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This article focuses on the Bildung in higher education, by linking both its mission and its practice to each individual's development and opportunities to live a good life. If higher education is to have Bildung as a goal, a pedagogical foundation that runs deeper than the dominating pedagogical paradigms of the contemporary university needs to be formulated. This foundation can be derived from pedagogical philosophy and the tradition of Didaktik, which can help us to place Bildung, transformation and emancipation at the centre of university teaching. First, we discuss contemporary changes of the organization, understanding, and goals of higher education with a focus on the European context. Second, we present a conceptual framework from Klaus Mollenhauer, Bernt Gustavsson, and Hartmunt Rosa. Third, the ecological university is discussed in relation to the framework. Finally, we show how the concept of study is helpful when emphasizing Bildung in higher education teaching.

In the article Hartmut Rosa’s concept ‘resonance’ and Jacques Rancière’s concept ‘le partage du sensible’ are explored through an aesthetic and musical interpretation of teaching. The main aim is to bring understanding into how educational practices, in particular teaching practice, can bring life into subject matter, and construe it as meaningful, significant, and important in times of social acceleration and alienation (Rosa, 2015; Stiegler, 2010). Besides texts from Rosa and Rancière, the article draws on discussions from music philosophy (Bucht, 2009; Lingis, 2004), and educational philosophy (Benner, 2015; Mollenhauer, 2014; Uljens, 1998). The article suggests that Rosa’s concept of ‘resonance’ and Rancière’s concept of ‘le partage du sensible’, read together and against each other, bring insights into discussions about the phenomenological nature of teaching, described as a sort of experiential frequency-modulation that aims for resonant relationships between students and the world. While Rancière’s aesthetics can be used to highlight the abstract logics and politics of educational relations, Rosa’s sociology of resonance provides a valuable complement that grounds teaching practice in lived experience. Resonance implies, according to Rosa, an aspect of constitutive inaccessibility, which requires that both subject and world are sufficiently “closed” or self-consistent so that both sides can speak “in their own voice”, while also remaining open to be affected or reached by each other. Interpreting this resonant state educationally, and from the perspective of Rancière’s aesthetics, turns teaching into a resonance-enabling practice where students, as unique subjects, are allowed to confront the teaching content in its pure materiality; to hear it sing with its own voice, key, and rhythm.

This chapter illustrates how conceptions from the German language tradition of Didaktik can contribute to a nuanced understanding of the pedagogy of teacher education. Using the general disappointment toward teacher education as a point of departure, we turn to Deborah Britzman who points out some key issues of teacher education that make it inept to deal with educational relations as uncertain and ethical activities. She identifies the primary problem as that teachers and students in teacher education are influenced by their own educational experience in ways that make it difficult to approach education and educational relations in productive ways. We begin with a discussion of how the content of the teacher education programs entails a pedagogical dilemma for both its students and teachers. Then we show how this dilemma can be acknowledged by recognizing and embracing the inherent pedagogy and Didaktik of teacher education. By problematizing the relationship between pedagogy and Didaktik, we show the importance of not letting them be separated, as that risks making Didaktik instrumental. Based on this reasoning, we take note of some conceptions from Didaktik that we believe maintain a basic pedagogical problem in focus and show how these perspectives are suitable to adopt, not only as content for teacher education but also as a pedagogical framework for teacher education in general. In conclusion, we offer a proposal on how a higher education pedagogy, with a firm base in Didaktik, can contribute to both listening to and meeting the existential journey of student teachers from student to teacher, as well as contributing with the necessary knowledge of Didaktik and a professional language that is fruitful for the prospective teacher. 

While the aesthetics of Rancière is a well-explored topic, there has been something missing from the reception of his works, and that is the relation between Rancière’s aesthetics and music. However, in recent years an interest in this relation has resulted in several academic contributions, which is sign enough that there is in fact a musical element in his works. Rancière himself, in response to this reception, has acknowledged as much. Music is a human form of expression that uses the physicality of air to produce vibrations that encounter and resonate with the human body. Musicality is the ability to attend to such vibrations and harness the expectations and surprises that they bring about. In this article, I explore how a musical approach to Rancière’s writings can inform educational philosophy, especially as regards the practice of teaching. Particular attention is paid to his notion of the sensorium as a sensible realm where we experience and encounter difference and otherness, in political events as well as in teaching situations. Attending ethically to these situations is predicated on a certain sensibility that involves certain aesthetic qualities. In this article, I explore this sensibility as a particular educational musicality. Drawing from educational philosophy, the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière, and music philosophy, I connect this musicality of teaching to an ability to navigate in an ethical space that comes to life through a material/sensible community of interests formed in teaching practice. I use the term acousmatic experience as an explorative device in an attempt to depict teaching practice as something that can bring about a specific educational sensorium.

