Jenny Mackness

Hi Kathleen - no this is not irrelevant - quite the opposite - because you have highlighted so clearly the relationship between the environment and emergent learning - which is what our research is all about.

You have also provided a very clear example of circumstances in which emergent learning might not happen and have raised the question of whether some learning requires a prescribed approach.

The question of early years reading is such a good example of all this. Years ago I was an early years teacher and have been through the 'should we let reading emerge through a real books approach to reading?' i.e. just let children handle and browse through books they like and learn to read because they love books - or should we teach them to read through a structured introduction to phonics and a decoding approach?

The link you provide as to why natural learning fails in classrooms definitely fits with my experience. Many, but not all, children simply did not learn to read 'in school' with the 'real' books approach and needed something more structured - although I so wanted them to learn through the 'real' books approach.

This relates to our thinking about getting the balance between prescription and emergent learning right for purpose.

Thanks so much for this great example Kathleen. Can you tell us more abut your experience with this?

The second question which might be interesting to discuss is:

Is it possible to assess emergent learning? How do you 'capture' learning that is not expected? How do you measure or value it? Are these the right questions or are they flawed?

We would welcome your thoughts about these and questions in the other forums.

Many thanks everyone for a great start to the discussion about emergent learning. Although we have by no means finished discussion in the other forum and we can continue there, there were some questions that came up in the webinar, which perhaps we could discuss further.

One question is:

Can we design for emergent learning or is that a contradiction in terms?

Barb - how wonderful to see you here.

As an aside to others, Roy, Simone and I met Barb at a conference in Scotland last year (the University of Stirling). What fun we had!

We would be really interested if you started to use the footprints in your work and would help in any we we can. You might also like to speak to a couple of people who were in yesterday's webinar who have used the footprints. Jutta Pauschenwein from Austria, who has used the footprints extensively with her colleagues and with students and blogs about it from time to time - https://zmldidaktik.wordpress.com/ - You will have to scroll through the posts, but there are plenty of them. Heli Nurmi - http://helistudies.edublogs.org/ - has also used the footprints for personal reflection. Again scroll through to find the posts. And there are lots of examples, some with explanations on our open wiki - http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/Folder+of+Footprints

In next week's webinar we will be going through the drawing of footprints and hope that everyone will take the opportunity to draw one during the webinar - but there is a video on the wiki which explains the process - http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/Drawing+footprints

Looking forward to discussing this with you further.

Great to see you here.

Jenny

Welcome Ila - good to have you with us. If you look in the other forum you will see that Sylvia has posted a link to the recording of yesterday's webinar, so hopefully that will help you to catch up on discussion if you have the time to view it. I need to watch it again myself, as I think there was loads in the chat that I missed.

Jenny