-
"My only insight is that people themselves (ie their personalities) are emergent phenomena. They are continually being influenced by many small factors that each have imperceptible effects on their personalities (sometimes there are very big events, but I think we overemphasize their significance and I'll ignore them - by this I mean, if a child's parents get divorced, that is a very big event in that child's life, but how the child reacts to it is the product of the gazillion prior events and genetics, each with mostly small influence, that created that child's personality). The divorce, to be sure, has an independent effect, but I think we exaggerate these big events because we can see them. There are also huge positive feedback loops involved: people like what they are good at, they practice what they like, practice makes them good at it.
In the face of this, formal education has little independent influence on children's lives. They take from it what their personalties have predisposed them to take form it (some take a lot and some take almost nothing and it is hard to influence this)."
-Mark
Gathering all the "pedagogy notes" in one place (as a first step towards a WhitePaper/Essay on "Emergent Pedagogy"?) I'm taking the liberty of copying here 3 relevant- postings-so far from the Emergence Forum:
[from Paul] "emergent pedagogy" 6-29-03 (#5789): Was trying to explain what it was to Alison Cook-Sather, director of the Bico Education Program, who will hopefully be in shape to join us for upcoming conversation. And so the following, as an offering for that conversation:
"Emergent pedagogy" = a new emergent, itself reshapable as it is further thought through by interacting individual/collective stories. For the moment, nothing more/nothing less than "teacher" and "student" both as active learners, engaged in somewhat unpredictable interactions out of which come new less wrong stories at both individual and collective levels and greater skill at creating useful new stories.
An old story (to some) in new trappings. Cf.
* Bi Co Ed Program Philosophy
* Making Connections ...
* This Isn't Just My Problem ...
* Science and Education
* Bridging Cultures in K-12 Education: Exploration and Emergence.
Advantage of new trappings is that it provides broader connections (biological evolution, brain organization, lots of amusing computer models in lots of realms) to justify what good teachers know anyhow, and the occasional new insight by comparing education to other parallel contexts that might otherwise not have occurred to one (eg importance of noise/randomness in classroom?). And, in reverse, suggests that what works in classroom should in fact be recognized as more relevant in other contexts. For the latter, see War is a Bad Metaphor and Theorizing Interdisciplinarity.
[from Anne, "Emergent Pedagogy, Continued, 6/30/02; posting #5791]
As Alison and I were en route to the conference sponsored last week by the International Association for Learning Alternatives, I also found myself trying to explain "Emergent Pedagogy" to her. I discovered, in the process, that we already have "considerably more" than what Paul describes above. Under the rubric of "Resurrection," I'd listed a number of characteristics:
* local hands-on interactions that
* produce unanticipated outcomes
* by validating multiple ways of knowing and thinking,
* and the relationships and interdependencies among the people doing the thinking.
Such practices have long been common among the progressive educators @ the IALA conference; for instance, Alison and I shared a panel w/ Chris Mercogliano, who wrote Making It Up as We Go Along. This is the story of Albany Free School, the oldest inner-city independent alternative school in the United States. Alison and I were both astonished and delighted to learn that it was founded (in 1969) by a BMC alum, Mary Leue, and that it has @ its center a "council meeting system" which (shades of BMC faculty meetings!) is guided by Robert's Rules of Order. Any one can call for council at any time, to address any problem; a quorum is not required, and a simple majority rules.There is no problem this self-correcting system can't handle, Chris claimed, including the problem of its own dissolution, which has happened more than once!
I see Albany Free School, and its simple starting condition, the council system, as a great illustration of the sort of "editing" Ted was describing above, a process which is both order-generating and, I'd say, emergent.
Anne
[from Anne, "Emergent Pedagogy: A Report and Invitation," 7/03/03, posting #5800]
I was delighted that we were able to spend this morning's session discussing the aspect/application of emergence which is for me by far the most interesting and potentially productive--that of pedagogy. It was a further delight to have new company in our conversation (Kim Cassidy, Alison Cook-Sather, Nia Turner).
Granting the "emergent" belief that the present is accounted for--albeit indeterminately--in terms of the past, I began the discussion by suggesting that we try thinking together about
* the significant initial conditions for "emergent" pedagogy (my claim: give up on "coverage," in order to gain space for "inefficient" discovery; Paul's refinement: choose content that illustrates/gives students experience in particular WAYS of thinking; that is, choose material that motivates discovery)
* how much editing/guidance/goal-direction is consistent w/ an "emergence" rubric for pedagogy?
