Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

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Paul Grobstein's picture

newly emerging emergent pedagogy

Borrowing a phrase several of you have used in these forums: Wow!  Emergent pedagogy sure seems to me to be a good way to learn about lots of things, including emergent pedagogy.  There seems to be something about an environment of open-ended transactional inquiry that promotes ... open-ended transactional inquiry.  A few things it has made me think, for myself and anyone else interested ...

The jungle, with lots of vines of different sizes/shapes/textures to swing from is a nice addition to the houseboat in our repertoire of metaphors.  So too, as per Barath, is the Serendip website itself.  Yep, not well organized but lots and lots of possibilities.  Which has virtues (there are starting places for lots of different sorts of brains with lots of different sorts of interests) and creates problems (how does one know where to start or, for that matter, where/when to stop? you can get lost in here).  And that can indeed by "overwhelming," not in the sense of having too many assignments to complete but rather in the sense of having too many open doors, including some pretty broad, sweeping ones ("the questions get bigger and bigger") that one might not have thought had things behind them yet to be explored.

Its an interesting place, but would one, as Bharath asked, actually want to live there?  It intrigued me that a few people (myself  included) said yes, but more said no.  My sense, however, was that even those who said no thought it was (like New York City) a nice place to visit, a place where one could have new and surprising thoughts that one could use later to refurnish whatever more structured environments one preferred to live and work in.  And that, for me, is a valuable lesson about emergent pedagogy: it needs to be offered in a way that is appealing to all, both to those who want to live in that space and those who would like to drop in every once in a while and take what is useful to them for whatever use that want to make of it.  

A good lesson not only for classrooms, but for life in general?  Offer something that one thinks might be of interest/useful to others but don't insist they sign on to it?  Let them make of it what they can/will, and in return you get new ways to think about what you have to offer?  Not a bad deal.  Thanks, all.

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