Emergent Pedagogy Research Articles

¿La escuela o la finca? Una historia que contar…

El presente artículo muestra de forma narrativa, la reflexión realizada a partir de un trabajo de campo realizado en el departamento de Arauca. Es la historia de una niña de la región, que no se siente motivada para asistir a la escuela de la vereda. Esta narrativa da la entrada a la discusión de algunos problemas, que actualmente presenta la escuela en las zonas rurales de Colombia. A partir de esta, se desprende el análisis de realidades educativas como la descontextualización y la colonización de saberes en la escuela rural. El texto presenta la necesidad de crear relaciones de diálogo epistémico en la escuela, tomando en cuenta las vivencias y los conocimientos propios de los seres humanos que no han sido visibilizados en el medio escolar, es así como se pone en escenario el tema de los cantos de ordeño, como una pedagogía emergente que construye la identidad social y cultural de un sujeto y de una comunidad en los llanos orientales colombo-venezolanos.

Translating change into improved practice

In Scotland, substantial changes in the management of education at national, local authority and school/community levels are afoot. Central to future improvements are how teachers translate curriculum guidelines, with an increased focus on health and wellbeing and holistic learning experiences, into constructivist inclined pedagogical practices. Through reviewing semi-structured interviews and planning conversations, this article reports on five teachers’ attempts to introduce new teaching approaches in primary school physical education programmes. Each of the teachers had completed a new Postgraduate Certificate in Physical Education, which aimed to help teachers understand more about developmentally appropriate physical education. We investigate their responses in trying to cultivate an emergent pedagogy with a greater emphasis on creating pedagogical opportunities that are inclusive and clearly connected with national educational priorities. Findings illustrate the diverse ways in which teachers used their professional development experiences as the basis for engaging with curriculum policy and the means by which they implemented new practices and knowledges in their schools.

Emergent pedagogy and affect in collaborative research: a metho-pedagogical paradigm

The widespread turn towards ‘collaboration’ in qualitative research methodologies warrants careful and continuous critique. This paper addresses the possibilities and the challenges of collaborative methodology, and in particular what happens when the line between pedagogy and methodology is blurred in classroom-based ethnographic research. Troubling the prized notion of collaboration, and decoupling the easy relationship drawn between collaborative, participatory methods and empowering, democratic research experiences, we draw upon empirical data from one site in a multi-site, international ethnographic project: Urban School Performances: The Interplay Through Live and Digital Drama, of Local–Global Knowledge About Student Engagement. In underscoring some tensions and conflict in the creation of a Verbatim Theatre unit, we analyse significant affective encounters that surfaced in the course of our research work. Mobilising feminist post-structuralism and current theories of affect, we question the privileging of voice as an unmediated and authentic phenomenon, while ultimately arguing for the importance of affect and emotion in ethnographic analysis and for persistent reflexivity in the negotiation of collaborative metho-pedagogical work.

Emergent pedagogies and the changing role of the teacher in the TI-Nspire Navigator-networked mathematics classroom

It is generally accepted that the introduction of networked technologies to the mathematics classroom can stimulate an irreversible change within the classroom concerning: the role of the teacher; the nature of the classroom tasks; and the way in which students engage in the process of learning mathematics. This article will use the context of a classroom-based study into teachers’ developing practices with the TI-Nspire Navigator-networked system of handhelds to explore the nature of these practices and the implications for the mathematics classroom. The emergence of a range of formative assessment practices is described and the implication of these practices on desirable learning opportunities (as described by the teachers themselves) is discussed.

