean student centeredness.
00:15:01 Gert B.
If I could say it in in one sentence, I shouldn't have written all those books! It is quite a
challenge. It connects, I think, to what I just said about the interest in freedom. We want
our students to be subjects of their own life, and not objects of control forces from the
outside. And I think education that sees risk as a problem, actually sees students as
objects. So, in this whole talk about interventions and learning outcomes, the students
become objects or things that are manipulated. So, for me, that is already a reason to
use these words “subjects” and “subjectification”, and to say that this is an important
purpose of education - to constantly keep this question of what it means to exist, what it
means to be the subject of your own life, in play.
But you can say that the subjectification work in education is quite difficult work,
because I cannot live the life that my students have to live. The only thing I can do is to
encourage them. To say “don't forget that your life is your own life, and not the life of
other people”. And to find all kinds of ways to practice what it means to lead your own
life. But it cannot mean that you just do what you want to do, because you live your own
life in a world that other people also try to live their life, so there is immediately the
question “what are the consequences of my actions for the possibility for other people
to live their life?” And I would say that this is the work of subjectification. It is to keep
that question alive. Because our education ultimately should be interested in freedom,
Hannah Arendt says. The beautiful thing I like about the word subject is that it has a
double meaning. In grammar the subject in the sentence is the one who does the action,
and to be a subject means that you are someone who can act, who can begin
something. But each time we begin something, and it arrives in the world, we are
subjected to what other people do with it. We are subjected to the limitations of the
planet or the natural environment, and to exist, as subjects we must try to stay in that
middle between taking initiative and understanding that there is a real world that also
puts limitations on what we can do. That is all there in this idea of subjectification.
00:18:30 Guro H.
In 2015 you published the article “How does a competent teacher become a good
teacher”. What is the difference between a competent teacher or practitioner and a
good one, as you see it?
00:18:45 Gert B.
You have done your homework really well! So, the play in the title is partly to respond to
particular trends in teacher education, but I see it in other professional fields as well,
where people have said we need to focus on the competencies that teachers or other
professionals need to acquire or develop. And you can say that's a step forward from
the older idea that says that to be a good professional, you need to know a lot, so we will
just work on the knowledge and that is it.
The idea of competence tries to broaden this old notion by saying that good
professionals do not just need to know things, they also need to be able to do
things. And the word competence comes in there, and it does something rhetorically,
because competence very quickly makes people say, of course, professionals should
be competent. But to say that professionals should be competent, doesn't mean that it
is a very good way to think about the education of professionals. One thing I've seen is
that competence based approaches to professional education very quickly end up in a
long lists of all the competences that teachers need to master, and often it stops with
these lists. For instance, when I moved to England 25 years ago, they did competence
based teacher education and believe it or not, they had a list of 1600 competencies that
all teachers should master. Of course, when you look at teaching, you can think, oh,
teachers need to go to do this and this and this, and wait a minute, also that and that,
and before you know it, you have this very long list. One thing is that these lists become
too long and unworkable, but they also do something odd because they cut up the
wholeness of professional action into all kind of bits. And the real challenge for a good
professional is not to have all these bits, but it's to be able to act well in a concrete
situation.
One thing I did in that paper is to say that if you are just someone who has mastered
loads and loads of competences, but you are not able to judge which competencies are
relevant in a concrete situation, then you are a useless professional. You can say to be a
good professional is more than just being competent. It begins with the ability to have a
sense of what is needed in a concrete situation. And then it is of course nice that you
have a whole box of competencies that are now relevant. But if you don't have that
ability to see and to judge what is needed in this situation, you will never become a good
teacher or a good professional. So that is the main message in the title of this paper.
00:22:37 Michael N. W.
You already dropped the keywords judging and judgment. What you are here addressing
is one of the three forms of knowledge from Aristotle, namely Phronesis, which comes
next to techné and episteme. How would you describe Phronesis, which is often also
translated with practical wisdom, and why do you think it is important in professional
studies?
00:23:00 Gert B.
I think, phronesis or practical wisdom, which I really like as an English translation, refers
to the ability to perceive a situation. So, it also has to do with perception, and to be able
to come to some kind of conclusion about what is needed in that situation. And that, I
think, is always a matter of judgment. And for me, that is the way to think about what
practical wisdom is. So, you can say phronesis is the ability to operate wisely in a
practical domain, and a practical domain is not a mechanistic domain where everything
operates according to laws where we can already predict what's going to happen now
and in the future. On the contrary, and therefore you can say, good professional action
requires this ability to come to a judgment about what needs to be done in this
situation.
00:24:29 Guro H. H.
In relation to this, you also use the term virtuosity.
00:24:35 Gert B.
Yes. Do I regret that now? Maybe so. It's also funny I because in our e-mail you refer
back to this paper, so I reread the paper and it's interesting to also read things you wrote
in the past. And I see things in the paper which I would no longer say in the way I put
them in the paper. What I was looking for was, I think, a different word to capture what
could give direction to professional education and to the education of teachers as part
of that. And because I was writing the paper in the context in which the whole idea of
competence based education was very central, I was thinking, you know, we need a
different word there. It is about a different quality. It has to do with what we were just
talking about: This ability to make wise judgments about what needs to be done in
concrete situations and that is not a competence, but it is something else. It is working
with the stance of the practitioner. I used the word embodied, but that is one of the
words I would probably be a bit more reluctant about now, but it is still really be in the
situation, and then the connection I made in the paper is to say, Aristotle talks about
this in terms of virtues, and then I thought “maybe this word virtuosity can do something
here”, because you can say also in music, virtuosity is really to be completely on the
inside of music. That was the reason why I suggested that notion. I've been criticized by
people who said that there are only very few musicians that are called virtuosos. So,
they said, it is a bit of an elitist notion. And I pushed back and said, “no, I actually think
this is what all professionals should aspire to”.
