At the very beginning of Supporting Teacher Competence Development for Better Learning Outcomes the European Commission (2013) states that “[m]aking sure that Europe’s six million teachers have the essential competences they require in order to be effective in the classroom is one of the keys to raising levels of pupil attainment; encouraging teachers to continue developing and extending their competences is vital in a fast-changing world” (p. 5). This sentence is representative of the ‘philosophy of teaching’ which imbues a wide array of EU documents that have been contributing to framing the policies (and the discourses) in teaching and teacher education.
All the elements of the predominant rhetoric (this word being used without any disparaging overtones) are present: the emphasis on the notion of competences; the stress on the idea of effectiveness; the understanding of teachers’ professional development as primarily (or solely?) connected with the extension of competences. As is clear from the title of the aforementioned document, all these elements are comprehended (in both the meanings of the word) within the framework of the “logic of learning” (Bingham, in press) or “learnification” (Biesta, 2006, 2010).
By interweaving the perspectives of scholars from different cultural contexts, the proposed symposium intends to critically engage with this thematic constellation from a reverse angle, by discussing in depth Gert Biesta’s (2014) notion of “virtuosity.” The latter is explicitly introduced to counter the over-emphasis on competences in teacher education, as “the competence, the ability to do things, is in itself never enough […] a teacher who possesses all the competences teachers need but who is unable to judge which competence needs to be deployed when, is a useless teacher” (Biesta, 2014, p. 130).
The idea of ‘virtuosity’ orchestrates different theoretical themes: a virtue-based conception of teaching and teacher education (although without any moralistic implications) as opposed to solely effectiveness-targeted discourses; a criticism of the narrowness (if not even one-sidedness) of the notion of competence; an understanding of teaching through the recovery of important Aristotelian insights about the difference between poíesis (production) and práxis (action); an understanding of teacher education as “formation of the whole person”, “professional subjectification” and “judgment-focused professional formation” (Ibid., p. 135-136).
By establishing a dialogue between typically philosophical reflections and teacher education inquiries, the contributions to this symposium aim at examining, in an international perspective, the notion of “virtuosity” as to its potential to offer an alternative view both of teaching and of what is required from and within teacher education to promote judgment and wisdom as main features of teachers’ professionalism. While ‘virtuosity’ will be considered as a promising theoretical tool to avoid some taken for granted assumptions in contemporary educational discourses, it will also undergo a critical scrutiny: the goal is to investigate whether and in what sense the ways in which it allows us to think of the kind of ‘doing’ that teaching is and of teachers’ professionalism could help us to go beyond the limitations of the dominant discourse on competence development and effectiveness and to elaborate richer, deeper and multifaceted conceptions about teaching ‘beyond learning.’
