The Wiley Handbook of Sustainability in Higher Education Learning and Teaching. Группа авторов

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for flourishing, and their scope and depth for human life are broader (Kristjánsson 2013). Thus, it is not only the amount of practice that matters, but rather the way the agent understands and carries on that practice. Aristotle is adamant: “It makes a huge [difference], or rather, all the difference” (NE 1103b). So eudaimonia as collective human flourishing or true happiness for the common good would be the lodestar guiding the acquisition of virtue, and arguably also guiding ES projects. In this sense, Kristjansson (2016) concludes from his review on flourishing as an overarching aim of education (p. 18):

      The uniqueness of a flourishing paradigm on human well‐being lies in its insistence that education and teaching is woven into the very fabric of flourishing – as work in progress until our dying day – and that any effort deserving of the name “education” must be characterised as education for flourishing.

      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.

      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.