However, I think some of my hesitation is also that in education, the whole discussion
about virtue ethics has become quite conservative and quite unemancipated. I also see
that that connections with virtue ethics can also get you in those problems.
00:27:18 Michael N. W.
Well, in relation to what you just explicated, where you also said that you are not certain
anymore whether it was wise to take the word virtuosity it into this article. For me,
however, it makes a lot of sense to relate it to the term phronesis and to practical
wisdom, not the least because perception as you mentioned earlier are a part or an
aspect of phronesis, and on the other hand, also improvisation as a key dimension of
virtuosity. So you described that with the musicians, with the genius, for example, and in
that respect it also becomes kind of obvious that phronesis is something that you
cannot teach. It's not teachable. This is also something that you already find with the
the works of Aristotle - that this is a form of knowledge and wisdom which is not
teachable, compared to techné and episteme. And here the next question is. If
phronesis is not teachable or virtuosity is not teachable, then how can you still integrate
it into higher education or into professional studies in one way or another?00:28:38 Gert B.
Sure. I think it is teachable, but then we need to go back to what we understand
teaching to be. So, if we think that teaching is “I tell you something, and then you say
ohh, I understand it and I can do it”, that's that is not teaching. So if we think that is
what we understand with teachability then you can say “no friends, it is not teachable”.
But I think my favorite definition of teaching is that teaching is the art of redirecting
someone's attention. That is what teachers constantly do. They try to present something
for the student`s attention, and then they try to redirect the attention, and sometimes
you need to make a strong switch because you think students are looking in the wrong
direction. Actually there's nothing interesting or this student really needs to pay
attention to this. And there I think, phronesis can be taught because what we will do in
teaching here is to try to focus the attention on this phenomenon, which you can do, for
example, by looking at other teachers or other professionals, not in a general sense, but
in the very sort of precise, concrete sense of taking an episode of practice and looking
carefully what what's going on here, What is the teacher doing? Why is this teacher
doing what he or she is doing? What is the wrong field of attention? How would are we
directing? How would interacting with their students so almost. I call it micro
phenomenology of practice. To attend to that, I think is the way to begin, to see what this
practical wisdom is, what it looks like in practice.
I think what I get from Aristotle is that he says practical wisdom is not an abstract idea or
to become practically wise has nothing to do with understanding what it is. But it is a
long trajectory of constantly studying examples of where you can find people trying to
navigate the field of practice wisely. And in that sense, I think it is teachable, but it is a
very slow process, and it really goes to the nuances of the practice.
00:31:18 Guro H. H.
And now I think maybe we are approaching the last question here, which is related to
our the title of our podcasts, the notion of response-Ability. Do you see a connection
between phronesis and response-ability, and between your problematic concept of
virtuosity and what we have chosen to call response-ability?
00:31:46 Gert B.
Yeah, I see all kind of connections, but the question is of course what kind of
connections that are valuable and interesting. As already said, for me a really key
component of practical wisdom is the ability to see, to perceive. For me, it is really
important in teacher education, for example, not to just equip teachers with all kind of
practical skills or techniques, but also to work on the ability to read the classroom
educationally. You can read the classroom in all kind of ways, and there is a big push on
education to read the classroom psychologically or therapeutically these days – that is
to say “let's look at each individual child and do measurements to see what the problem
is”. That is not to read a classroom educationally. When I encounter the students in my
classroom as educationally as a possibility, I am always interested in their potential
future. Then I do not want to know too much about their current problems because that
may get in the way of opening a future for them. So, you can then say that to read the
situation, which I think is key to practical wisdom. also has something to do with the
ability to respond well to what the situation needs. And of course, to come to a
judgment about what the situation needs is risky, because you may have it completely
wrong.
That is again where we can see if we really take practices like education seriously. We
are also risking ourselves. We have to act, and we have to come to an idea of what may
be needed here in this situation. And sometimes when we act on it, it goes fantastically,
but sometimes we also miss the point. So education is always risky. But we have to try
again and again to see the situation better, and the closer we get to an answer to the
question “what is needed here?”. It is also a matter of responding to what the situation
asks of you. That is quite hard work, and I do not expect the teacher in the first week of
their teacher education program to be able to do that, but it is a very fundamental
question that I think you should be asking from day one. Try to look at this situation.
What do you think it needs? Why do you think it needs that? What would happen if you
act on your ideas? The whole idea of judgment is the ability to respond to the needs of
the situation. It is a very nice way to capture what the essence of wise action in
professional practices is.
The only thing I would say is that responsibility also has some moral connotations. And
then we should be careful, because in this judgment about what the situation may need,
there is also a risk in the bad sense that will become very moralizing. We might have all
kinds of moral judgements where we say, “oh, I know better what these students
need”, or “I have these fantastic values and they are really the driver of my practice”,
and before you know it, these values can get in the way of your ability to perceive what is
in front of you. And therefore, I like this idea of the ability to respond. But I will be careful
not to make that too moral, because I have seen teachers who have such strong moral
values that they have become blind to what is in front of them. They already know
what should happen. They then become almost unable to perceive what is needed.
00:36:14 Michael N. W.
Thank you very much. And I think with that we are also approaching the end of this
episode. Gert, thank you very much for joining us today. It was a pleasure having you
here as our guest. It was a very insightful and inspiring talk for us. We would also like
thank our listeners and hope that they are joining us again in one of our other episodes.
And with that, we can only say thank you and goodbye.
