Cultivating the Future in Higher Education: Fostering Students’ Life-World Becoming with Wisdom Pedagogy

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to cultivate the future in Higher Education (HE), firstly by looking backward and learning from the past, then by looking around and questioning the present, and finally, by looking forward and imagining the future of HE. This paper seeks to answer the question of how HE can foster students’ life-world becoming, their emancipatory competence with wisdom pedagogy. The research method is based on selected literature from German educational philosophy (Herder, Humboldt, Hegel, Heidegger, and Gadamer) and on recent international publications discussing Bildung, self-cultivation, and life-world becoming in relation to HE. The findings show the need for moral education to enhance students’ flourishing in life with wisdom pedagogy. In the future, HE needs to focus more on cultivating character, emancipatory competence, life-world becoming, values, justice, trust, truth, and intellectual virtues such as intellectual humility, curiosity, open-mindedness, and courage. This paper offers a framework for synthesizing the epistemological and ontological goals of HE, and a framework that presents the place and role of wisdom pedagogy in developing emancipatory competences. This paper argues for applying wisdom pedagogy and its methods by teachers in HE to foster students’ capacity to flourish in life. The paper calls for more debates and research in understanding wisdom pedagogy in HE.