Wiebe Koopal’s research while affiliated with KU Leuven and other places

In this paper we want to rethink the educational significance of the novel – and particularly of novel-reading – from the perspective of a ‘meta-novelistic’ reading of Don Quixote, often acclaimed as the “first modern novel”. Our point of departure is double: on the one hand, there is the controversial contemporary phenomenon of “de-reading”, and all the educational discussions which it entails; on the other hand, there is the existing tradition of literary education, which, from different angles, has already extensively reflected upon the (moral, epistemological, ontological) relation between novel-reading, education and subjectification, but which also sometimes seems to have exhausted its means for doing so. To problematize this double starting point in a new way, we propose to revisit the ‘origins’ of the novel and novel-reading, at the dawn of modernity. By exploring the differences between the narratives of subjectification represented by the Cartesian cogito and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which were near-contemporaries, we try to argue for an educational-philosophical rehabilitation of the latter, if not against then at least beyond the former. In a first movement, and in dialogue with novelists Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes, we do so by focusing on the novel as a particular form, or ‘configuration’, of knowledge – one that is by nature experimental and pluralist. In a second movement, we link this to Jean Baudrillard’s famous distinction between “simulation” and “illusion”, claiming that novel-reading qua subjectification always involves a Quixotic practice of adventurous, ‘playful’ and public negotiation between reality and its more or less ‘illusory’ alternatives.

In this paper I try to 'rethink' consistency as an educational quality for the 3rd millennium, following Italo Calvino's choice to take it up in his lecture series Memos for the Next Millennium, and despite the fact that the (final) lecture devoted to this quality remained unwritten. After reflecting on how consistency already plays a certain role in Calvino's other lectures, I expand on the specific educational implications of this role's unresolved ambivalence, in order to argue that this ambivalence, properly understood, might be fully constitutive of the educational significance of consistency. To achieve such an understanding I turn to Gilles Deleuze and his concept of style as a 'practice' of consistency. Not only does a stylistic understanding of consistency offer interesting possibilities for a more constructive approach to the said ambivalence—between consistency as static stability and dynamic keeping-together- but as such it also speaks to a number of issues that are directly and fundamentally educational in nature.

In this paper we discuss the musical work of classical composer Benjamin Britten as a lasting legacy for public music education. Our starting point is the contemporary urgency to rethink both public music education in general, and the public-educational significance of Western classical music in particular, in the face of the dual threats posed by anti-educational tendencies of “functionalization” and “hobbyfication.” Relating this situation to concerns already voiced by Britten in his time, we consider in what ways aspects of Britten’s musical work can be shown to reveal a highly original, post-critical answer to these threats. While his pedagogical musings remain riddled with ambiguities, which readily invite critical deconstruction, our paper argues for the more affirmative option of reconceptualizing these ambiguities as constitutive tensions of a public-educational love for (classical) music. To gauge the practical implications of such a post-critical music-educational love, we analyze the concrete case of the Aldeburgh Festival , perhaps Britten’s most full-fledged effort to reclaim music as a public affair. Thinking about this case, we reflect on how Britten’s legacy could lastingly impinge on the publicness of Western classical music, as well as on ongoing and future practices of public music education in general.

In this paper we discuss the musical work of classical composer Benjamin Britten as a lasting legacy for public music education. Our starting point is the contemporary urgency to rethink both public music education in general, and the public-educational significance of Western classical music in particular, in the face of the dual threats posed by anti-educational tendencies of “functionalization” and “hobbyfication.” Relating this situation to concerns already voiced by Britten in his time, we consider in what ways aspects of Britten’s musical work can be shown to reveal a highly original, post-critical answer to these threats. While his pedagogical musings remain riddled with ambiguities, which readily invite critical deconstruction, our paper argues for the more affirmative option of reconceptualizing these ambiguities as constitutive tensions of a public-educational love for (classical) music. To gauge the practical implications of such a post-critical music-educational love, we analyze the concrete case of the Aldeburgh Festival , perhaps Britten’s most full-fledged effort to reclaim music as a public affair. Thinking about this case, we reflect on how Britten’s legacy could lastingly impinge on the publicness of Western classical music, as well as on ongoing and future practices of public music education in general.

This paper deals with the question of what makes public music education ‘public’, and how music-educational notions of ‘publicness’ can/should relate to politics. Our starting-point is a very concrete piece of music, from a particular tradition: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Since already this musical work carries with it a highly ambivalent political aura, we investigate in which different ways one could today still make a ‘case’—in the very literal sense—for its use in public music education. Throughout our investigation we elaborate three music-pedagogical models for thinking the possibilities of contriving such a case, each of which is explained in terms of the agency of conducting. The first two models are historically the most dominant: the Platonic-inspired ‘conducting conducts’, focused on using music to fortify the harmony of the status quo; and the Adornian alternative of ‘contraducting conducts’, which approaches music education with the aim to emancipate the dissonance of music’s non-harmonizable, particular forms. With the third model, eventually, which we dub ‘viceducting conducts’, we not only try to respond to some common practical-educational concerns regarding the former two, but we also believe to propose a model that allows to relate to publicness in a more intrinsically music-educational way.

This paper primarily aims at conceptualizing a new philosophical approach to literature education, one that we—in the vein of certain pedagogical trends—propose to call “thing-centered”. Point of departure is the ongoing confrontation with a two-sided educational problem: on the one hand, the confrontation with the steady decline of younger generations’ engagements with ‘classical’ literature; on the other hand, that with the unsatisfactory answers which either accept (and even support) this development, in light of the world’s irresistible digitization, or try overcoming it through a more student-centered, ‘biographical’ appropriation of literature. Beyond the more immediate didactical difficulties which this two-fold problem poses, we ask ourselves the question whether it is not time for a more fundamental renewal of our understanding of literature’s contemporary educational significance. In answering this question, for which we turn to such diverse authors as Rousseau, Deleuze and Calvino, it is argued that if education is to continue its care for both classical literacy and literary classics—and not so much against as in relation to ascending digital literacies—a more radically immanent, thing-centered perspective is likely to prove the most sustainable, in the sense of enabling truly new, ‘care-ful’ literary-educational practices to emerge.

This paper is based on an online experiment, conducted with bachelor students of educational sciences during the COVID-19 lockdown period in the spring of 2020. The experiment, which took place on a daily basis for a whole workweek, consisted of a series of what we have come to call “artistic-scientific interventions”. These constituted a pedagogical praxis in which over a longer period of time students are challenged to collect and ‘think with’ artistic media as alternative ways of experiencing, studying, and evaluating the corona crisis. Our paper describes the structure and proceedings of this experiment against the background of efforts to develop a new philosophical idea of what it means to do pedagogy. This idea, inspired by philosophers of science like Bruno Latour, contests some of the classical divides that run through the educational sciences, and that we believe pose a great threat to their relevance in current times of crisis: empirical/speculative, quantitative/qualitative, natural/social, facts/meaning, object/subject, etc. What our experiment shows, beyond all obsession with validating hypotheses or consistency of results, is that art, as an education of the senses, can afford science with a much needed platform for (re)creating and/or (re)arranging circumstances in which those problematic divides may be overcome. However, what it also shows is that often this only works when art is approached, not through the lens of predominantly respresentationalist aesthetics, but as a full-fledged part of a scientific (c.q. pedagogical) discipline. Especially in a diffuse digital environment, this entails a need for transindividual, impersonal protocols which allow for both repetition, variation, and feedback, and instil a strong sense of transformative gathering and study.