THE PLACE OF WISDOM IN TEACHING

The primary purpose of this article is to focus the dialogue on the place of wisdom in teaching within three contexts: (1) the realm of knowledge deemed essential to good teaching; (2) the realm of imagination, specifically in creativity, possibility, and play; and, (3) the realm of moral action, particularly as revealed in responsibility and an ethic of care. It is proposed that a postformal stage of reasoning is associated with expert teaching, and that consistent with the intricate details of wisdom and postformal reasoning described here, expert teaching is democratic, dialogic, and ecologically valid. The discussion culminates in thinking of expert teaching with metaphors of symphonies and jazz.