Making sense together. The cabinet of curiosity as path to reconsider education for all

ABSTRACT

This paper refers to a project that we as an art school carried out together with the Flemish organisation VVOB in Zambia. The main goal of the project was to equip primary school teachers with the necessary knowledge and infrastructure to deliver basic ‘education for all.’ The paper challenges the implicit instrumentalization of the arts in that approach, but also brings back to the forefront the notion of art as a practice that ‘makes sense together.’ Through cabinet of curiosity practices such as observing, noting, collecting, mapping, exposing and gathering, we explored how sharing emergent relational structures could be a starting point and even the essence of a pedagogical practice that thinks with and before the world, and approaches education for all as a study praxis rather than an end goal. The argument is built in company with authors such as Gert Biesta, Jean Luc Nancy and Tim Ingold.

Keywords:

• mundialisation
• globalisation
• education for development
• attention
• education for all
• cabinet of curiosity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. VVOB is an acronym that previously referred to ‘Vlaamse Vereniging voor Ontwikkelingssamenwerking en Technische Bijstand.’ Today this reference is no longer in use, it refers to Education for Development.

2. This is the general goal of the larger QEECS- program of which the cooperation between LUCA and VVOB forms a part. At that moment only 17,3% of the children that attend primary education had ECE. Besides this, the quality of ECE was well below par. https://www.vvob.org/en/programmes/zambia-quality-early-education-community-schools.

3. https://www.vvob.org/sites/belgium/files/2018_vvob_technical-brief_learning-through-play_web.pdf.

4. ‘We’ is : Lieve Simoens and Lore Stessels, who were at that time students of the teacher training of LUCA School of art who did their internship in Zambia, together with Nancy Vansieleghem and Gerda Dendooven who performed a workshop on cabinet of curiosity for teacher trainers in Zambia.

5. Andrea De Wulf about Alexander Von Humboldt: ‘He had waited for years to see the world and knew that he was putting his life in danger, but he wanted to see more’ (De Wulf 2019, 53).