Why Embrace Emergent Pedagogy
image created using Padlet ai, prompt "connecting the dots"
Every time I go home to see my parents in the woods and it's night time, I look up at the stars. Ever since I was little, I was awe struck by the mystery of the stars and the smallness of myself. I wanted to be an astronomer.
I am not an astronomer, I am an educator, a Spanish immersion preschool one at that. But there are fundamental similarities between my fascination of the cosmos, be it the macro physics of general relativity or the quantum physics of quantum mechanics. Essentially, my fascination with the cosmos is about what is fundamentally real, including that there will always be mystery, and always humans attempting to make sense of our universe through theories.
Similarly, my fascination with education, especially early childhood, is about what is fundamentally most important to being human. And I am always attempting to make sense of children and adults' learning and meaning making through my own theories, based on observations and my relationships.
In both my fascination of the cosmos and education, I am fascinated by what emerges. According to Nick Obolensky in *Complex and Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty*, by way of adrienne maree brown's *Emergent Strategy*, "Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions". Whether it's quantum fields giving rise to electrons or a child offering a hug to another human, these individual occurrences happening over time in several different ways leads to the complexity of relationships between fundamental particles and between human beings leading to more complex structures such as stars and more complex relationships called communities.
I believe emergence is the nature of learning and relationships. That is why I find so much more satisfaction in embracing emergent pedagogy - a way of thinking about learning that accepts and embraces the ambiguous nature of learning, rather than imposing the illusion of control and linearity on it.
How is linearity imposed in education?
If you have studied Education, you are likely familiar with backwards planning, "beginning with the end in mind." In my experience, I focused on a product that would show what I considered understanding, and then plan backwards, considering every point in time that would connect to lead me to this product. I found this incredibly frustrating, as it wouldn't match reality! Or, if I somehow forced the linearity, I felt a sense of soullessness in my work, that something was off.
So what to do instead?
Backwards planning didn't go out the window. I just realized it showed one possibility for how learning could go, and it was helpful to think about what could happen and why. I began to distance myself from that path, and start embracing the ambiguity of following children's interests, reflecting with them and other members of our community on what was happening, and co-constructing our learning together.
When I was imposing linearity, I would put dots (i.e. events, experiences, observations) on a graph and focus on staying on a straight line, as well as possible.
When I embraced emergent pedagogy, I would allow the dots to emerge, and allow myself to connect the dots in different configurations, including at times circular, sometimes leading to dead ends, and sometimes leading to long threads of inquiry. This was only possible because I ended up at a school that allowed for this openness, and so I am invested in supporting wider systemic changes to allowing more space for this work to happen.
