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Jill Bean's picture

Emergent pedagogy and learning styles

I continue to wrestle with the question "Is emergent pedagogy the best type of instruction for all learning styles, or is it good only for certain learning styles?"  I'm thinking about the child who has weak inter and intrapersonal skills.  Will he learn best through a transactional learning experience that seems to require strong metacognitive skills?  Or the child who is grounded in the concrete world and who struggles with even the most basic abstract concepts.  Can she truly engage in emergent pedagogy and create her own stories for some of the phenomenon in the world? 

I'm also thinking about Wil's suggestion that some students are simply not yet ready for their story to emerge?  When I think about my students from this past year that I can envision thriving in a classroom based on emergent pedagogy, they are all students who brought with them at the start of the school year vast amounts of background knowledge.  Perhaps they were able to engage with some of the questioning, story telling, and story revising that we did throughout the year because they already had sufficient exposure to a variety of experiences, different contexts, and being encouraged and expected to think about and ask questions about the world.  Perhaps the other set of kids that struggled with these activities will be ready later in their lives, after they too gain more experience in these areas.  Which leads to Deb's question, "Does parenting style impact the effectiveness of emergence pedagogy?"  Reflecting on my students this past year, I think the answer to that questions has to be yes! 

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