Complexity thinking mentorship: an emergent pedagogy of graduate research development

In this article we articulate a view of mentoring that extends into interactive and relational forms, fostering a redefinition of traditional roles and practices within mentor‐protégé models. From the perspectives of a senior administrator and two assistant professors, we revisit the mentoring spaces and relations within which we were engaged while working in an approach to arts‐based educational research known as a/r/tography during dissertation research projects. From our interconnected experiences, we propose a framing of the intersections between a/r/tographic research and mentorship informed by complexity thinking. We analyzed our work together while deconstructing the ways in which we have supported and unsettled each other. Through narrative inquiry we share reflections from dissertation research experiences, while also describing patterns of an emerging pedagogy of mentoring within higher education that we term complexity thinking mentorship. Borrowing from complexity theory, this conception of mentorship attends to the specific conditions of redundancy, decentralized control and diversity as being facilitative of evolving change and insight within graduate student research development.

The Role of Academic Libraries in Mentored Undergraduate Research: A Model of Engagement in the Academic Community

Mentored undergraduate research is an emergent pedagogy in higher education. It differs fundamentally from course-related student research and is largely independent of the curriculum. Academic libraries should engage formally with the undergraduate research community. To do so, librarians will need to think and work beyond traditional models of library service, most notably in information literacy programs. The intent of this article is to raise awareness about opportunities for library involvement with undergraduate researchers and programs. Lessons from one university, including a formal partnership between a library and an undergraduate research center, suggest some general strategies that academic libraries might explore.

The Role of Academic Libraries in Mentored Undergraduate Research: A Model of Engagement in the Academic Community

Mentored undergraduate research is an emergent pedagogy in higher education. It differs fundamentally from course-related student research and is largely independent of the curriculum. Academic libraries should engage formally with the undergraduate research community. To do so, librarians will need to think and work beyond traditional models of library service, most notably in information literacy programs. The intent of this article is to raise awareness about opportunities for library involvement with undergraduate researchers and programs. Lessons from one university, including a formal partnership between a library and an undergraduate research center, suggest some general strategies that academic libraries might explore.

The Mother's Magazine: moral media for an emergent domestic pedagogy, 1833–1848

This paper presents a theoretical analysis of selected passages from The Mother's Magazine, one of the first periodicals for women published in the USA. Of particular interest are selections that highlight desirable maternal characteristics and those that described the intended pedagogical experiences within the domestic sphere. The layout, overarching themes and content of specific articles provide a gateway to discern contributors' attempts at moral regulation. The authors facilitated a character education initiative to ensure that both mother and child would be dutiful and thoughtful Christian citizens. There is also a focus to secure the proliferation of industrious, gendered subjects. It could be argued that the periodical marks the transition from a Calvinist to a Lockean conception of childhood. More accurately, the magazine utilises modern methods of childrearing while still adhering to an evangelical ideology that both reinforces traditional power structures and redefines the role of mother for the emerging nuclear family.

Spatial Literacies, Design Texts, and Emergent Pedagogies in Purposeful Literacy Curriculum

There has recently been an emphasis within literacy studies on both the spatial dimensions of social practices (Leander & Sheehy, 2004) and the importance of incorporating design and multiple modes of meaning-making into contemporary understandings of literacy (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; New London Group, 1996). Kress (2003), in particular, has outlined the potential implications of the cultural shift from the dominance of writing based on a logic of time and sequence in time to the dominance of the mode of the image based on a logic of space. However, the widespread redesign of curriculum and pedagogy by classroom teachers to allow students to capitalise on the various affordances of different modes of meaning-making—including the spatial—remains in an emergent stage. We report on a project in which university researchers' expertise in architecture, literacy, and communications enabled two teachers in one school to expand the forms of literacy that primary school children engaged in. Starting from the school community's concerns about an urban renewal project in their neighbourhood, we worked together to develop a curriculum of spatial literacies with real-world goals and outcomes.

A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom

Traditional distinctions between work/play and classroom/gamespace create barriers to computer games’ integration into academic settings and the writing classroom in particular. For a writing class, the work/play distinction often relegates games to an object of analysis in which students critique the games but have little invested in the gameplay itself. After examining briefly how historical changes in education created these distinctions, we offer an alternative position that places play and gamespace within the realm of the classroom. In so doing, we open up a gap for computer game theory to inform the pedagogy that can be practiced in a writing classroom. We show one such example of game theory informing writing pedagogy—the theory of emergent gaming. We then offer an example of an enacted emergent pedagogy in which students play the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft throughout the term, composing self-determined, rhetorically focused writing projects informed by play and written for other game players.

