A phronetic approach to educational design-based research: Issues and aspirations

This paper is a theoretical attempt to show how the Aristotelian notion of phronesis may provide a fruitful viewpoint to trigger and animate a series of discussions on educational design-based research. In particular, we focus on the overall meaning that the notions of intervention and theory can acquire. What concerns the former, phronesis helps avoid interpreting intervention as the making of an object, be it a learning environment, an application, a piece of software. Conversely, it posits that intervention can be fruitfully located within teachers’ professional judgment. The specific focus on professional judgment helps point to a different conception of “theory”, which does not revolve around the development of generalized principles informing the practice. Conversely, theory can be viewed as the effort to articulate teachers’ experiences in the form of stories “from the field”.