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СКАЧАТЬ Virtue Education in Practice: Exploring Pathways to Develop Phronesis for Sustainability

      The arguments presented so far support the focus on cultivating practical wisdom in the goal to ground the moral and political dimensions of ES from virtue ethics. Phronesis, as mentioned, is not just another virtue, but the necessary one for moral virtues to be exercised. Reciprocally, one cannot execute practical wisdom without having all the moral virtues – they are interrelated in a kind of unity (Russell 2009) – since phronesis involves identifying the right virtues to the right ends of action: “It is evident that it is impossible to be wise in practice without being good,” Aristotle states (NE 1144a).

      Phronesis, therefore, provides the good judgment to resolve problems of specificity, relevance, and conflict by perceiving the moral aspect of a situation and by deliberating on how to act in the interest of the right end (Schwartz and Sharpe 2006; Russell 2015). Thus, the challenge of enabling people to address the complexity of socioecological problems would benefit from establishing phronesis as an explicit learning goal of ES. Cultivating practical wisdom helps us to act from virtue in the multiple situations in which socioecological global challenges unfold (e.g. when a policy‐maker participates in discussions about new regulations affecting the climate; when a consumer makes a decision about whether to buy an attractive product or refrain from buying it; when an entrepreneur is faced with a conflict between social and economic benefit).

      However, since practical wisdom comes from experience in real situations, theoretical knowledge is not sufficient to teach phronesis (Ames and Serafim 2019). This might seemingly make it difficult to include practical wisdom as a learning objective in formal education (Schwartz and Sharpe 2006); nevertheless, to the extent that experiential approaches are common in most educational projects, including a phronesis perspective in learning objectives would be worthwhile and feasible to implement.

In the following, we suggest pedagogical approaches that might serve as illustrations on how to bring phronesis into the classroom in the context of ES.² For that purpose, we draw upon the four‐component model of phronesis by Kristjánsson et al. (2021), that aims to contribute to the operationalization of practical wisdom and to fill the gap between moral knowledge and action: (i) the ability to perceive the moral components and implications of a situation (constitutive function); (ii) the ability to judge and to prioritize virtues in conflicting or dilemmatic situations (integrative function); (iii) the ability to reflect on and understand what means flourishing (blueprint function); and (iv) the ability to adjust and foster the emotions that would be conducive to that flourishing life (emotional regulative function). For the sake of greater clarity, we present specific pedagogies associated with each one of the four components; however, they are by no means exclusive to this component, as is evident throughout the text.

Also, it is important to note that, alongside this multifaceted quality of phronesis, its processual nature is also part of the emphasis of virtues on how (and why) the agent arrives at the right action, rather than the emphasis on the rightness of the action itself. In this sense, the phronetic process involves different stages, as explained by MacIntyre (1999):

      A chain of reasoning whose first premises concern the human good, whose intermediate steps specify what the virtues require, if human good is to be achieved, and whose conclusion is the action that it is good and best to perform here and now. (pp. 158–159)

      Recognizing this spiral movement of awareness, deliberation, and choice through which phronesis develops according to the particularities of a situation can help guide its formation. As such, it is integrated into our proposals.

      4.4.1 Perceiving (Constitutive Function)

      The first stage in the chain of reasoning of phronesis entails the discriminatory capacity to recognize the moral issues of a given situation and which virtues are required (Kristjánsson et al. 2021). As Russell (2009) highlights, it is about the ability to “sense” and to “read” a situation so as to reflect on what to do.

      Moral imagination stands out as a relevant ingredient in this stage in order to train practical wisdom, as it provides awareness and understanding of the consequences of different actions that may derive from a situation (Waddock 2010). In a well‐cited work, Werhane (2002) defines moral imagination as “the ability in particular circumstances to discover and evaluate possibilities not merely determined by that circumstance, or limited by its operative mental models, or merely framed by a set of rules or rule‐governed concerns” (p. 93). Moreover, Sanderse (2012) conceives moral imagination as a virtue itself, needed to deal with suffering and with the vulnerability of human life since it awakens our sense of commonness with others.

      Thus, cultivating moral imagination to develop the phronetic capacity to “sense” and “read” the moral dimensions of challenges involves perceiving in a transformative way, as we argued in Section 4.2. In this sense, educators might focus on the awareness of dominant mental models as well as on the envisioning of new ones better aligned with the challenges posed by socioecological crises.

      For that purpose, the development in the classroom of pedagogical activities designed from a systems perspective is key. The challenge of tackling most socioecological problems derives from the complex network of systemic relationships between worldviews, institutions, and technologies that define our current sociotechnical systems (Kallis and Norgaard 2010), as mentioned in Section 4.1. Thus, a systems approach has been widely acknowledged as necessary to address the dynamic interdependencies among economic, political, social, and ecological issues across temporal and spatial dimensions (Williams et al. 2017). A systems‐thinking and multiple‐perspective approach addressing such a complex network of relationships would be required so that moral imagination can be at work to question and reframe mental models (Werhane 2002, 2008; Waddock 2010). Ultimately, pedagogies that train systems thinking will be particularly useful for developing phronesis by focusing on the multiplicity of moral issues arising in the sociotechnical systems in which we are embedded.

A tool that might well contribute to achieve that goal is the use of maps in the classroom. If a picture is worth a thousand words, mapping might effectively connect learners with the multiple and interrelated domains, scales, actors, cause–effect relationships, feedback loops, and other systemic features of socioecological problems (see the proposal to operationalize the systems‐thinking competence for sustainability by Wiek et al. 2015, and Werhane 2002, 2008 for working with the stakeholder theory). As Corbett and Lydon (2018, p. 113) state, maps “reflect our relationship to ourselves, to one another and to the environment …. Whether conscious or not, our cognitive or mental maps guide the paths and routes that make up our lives.” Maps may thus be tools for transformation.

      Students can be invited to brainstorm on the components involved in a socioecological problem they have identified. First, they could freely write down on a large piece of paper different words representing these components from as many different perspectives as they can imagine. For instance, words referring to concepts, emotions, principles, beliefs, technologies, causes, effects, institutions, collective actors, individual actors, time, places, geographies, and so on. When participants feel that no other elements come to their minds, they can be asked to think of the resulting word cloud from a systemic view rather than as a set of disconnected elements. As Meadows (2008) suggests, some questions can guide that task: “Do the parts affect each other?… Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own?… Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances?” (p. 13). Participants can then envision and depict connections among elements, again from all possible angles. Interconnections might СКАЧАТЬ