Teacher Education and Teaching as Phronesis: Being and Learning to Be

Abstract

Inspired by the Aristotelian notion of Phronesis, we developed a reflection on teacher formation, in the perspective of learning as an exercise continuously done and redone, grounded on a reflexive and theoretical attitude. We approximated the concept of the contemplative life to one of the reflexive teachers aiming to advance toward praxis as a dialectic process of action-reflection-action, the background to pre-service education of teachers, which intertwines theory and practice as the horizon of a “living teaching”. This re-reading of Aristotle’s practical philosophy is followed by Hans-Georg-Gadamer’s interpretation, in his work Wahrheit und Methode, using the concepts of practical wisdom and mimesis, the productivity of the concept of experience, and Aristotle’s hermeneutic topicality, which structure the following text.