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Some excerpts from a longer set of Bharath's reflections stemming from our conversation:

"In the one story model there is no oscillation between flexibility and structure, because all the students get all the time is structure and more structure. Only the students for whom the structure is natural and fun, for whom the structure comes with in built flexibility, do well in the class, get top grades and might go on to study the subject further. The rest of the students leave the class broken down by the sense of their stupidity regarding the subject, accepting it as a fact and conceding the subject to others deemed more fit for it. The sense that one can study anything, be anything and do anything is warped, and evaluative judgments (“She is great at X, I am bad at it”) are taken as natural facts on a par with having two hands and two legs ...

Similarly, in the one story model, there is no oscillation between the individual and the social, for even though the classroom is a social gathering, the interaction is simply one on one between the teacher and each of the students. There are no frequent changes in perspective and few new insights generated amongst the students, and so in such a class students feel everything is predictable a couple of weeks into the semester. The struggling students are forced to turn for help to the teacher and the students with the good grades, in both cases taking the help at the cost of giving up following the passions within themselves regarding the subject ...

And on the one story model, there is certainly no oscillation between teaching and learning, since the classroom is a one way street of education ...

Classrooms where the teacher abandons lecturing or setting guidelines and constantly lets a thousand flowers bloom fares no better; call this the infinite stories model. In the infinite stories model, there is no oscillation between flexibility and structure, because all the students get all the time is flexibility ... The infinite stories model also doesn’t allow for oscillation between the individual and the social ... Lastly, the infinite stories model also doesn’t allow for the oscillation between teaching and learning, because the equivalence of all ideas makes the concept of teaching itself incoherent. The teacher and the students are both bored; the teacher because ultimately she is reduced to a traffic cop constantly reminding the students that all points of view should be respected, and the students because they lose respect and awe for the classroom and treat it as no different from hanging out with their friends ...

In relation to emergent pedagogy, it is important to see that emergent pedagogy is not and need not be the infinite stories model ... Emergent conversation requires thoughtful participation, not mindless participation. How can there be thoughtful participation? That is where the constraints or guidelines come in. The key is to think of some constraints which can help a fruitful and multi-dimensional conversation to emerge, and which can thereby avoid the pits falls of the one story model and the infinite stories model ...

The balance of stories model avoids both extremes and aims to keep alive throughout the class the exictement and openess with which the teacher and the students come to it. It draws a line in the sand at the beginning of the class with the teacher presenting the base story to the students. But unlike the other models, it acknowledges that the classroom is ultimately a place of change, transformation and growth, and that a good class is one which changes through that development. Thus through the oscillations between structure and flexibility, the individual and the social, and teaching and learning, the teachers and the students together erase the line in the sand as the class proceeds. They grow together because they grow from being on separate sides of the line to occupying a common space which incorporates and challenges every one, each of the students and the teacher alike.