Open towards the future. A reinvigoration of practical wisdom in teaching with a view to subjectification

Abstract

The daily contingent and ambiguous praxis of teaching raises various issues that are related to the multidimensional question of the purpose: what to do and how to act with a view to what is considered to be educationally desirable? Despite the revival of interest for practical wisdom as quality of teachers to judge what is to be done, literature is still scarce on practically wise teaching as a coherent entity of strategies to act and on a way to activate these strategies in the course of teaching. This article presents an elaboration of practically wise teaching with a view to the subject-ness of students and that involves four consecutive strategies: to sense difference, to allocate meaning, to deliberate with others, and to decide how to act. Practically wise teaching is characterised by a listening, receptive attitude to engage with the openness to the future in order to actualise the internal goods of teaching regarding students’ subject-ness.