In this article, we discuss the centrality of improvisation for teaching, based particularly on readings of Cassin (2014, 2020), Ranciere (1991, 1999, 2020), and Bailey (1992). Our starting point is that there simply can be no teaching without improvisation, i.e., the delicate practice of responding to, situating, and attuning to events within educational encounters that cannot be foreseen, but constantly call for attention and action through the finest virtue of our intellect at play. In the article, we go along with the early Sophists for whom improvisation meant to be able to speak about everything by allowing oneself to be led by opportunity (Cassin, 2014). We will be claiming that improvisation of the Sophist teacher is both an intellectual and bodily virtue, requiring discipline as well as poesis and techne as well as praxis. In short, improvisation as a specific form of educational performativity. Together with Ranciere (1991, 2020), DiPiero (2020), and Bailey (1992) we intend to show how improvisation in teaching speaks to our senses and sets into motion simultaneously the sharing and uniqueness of sensing as such, captured by Ranciere's understand-ing of le partage du sensible. Improvisation, we conclude, can be understood as the product of contingent encounters between subjects, objects, and environments, where it emerges in the rupture between form and content (DiPiero, 2020). As such, it allows for other ways of speaking and being in the world than those desired by the institu-tionalisation of a certain police order (fixing a particular and non-negotiable partage du sensible) and therefore becomes, we suggest, a central element in a democratic realization of teaching practice.

Detta kapitel behandlar samverkan som begrepp och fenomen inom ett pedagogisk-filosofiskt ramverk. Mina primära syften med texten är att med hjälp av pedagogisk teori ”läsa” begreppet samverkan samt lyfta fram dess latent pedagogiska potential. Med termen läsning utgår jag från idén om att pedagogik innefattar vissa centrala frågeställningar och blickpunkter, som är viktiga att hantera i relation till samverkansprocesser som syftar till skolutveckling på vetenskaplig grund. Utgångspunkten för kapitlet är att även om samverkan har kommit att bli ett ledord för skola och utbildningsvetenskaplig forskning är det ett svårnavigerat och komplext område. Med stöd av resonemang från utbildningsfilosoferna Gert Biesta, John Dewey och Johann Friedrich Herbart vill jag teckna en fördjupad bild av denna komplexitet och dess inneboende pedagogiska spänningsfält. Med särskilt fokus på begreppet takt visas i kapitlet hur samverkan kan förstås som ett i grunden pedagogiskt problemområde. Målsättningen är att lyfta och skriva fram de specifika möjligheter såväl som utmaningar som samverkan kring forskning och skolutveckling innebär.

This article highlights the educational and the aesthetic significance of the subject matter (i.e., “the third thing”) in the relationship between teacher and pupil. This, through a reading of two texts, one written by the 19th century educationist and German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart, and one written by the contemporary philosopher and political theorist Jacques Rancière. By emphasizing the third thing between pupil and teacher, the article intends to reimagine both the educative and aesthetic values of those timeless things around us, such as objects of art and education, which give life a meaning beyond our limited socio-cultural desires, interests, concepts, and identities. Teaching, from this “fusion of the horizon” between Herbart and Rancière, is an activity created by the heterogeneity already integral to the “essence” of the subject matter. As such, the article also offers a fusion of the horizon between aesthetics and Didaktik. 

Communication, knowledge, and democracy in an age of digital education. In the article, we problematize the concept of digitalization from educational perspectives by drawing on a) John Dewey’s discussions on school as a communicative hub for democratic societies, and b) Bernard Stiegler’s critical remarks on digital communication. The ongoing digitalization of public education appears as a fast-moving process, where various technical solutions and quick implementations are given priority, and where teachers’ work is formed and limited by the technology that is currently rewarded. In the light of this, the article aims to contribute with perspectives on the digitalization of schools and society that stretch beyond questions about competence development for teachers and pupils. The overarching question for the article is: how might school function as a place that considers the societal impact of digitalization, given that it should also work for teachers’ and students’ communicative and interpersonal relations in the lived practice of teaching?