THE LIMITS OF COMPETENCE-BASED TEACHER EDUCATION
The idea that teachers should be competent at what they do is difficult to contest. Perhaps this partly explains the popular appeal of competence-based approaches to teaching and teacher education, which, in recent decades, have spread rapidly across many countries around the world (for an overview and critical analysis, see Heilbronn, 2008, chapter 2). National frameworks for teacher education are increasingly being formulated in terms of competences, and even the European Commission has recently produced a set of Common European Principles for Teacher Competences and Qualifications,1 meant to stimulate ‘reflection about actions that can be taken at Member State level and how the European Union might support these’ – as it was formulated in the 2007 document Improving the Quality of Teacher Education.2 The idea of competence, however, has more than just rhetorical appeal. Its introduction marks an important shift in focus from what teachers should know to what they should be able to do, and potentially even to how they should be. In this regard the idea of competence represents a more practical and more holistic outlook in that it encompasses knowledge, skills and professional action, rather than seeing such action as either the application of knowledge – an idea captured in evidence-based approaches to teaching and teacher education (see Biesta, 2007, 2010a) – or the enactment of skills, an approach particularly prominent in those situations where teachers are supposed to pick up their skills ‘on the shop floor’, so to speak, rather than that they are thought to be in need of any proper professional education.
Yet the idea of competence is not without problems, and also not without risks (see Mulder, Weigel and Collins, 2007; Biesta and Priestley, 2013). The risks have to do with the way in which the notion of competence is defined and understood, the problems with how it is being implemented and enacted. With regard to matters of definition, competence can be seen as an integrative approach to professional action that highlights the complex combination of knowledge, skills, understandings, values and purposes (for such a definition see Deakin Crick, 2008, p. 313). In such an interpretation a competence-based approach clearly has the potential to promote the professional agency of teachers. Yet many commentators have shown that the idea of competence actually steers the field of teaching and teacher education in the opposite direction through its emphasis on performance, standards, measurement and control, thus reducing and ultimately undermining the agency of teachers (see Heilbronn 2008, pp. 21–25; see also Winch, 2000; Priestley, Robinson and Biesta, 2012).
With regard to the practical implementation of the idea of competence, particularly within the field of teacher education, there are a number of additional problems. One has to do with the fact that any attempt to describe in full everything that teachers should be competent at runs the risk of generating lists that are far too long and far too detailed. The existence of such lists can result in a situation where teacher education turns into a tick box exercise focused on establishing whether students have managed to achieve everything on the list. This may not only lead to a disjointed curriculum and an instrumental approach to the education of teachers, but also runs the risk of turning teacher education from a collective experience to a plethora of individual learning trajectories, where students are just working towards the achievement of their ‘own’ competencies, without a need to interact with or be exposed to fellow students.
A second major problem is that competencies are always orientated towards the past and the present. It is, after all, only possible to describe what a teacher needs to be competent at in relation to situations that are already known. Yet teaching is in a very fundamental sense always open towards the future. There is a danger, therefore, that a competence-based curriculum for teacher education ties students too much to the current situation – or to a particular interpretation of the current situation – rather than preparing them sufficiently for meaningful action in an unknown future. This, as I will argue in more detail below, is not meant as an argument that teachers need flexible skills but as an argument for the central role of judgement in teaching.
All this feeds into what is perhaps the most important problem with and limitation of a competence-based approach to teacher education, which is the fact that good teachers do not simply need to be able to do all kinds of things – in this regard it is true that they need to be competent (and being competent is a better formulation than having competences) – but they also need to be able to judge which competences should be utilised in the always concrete situations in which teachers work. If competences in a sense provide teachers with a repertoire of possibilities, there is still the challenge to judge which of those possibilities should be actualised in order to realise good and meaningful teaching. This is why I wish to suggest that while the possession of competences may be a necessary condition for good teaching, it can never be a sufficient condition. And the reason for this lies in the fact that good teaching requires judgement about what an educationally desirable course of action is in this concrete situation with these concrete students at this particular stage in their educational trajectory.
In its shortest formula we might say, therefore, that ‘good teaching = competences + judgement’. But this raises a number of further questions. One is: ‘Why do we need judgement in teaching?’ A second is: ‘What kinds of judgement do we need in teaching?’ And a third is: ‘How might we help teachers to become capable of such judgements?’ – which is the question of teacher education. In what follows I aim to provide an answer to these questions. Through this I will articulate a conception of teacher education that can be seen as an alternative to competence-based approaches. This conception focuses on the ways in which, through teacher education, teachers can enhance their ability for making situated judgements about what is educationally desirable, with regard to both the ‘ends’ and the ‘means’ of education.3
As I will explain in more detail below, I refer to this approach as a virtue-based approach (see also Biesta, 2013), which is the reason why I will emphasise the need for teachers to develop educational virtuosity. I will preface my discussion with an exploration of the particular nature of teaching and education more generally.
