Hi Peter, Jenny, Deirdre
Not sure how far we can push discomfort before it overwhelms all of our senses and becomes raw confusion. Or triggers our mind to dive back into itself. Neither of which would favour learning.
Maybe we are talking about two things here? In both cases we are responding to some sort of stimulus. One contains the potential to learn, react badly or some other random activity. The other response may be orderly, purposeful and, possibly, goal directed, like learning to knit by trial and error--which I think reveals an innate human need to work things out. Is that need something we could leverage?
It makes sense to me that humans would seek order (things that work) over chaos. Though we are capable of navigating chaos it is too unpredictable as tool for causing workability to appear.
We have the functional ability to make things turn out the way we want to. And this brings intention into the mix pushing us to desired outcomes. And since not just anything will do, we make deliberate effort to direct emergence to land in a specific area and roll out as a comprehensive path called a curriculum.
But what happens here feels like feels like we are putting constraints on a system initially designed to explore first and pick viable options from the results into a model of efficient locating of a preselected outcome. How much control is too much here? Or maybe "control" is too loaded a term and I should use preferable or productive pushing which would allow us to have a purpose for learning over a strictly defined goal?