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Deborah Hazen's picture

Still we all had the sense that there was one truth

You hit on one of the practical considerations that often plagues me. On the one hand, what I would call "pure emergence" pedagogy requires a large amount of time for students and teachers to be engaged in genuine inquiry. On the other, if we as teachers are "playing at" emergence pedagogy while "directing" students toward a particular truth or outcome, students catch on fairly quickly. Some will play along because they want to know that they can figure where the teacher wants them to go---others will simply disengage and wait for the teacher to arrive at the destination. This is especially the case if there isn't enough time to fully explore something, the exploration seems to call for background knowledge a student doesn't feel they have, or the teacher has already begun the redirecting and sculpting of other student's ideas to bring everyone to the desired outcome.

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