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The arguments presented so far support the focus on cultivating practical wisdom in the goal to ground the moral and political dimensions of ES from virtue ethics. Phronesis, as mentioned, is not just another virtue, but the necessary one for moral virtues to be exercised. Reciprocally, one cannot execute practical wisdom without having all the moral virtues – they are interrelated in a kind of unity (Russell 2009) – since phronesis involves identifying the right virtues to the right ends of action: “It is evident that it is impossible to be wise in practice without being good,” Aristotle states (NE 1144a).

Phronesis, therefore, provides the good judgment to resolve problems of specificity, relevance, and conflict by perceiving the moral aspect of a situation and by deliberating on how to act in the interest of the right end (Schwartz and Sharpe 2006; Russell 2015). Thus, the challenge of enabling people to address the complexity of socioecological problems would benefit from establishing phronesis as an explicit learning goal of ES. Cultivating practical wisdom helps us to act from virtue in the multiple situations in which socioecological global challenges unfold (e.g. when a policy‐maker participates in discussions about new regulations affecting the climate; when a consumer makes a decision about whether to buy an attractive product or refrain from buying it; when an entrepreneur is faced with a conflict between social and economic benefit).

However, since practical wisdom comes from experience in real situations, theoretical knowledge is not sufficient to teach phronesis (Ames and Serafim 2019). This might seemingly make it difficult to include practical wisdom as a learning objective in formal education (Schwartz and Sharpe 2006); nevertheless, to the extent that experiential approaches are common in most educational projects, including a phronesis perspective in learning objectives would be worthwhile and feasible to implement.

In the following, we suggest pedagogical approaches that might serve as illustrations on how to bring phronesis into the classroom in the context of ES.² For that purpose, we draw upon the four‐component model of phronesis by Kristjánsson et al. (2021), that aims to contribute to the operationalization of practical wisdom and to fill the gap between moral knowledge and action: (i) the ability to perceive the moral components and implications of a situation (constitutive function); (ii) the ability to judge and to prioritize virtues in conflicting or dilemmatic situations (integrative function); (iii) the ability to reflect on and understand what means flourishing (blueprint function); and (iv) the ability to adjust and foster the emotions that would be conducive to that flourishing life (emotional regulative function). For the sake of greater clarity, we present specific pedagogies associated with each one of the four components; however, they are by no means exclusive to this component, as is evident throughout the text.

Also, it is important to note that, alongside this multifaceted quality of phronesis, its processual nature is also part of the emphasis of virtues on how (and why) the agent arrives at the right action, rather than the emphasis on the rightness of the action itself. In this sense, the phronetic process involves different stages, as explained by MacIntyre (1999):

A chain of reasoning whose first premises concern the human good, whose intermediate steps specify what the virtues require, if human good is to be achieved, and whose conclusion is the action that it is good and best to perform here and now. (pp. 158–159)

Recognizing this spiral movement of awareness, deliberation, and choice through which phronesis develops according to the particularities of a situation can help guide its formation. As such, it is integrated into our proposals.