Emergent pedagogy: learning to enjoy the uncontrollable—and make it productive

This essay reflects the shared experiences of four college faculty members (a biologist, a psychologist, a computer scientist, and a feminist literary scholar) working together with K-12 teachers to explore a new perspective on educational practice. It offers a novel rationale for independent thinking and learning, one that derives from rapidly developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiries in the sciences and social sciences into what are known as “complex” or “emergent” systems. Using emergent systems as a model of teaching and learning makes at least three significant contributions to our thinking bout teaching, in three very different dimensions. It invites us into an awareness that the brains of individual students and teachers operate as emergent systems that are neither possible nor desirable to control fully. It invites us to appreciate as well that the activities and benefits of a classroom are not all individual interactions between teacher and student. Interactions among students and teachers are collectively contributing to a somewhat unpredictable project with an insistently social dimension, which is in turn crucial to the individual achievements of all involved. Finally, emergent pedagogy encourages us to consider more carefully the relations between the individual classroom and the larger educational community of which it is a component, including a challenge to rethink the matter of assessment.

What purposes, specifically? Re-thinking purposes and specificity in the context of the ‘new vocationalism’

Discipline-specific approaches to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) tend to overlook the purposes of the disciplines themselves and the issue of transferability from academic to professional contexts. This becomes problematic in the context of the ‘new knowledge economy’ and emergent pedagogies in higher education, which are increasingly focused on attributes transferable to workplaces. This paper explores the chain effect of the ‘new knowledge economy’ on the purposes of newly vocationalized courses, on assessment tasks, and on the forms of learning and literacy required. I draw attention to a new set of generalisable skills and ways of thinking that are valued in this context, and to the implications this has for lecturers in the field of EAP. I argue that specific approaches to the development of literacy in these contexts need to focus on the purposes of pedagogies rather than on specific written genres. I suggest that a broader definition of literacy, which recognizes face-to-face interactivity as one of the important communicative modes in this context, is necessary.

A Manifesto for Instructional Technology: Hyperpedagogy

We believe hypertext and hypermedia solidify bold and original ideas having the power to open new realms of creative possibility. Unfortunately, we find the new tools encrusted within concepts borrowed from traditional curriculum theory and instructional design. Our goal in this paper is to liberate hypertext; doing so requires challenging Western metaphysics. We rely on the philosophy of John Dewey to disclose this metaphysics and propose an alternative. The paper reviews dominant models of curriculum, especially Ralph Tyler's, revealing their concealed metaphysical assumptions. Our efforts are greatly aided by Herbert M. Kliebard's critique of the Tyler rationale, exposing the fact that, in spite of its inflated claims, all there is to Tyler's rationale is “the philosophical screen.” That is also all we think there is to all the dominant models of curriculum. We show that the philosophical screen is largely comprised of a concealed metaphysics before concluding by showing how hypertext and hypermedia, freed of dogmatic metaphysics, may yield what we call hyperpedagogy, based upon theories of emergent pedagogy and transactional metaphysics.

A Manifesto for Instructional Technology: Hyperpedagogy

We believe hypertext and hypermedia solidify bold and original ideas having the power to open new realms of creative possibility. Unfortunately, we find the new tools encrusted within concepts borrowed from traditional curriculum theory and instructional design. Our goal in this paper is to liberate hypertext; doing so requires challenging Western metaphysics. We rely on the philosophy of John Dewey to disclose this metaphysics and propose an alternative. The paper reviews dominant models of curriculum, especially Ralph Tyler's, revealing their concealed metaphysical assumptions. Our efforts are greatly aided by Herbert M. Kliebard's critique of the Tyler rationale, exposing the fact that, in spite of its inflated claims, all there is to Tyler's rationale is “the philosophical screen.” That is also all we think there is to all the dominant models of curriculum. We show that the philosophical screen is largely comprised of a concealed metaphysics before concluding by showing how hypertext and hypermedia, freed of dogmatic metaphysics, may yield what we call hyperpedagogy, based upon theories of emergent pedagogy and transactional metaphysics.