* how important/significant (pushing @ the envelope of the usefulness of emergence for thinking about teaching) is it that pedagogy is enacted w/ 'n among the "active information-grabbing devices" that are the nervous systems of our students? how much difference does it make, in other words, if the actors in the system are thoughtful ones, each w/ their own agendas? We went on to explore a wide range of other related-and-fascinating topics:
* the need for a materialist base in our teaching: an accretion of detail out of which thinking emerges we can't help our students develop thinking skills w/out the content to think with
* through the process of thinking for themselves, of learning to make and solve puzzles, students will inevitably acquire the content they need for doing so
* rather than exploring an alternative to traditional methods (replacing a "standard" w/ an "exploratory" curriculum, or "content" with "process"), we are searching for an effective means of integrating the two components: selecting content for its usefulness, because it facilitates a process of discovery (rather than because someone else has declared it "important")
* this is a means of addressing what Deepak called the "Olympic-games phenomena" (i.e.: since new sports are always being added, some must be dropped; in classroom terms: you can't cover it all!) * it is also a way of facing the "illusion of efficiency" (shared by students and teachers, who think that delivering/being delivered content is "learning" it)
is the "directive" way ever "the best"? in an emergent system, we can't ever know, for sure, what it is our students need to know
* how to handle the "uninformed self-editing" enacted by our students, as they choose deliberately not to engage in the classroom (out of fear of what might emerge, if they did?)
* how to reconcile conventional psychological notions of "readiness" (always constructed developmentally) w/ questions of motivation?
* children first recognize themselves as learners in kindergarten; part of the project here is preserving the exploratory nature of those early years thoughout the educational process
* is it possible to "go back" to that point in childhood where our students (hey: we ourselves) wanted to make their own categories, rather than accepting those designed by others?
* memorizing can be a useful learning technique, not just as a way of storing information, but as keeping labile various methods of "retrieving it," by keeping "in trim" the "associative" function of the unconscious might we think of the optimal classroom as one which gives access to a variety of intelligences, to everyone's ways of thinking? by insisting that the primary task of educators is to help students develop the ability to think independently, are we simply imposing a new orthodoxy?
* this sort of teaching may well involve a delay in gratification: assessment may well not be simple or immediate
* this sort of teaching and learning is both more different and more dangerous: giving both teachers and students more responsiblity means we are also giving both more room for error
* what is the psychology of taking "bubble tests" (multiple choice tests are actually designed to confuse; each range of answers includes, along w/ a right one and a wrong one, a "distractor").
As we closed, Alison recommended two books relevant to our discussion:
Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education and Raymond Callahan, Education and The Cult of Efficiency.
I create this archive of our conversation both for myself, as a resource for the Summer Institute on Exploration and Emergence, and in the hopes that we will be able to continue the conversation--and maybe write a paper out of it!!!
From Anne Dalke, Further Notes, Posting #5802 (7/06/03): untrade-able non-objects
I've been at work this weekend on a new project about, oh, commodification of research and learning, and the cycle of reciprocity and community-building that is gift-giving, trying to reach for an alternative form of "gifting" that is free, no strings attached (following Derrida), "never (a) present."
En route to figuring all this out, I found myself reading an essay by Jean Lave and Ray Mc Dermott. "Estranged Labor/Learning," Outlines 4 (1), 2002: 19-48 is a strong follow-up to a VERY important piece Mc Dermott wrote some years ago w/ Herve Varenne, "Culture as Disability," which a number of us in the Education and CSem programs have found enormously valuable in our teaching.
Anyhow, in "Estranged Learning," which is a Marxist analysis of alienated educational praxis, Lave and Mc Dermott make a number of comments which seem to me to pick up and expand on our exploration of emergent pedagogy last Wednesday. We had begun our discussion w/ the postulation that emergent pedagogues, rather than designing courses to provide complete "coverage" (impossible anyway), might choose content that illustrates/gives students experience in particular WAYS of thinking; that is, choose material that motivates discovery.
Lave and Mc Dermott frame/describe (what I think is) the same idea somewhat differently, suggesting that we replace "objects" of learning (which can include skills) w/ "activities," which cannot then be "traded" or "distributed" as "objects":
categories of learning...by current practice, are treated instituitionally as objects--a stockpile of objects, really: attention, memory, problem solving, higher order skills, and so on--and not as activities well tuned to the relations among people and their world. So we say, over and against the mainstream, that learning is dependent, situated, contextual and emergent. But it is only the first half of a critique of learning theory as currently insitutionalized...and its market place as estranged, alienated, and mystified. Perhaps the most mystifying and in the end the most alienated and alienating assumption is specifically a matter of distribution--a widely and deeply felt distinction that separates the production of official knowledges (e.g. science, literature, national curricular frameworks)...from their distribution through school practice.... "The production of knowledge stocks" is carefully distinguished from what boils down to their apparently non-generative, unchanging distribution as they are "transmitted" through schooling, "learned," and "transferred" beyond. (pp. 29, 34)
My translation of their Marxism into our emergence? That such pedagogy is neither goal-or-product oriented, but action-driven. And cannot be "traded."
Back now to this piece/stand I'm taking against commodification.
