Reply to comment

I've got a similar thing going on. The really interesting piece of what you're saying, for me, is the idea that we might need to feel accepted by everyone. So what does this mean for an emergent classroom? There are all sorts of group dynamic studies that seem to present observations that support what you are saying--put a group together and they will form an identity---and part of the identity formation is a way for everyone to get that accepted feeling. I stumbled across a piece of research that was arguing that our brains may actually be set up to get pleasure from cooperation. This sounds like a recipe for disaster if I expect that my classroom will be richer for having many different perspectives represented.

Is this why we look at ---let's pick on PhDs---profs and say they typically don't have good social skills--because success in the academic culture comes by having a brain (architecture and training) that prizes dissonance over consonance--because out of the dissonance comes truly original ideas? And what does this mean for the effectiveness of an emergence pedagogy when discussing "hot" topics like politics, sexuality, abortion, religion...?

On a practical level do we need more dialogue in our schools about the difference between dissonance and disrespect?