ABSTRACT
Teaching is a practice that is valued when it is effective in producing measurable results. These results might be an increase in a student’s test scores, or the development of a sense of self, or the fulfillment of a potentiality/talent, or an increase in human capital. Whatever the case, teachers are under pressure to produce deliverables, and these deliverables come in the form of learning outcomes. Likewise, teacher education programs are labeled successes or failures based on how well they equip pre-service teachers with the skills and knowledge to become competent in their future classrooms. Recently, educational philosophers such as Gert Biesta have challenged the primacy of competencies in teacher education. As an alternative, he has proposed that teacher educators promote a values-based approach to teaching, one that replaces competencies with virtues. While this is an important critique of taken-for-granted assumptions concerning the inherent value of competencies for valuing teacher educators, this chapter argues that Biesta’s alternative nevertheless falls prey to his own criticism of effectiveness. Paradoxically, we can argue that Biesta’s notion of virtuosity is too successful and too effective. But if this is the case, can we imagine a weak alternative to effectiveness? Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the gesture, this chapter concludes with an ineffective form of teacher education that suspends its ends (both in terms of competencies and virtues) in order to find a new freedom to truly study teaching. ?
