Filling the gap: Pedagogical apologias and the sense of LISTENING

RSVP

Talk open to all interested:

Filling the gap: Pedagogical apologias and the sense of listening

Location: SWNG 210
Date: Thursday 2025-04-10
Time: 13:10 – 14:30

In our contemporary education we pay a lot of attention to dialogue, to participating in critical discussions, to developing speaking skills and to improving our ability to act, to do things. On the one hand, it seems that we are increasingly able to speak, think, and act which is a valid and valuable aspect of contemporary education. On the other hand, there is the question of “the other side of language,” as Gemma Corradi Fumara put it in the title of her book. Although some researchers are addressing the issue of listening, the listening gap in contemporary education seems to be enormous. Reservations about listening-based education have some historical context and justification (just to mention the discussion with the “traditional school” and the didacticism of the Herbartists). However, we need to rediscover listening that is not synonymous with obedience and a trick to maintain discipline.

In my talk, I would like to propose a new way of understanding contemporary education by introducing the concept of “pedagogical apologias” as an instrument for distinguishing the position we take in educational and relational experiences, including our ways of listening. This instrument can be used to perform an education as a kind of “music.” Therefore, it requires fine ears, but not limited to the sense of hearing. Listening as a way of being plays a crucial role in education. So, after a brief discussion of “pedagogical apologias” I will then focus the issue of “sense” understanding and, then, I will focus on the question of the sense of listening and the different forms that listening takes. In this way my talk will be an introduction to my concept of an “acouological education,” or – in a broader sense – “acouology.”

Bio:

Małgorzata Przanowska – Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia, Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland; philosopher of education specialized in philosophical hermeneutics, music, and contemporary educational trends. Her field of interest includes interpersonal communication, the experience of listening and its impact on education, human  development, interpersonal communication, and relationship building processes, the issue of question as an existential phenomenon, and the experience of music as a “wor(l)d of and for education.” In 2019 she published her book Listening and Acouological Education. Since 2021 she holds the position of the head of the Adult Education and Lifelong Learning Unit at the Faculty of Education, University of Warsaw. Her latest texts are devoted to acouological touch (UOP, Oxford 2023) and mousikē, dialectics and philosophy as adult education (Polish Academy of Science, Warsaw  2024).