ON THE ‘NATURE’ OF EDUCATION: TELEOLOGY AND THE THREE DOMAINS OF EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE
In order to understand why there is a need for judgement in teaching, we need to begin by looking more closely at the particular nature of educational processes and practices. In recent years it has become fashionable to do so with the help of the language of learning. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere in more detail (see particularly Biesta, 2004, 2006, 2010b), the language of learning is a very limited and to a certain degree even inadequate language to capture what education is about. Perhaps the quickest way to highlight what the problem is, is to say that the point of education is not that students learn, but that they learn something, that they learn it for particular reasons and that they learn it from someone. Questions of content, purpose and relationships are precisely what distinguishes (a general discussion about) learning from (a concrete discussion about) education. Education, to put it differently, is not designed so that children and young people might learn – which they can anywhere – but so that they might learn particular things (in the broad sense of the word) within particular relationships and for particular reasons.
The latter dimension – which concerns the question of purpose – is the most central and most fundamental one, because it is only once we have articulated what we want our educational arrangements and efforts to bring about that we can make decisions about relevant content and about the kind of relationships that are most conducive for this. Without a sense of purpose, there may be learning but not education. This is why we might adopt the stronger claim that education is not simply a practice that is characterised by the presence of purposes, but one that is actually a practice constituted by purpose(s) (see Biesta, 2010a, 2010b). In philosophical language, education can therefore be seen as a teleological practice, that is, a practice constituted by a telos. This already provides us with one important reason why judgement is needed in education, as we need to come to some kind of understanding of what the purpose of our educational activities should be. (It is useful here to follow the distinction suggested by Richard Peters between the purpose of an activity, which refers to the reason for it, and the aims of an activity, which concern the concrete targets one wishes to achieve; see Peters, 1973, p. 13.)
But here we encounter an additional reason why judgement is needed in education, which has to do with the fact that in education the question of purpose is a multidimensional question. This means that there is not one single purpose of education but that there are a number of different domains of educational purpose (on this thesis see particularly Biesta, 2009a, 2010b). The idea here is a simple one, but it has some profound implications for understanding the role of judgements in education. One way to understand the multidimensional nature of educational purpose is to start from the question how education functions, that is, what our educational actions and activities effect. One important function of education lies in the domain of qualification. Here education is concerned with the transmission and acquisition of knowledge, skills, dispositions and understandings that qualify children and young people for doing certain things. Such doing can either be understood in a narrow sense, for example becoming qualified to perform a certain task or job, or it can be understood in a much wider sense, such as that education qualifies children and young people to live life in modern, complex societies.
Some would say that this is the only dimension in which education functions, that is, that education is basically about getting knowledge and skills. Others would highlight, however, that education is not just about qualification but also about socialisation, that is, about initiating children and young people into existing traditions, cultures, ways of doing and ways of being. Education partly does this deliberately, for example in the form of professional socialisation, or socialisation into the culture of democracy. The idea of the hidden curriculum (Giroux and Purple, 1983) suggests, however, that socialisation also happens behind the back of teachers and students, thus reproducing existing traditions, cultures, ways of doing and being often, though not necessarily, in ways that benefit some more than others, thus contributing to the reproduction of material and social inequalities. In addition to qualification and socialisation I wish to argue – and have argued elsewhere (Biesta, 2009a, 2010b) – that any educational activity or effort always also impacts on the person, that is, on the qualities of the person and on personal qualities. Here we can think, for example, of the ways in which through the acquisition of knowledge and understanding individuals become empowered. Or how, through adopting particular culture patterns, they become disempowered. This is a domain where we can find such qualities as autonomy, criticality, empathy or compassion, which all are potential ‘effects’ of education. I have suggested referring to this third dimension as subjectification, as it concerns processes of being/becoming a human subject. (For the particular reason for using the notion of ‘subject’ rather than, for example, the notion of ‘person’ or ‘identity’, see particularly Biesta, 2010b, chapter 4; see also Biesta, 2006, 2014.)
If it is granted that qualification, socialisation and subjectification are three domains or dimensions in which education functions – which means nothing more than when we teach we always have some impact in each of these three domains – then it could be argued that as educators we also need to take responsibility for the impact of our educational actions in relation to these three domains. That is why the distinction between qualification, socialisation and subjectification cannot only be used in an analytical way – that is, to analyse the ‘impact’ of particular educational arrangements – but also in a programmatic sense – that is, to articulate what one wishes to achieve or bring about through one’s educational efforts. That is why they can also been seen as three purposes of education. Given that within each domain there can actually be significantly different views, for example, about what knowledge is, what tradition or culture or, or what it means to be a human subject, I prefer to refer to them as three domains of educational purpose. And the suggestion here is that those who have a responsibility for education – be they teachers, policy makers, politicians, or students themselves – need to articulate and justify what they seek to achieve in relation to each of these domains.