Bridging Continents: Technology Trends Today and Tomorrow

'If e-learning is the answer, what is the question?' Will e-learning and its use be impacted by recent world events? Will we see, for example, the use of e-learning techniques as a shortcut to what is termed 'just-in-time' learning? We do indeed have historical precedent for thinking such may be about to happen. In this paper, numerous examples have been provided to investigate the extent to which e-learning represents an emergent pedagogy that will be employed, not only by corporations but by educational institutions, government agencies and major transportation carriers around the world. Special attention and thought is given to the relationship of e-learning to diverse cultures, some of which bring with them centuries of tradition. Can such historic traditions co-exist within our new millennium or must there be compromise and blending of old with new? Relier les continents: tendances technologiques d'aujourd'hui et de demain. 'Si l'e-formation est la réponse, quelle est la question?' L'utilisation de l'enseignement en ligne sera-t-il affecté par les récents événements mondiaux? Verrons-nous l'émergence de ce que l'on pourrait appeler les enseignements 'du bon moment', ou de l'opportun . ? Des précédents historiques sont lÀ pour nous y faire penser. Dans cet article, de nombreux exemples sont étudiés pour déceler si l'enseignement en ligne peut représenter une nouvelle forme de pédagogie qui pourrait être mise en place, non seulement par des entreprises diverses mais aussi par des institutions d'enseignement, des agences gouvernementales ou des compagnies de transports de par le monde. Une attention toute spéciale est donnée À l'étude de la relation entre l'enseignement À distance et les diverses cultures émanant, pour certaines, de siècles de traditions. De telles traditions historiques peuvent-elles co-exister dans notre siècle ou devra-t-on trouver des compromis en mariant traditions et innovations? Kontinente verbinden: Technologie-Trends heute und morgen 'Wenn E-Learning die Antwort ist, was ist dann die Frage?'. Wird E-Learning und seine Verwendung von den jüngsten Weltereignissen beeinflusst werden? Sehen wir zum Beispiel die Verwendung von E-Learning als Abkürzung an für 'Just in time'-Lernen? Wir haben wirklich genügend historische Präzedenzfälle, um uns vorstellen zu können, das so etwas geschehen kann. In diesem Papier sind zahlreiche Beispiele zusammengetragen worden, um zu untersuchen, inwieweit E-Learning eine junge Pädagogik darstellt, die man einsetzt wird, nicht nur von Gesellschaften, sondern auch von Bildungsinstitutionen, Regierungseinrichtungen oder größeren Verkehrsgesellschaften rund um die Welt. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit und Beachtung wird der Beziehung zwischen E-Learning und unterschiedlichen Kulturen mit zum Teil Jahrhunderte alten Traditionen gewidmet. Können solche historische Traditionen innerhalb unseres neuen Millennium koexistieren oder muss es Kompromisse und Anpassungen zwischen Alt und Neu geben?

Emerging pedagogy: teaching digital hypertexts in social contexts

Fluid texts such as digital texts and hyperfictions present users with both individual and social challenges. In the classroom, particularly, teachers should take advantage of the multiple aspects of narrative time constructed through hypertextual duration, frequency, and order. These challenges, or disjunctures, invite teachers and students into transformative moments, or rejunctures, within the context of the classroom. Based upon an ethnographic study of two college courses, I illustrate several of these opportunities as they subvert the dominant orders of textuality totalized by print-based culture and form an emergent pedagogy.