Practical Wisdom and Spiritual Exercises in Teacher Education. What Does ‘Being Taught’ by the Ancients Mean?

How can teacher educators contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of wisdom and knowledge in the life and practice of a new generation of teacher students? How can we counteract educational programs that too easily pursue a formal and theoretical knowledge abstracted from the contextualized constellations of practice? This chapter endeavors to show that to achieve this goal is not primarily a question of more knowledge, but rather of helping the individual to enhance her awareness of how she responds and acts when gaining new knowledge and encountering the complexity of real life. In this perspective, by endorsing the contemporary vindication of phronesis (practical wisdom) as an essential component for navigating the contexts of professional practice and after developing an inquiry into key notions like Donald Schön’s “reflective practitioner” and Gert Biesta’s “virtuosity” of the teacher, this contribution proposes the Greek tradition of spiritual exercises as a way to cultivate a “phronimos” attitude and to promote professional subjectification. This is much needed in order for teachers not to capitulate to the stranglehold of discourses dominated by a too narrow-minded technical rationality and to re(dis)cover, instead, their professional practice as primarily a kind of art and an exercise of judgement and wisdom, sustained as they should be by sound scientific knowledge.