Beyond Phronesis: the possibilities of the ontogenic curriculum

Abstract

The generic skills agenda within Australian was born out of the problem that graduates were not fully equipped for professional practice. Moving beyond and drawing on the findings of an Australian evaluation project on Graduate Attributes (The National GAP project), this paper will contextualise the generic skills debate historically and provide a new perspective on the problem by drawing on the notions of episteme, techné and phronesis. We suggest phronesis as too pragmatic to be useful for the problems that will need to be addressed by graduates in the 21st century. We argue for an interpretation of phronesis that shifts the emphasis from pragmatic wisdom to a broader ethical framework. We explore the possibilities and conditions of an ontogenic curriculum, provide examples and consider the implications for curriculum design. We discuss a consequentialist framework that might provide a suitable framing for higher education curricula into the future.