Roy Williams

Hi Kathleen, as Jenny says, below, its very relevant.  

Much of what I learnt about emergence comes from Montessori preschools.  The approach starts a little differently, in my experience.  It assumes children want to explore writing first, and in an embodied way - so ... they get to isolate a few letters (the f of food - see Sesame Street) is a favourite of mine, and food is such an interesting thing for young children, who love to explore what 'is' food and what 'isn't'. 

Then they can explore sandpaper letters, and the practice of writing one letter at a time, then put them together, and so on - reading comes much later, as it is not - in the same way - based on the development of agency in the child, and it is someone else's text. (Reading aligns with agency later on, sure, but not at the beginning).  

Our eldest daughter was going through this process at the time her sister Alice was born, and the next step for her was to write "Alice", and then to repeat that - almost without pause, for 3 days - she did little else during this time, except to write Alice, Alice, Alice .... until she decided she had 'got' it.  Then she left that behind, and went on to other things. 

Point is, the process was driven by the availability of 'intentional' learning objects and learning practices, which she could choose from, and pursue until she had decided she had got it / mastered it, and then never had to return to it, or be 'assessed' in doing it.

Internal motivation, linked into 'intentionallly designed' learning objects - (see the discussion elsewhere in these forums on 'intention', and what we might call the dance between the intention of the open learning environment / structure and the emerging intention of the learner) - if sustained, can go a long way (all the way? I dont know - it depends on whether the designer is astute enough to recognise the emergent intentionality of the learner, and translate/transcribe that into intentionally designed learning objects / learning practices - its a big ask for anyone, and we're not all designers - certainly not at that level. 

More problematic is base 10, which Napoleon imposed on us to the exclusion of all other counting systems (although some survive, like our base 60/12/24 for time). There is nothing intuitive about base 10 - I for one much prefer 12 (or 5 if you must), but Montessori (who was firstly a mathematician) managed to design intentional learning objects for that too - like the wonderful 'pink tower'. 

There's also a whole trajectory of 'embodied' learning to consider, and its role in emergence and 'natural' learning - not only at preschool level - but that's another story.

Hi Barb, great to see you here.  Welcome.  The redesign sound excellent.  Jutta has used the footprints to work through design and re-design, to good effect. Inevitably the footprints of the designer/s, participants, teachers,etc will be different - that should make for interesting conversations about how the design, the space (the invitations, opening, and holding - see above) work or dont work for particular people at particular phases in the event. 

In a sense this can provide the basic inputs for what Etienne Wenger calls a learning partnership, in which everyone seeks to learn from each other - which is a very different way to collaboratively reflect on the learning process, rather than to 'evaluate' it. But I'm sure you know all this already - looking forward to seeing how it works out. 

Glen, love to hear more on ITI's.  

It might not be transferable, but there is a wonderful example of 'research-based' learning in a book by Lada Aidarova: Child development and Education, in which she got her first grade Russian speaking pupils to go out with a notebook and research linguistic practices - what we would now call Hallidayian linguistics.

She started by getting them to tell her what 'researchers' were, and did, and then sent them out to describe, for instance, how people in their families and neighbourhoods said 'hello' in different contexts.  She built up from there to getting them to set their own comprehension tests at the end of first grade, which included many items which the 'curriculum' had reserved for grade 3 or even 4. 

So they built up their own data-base of empirically found and validated texts, and their own assessment bank. She had an interest - (see one of the discussions, above) which guided all of this, which was a sophisticated understanding and love of applied linguistics, but she never had to mention the word linguistics to them - she just got them to do it - to their and her surprise. 

Peter, if we are talking about the 'new open' space (forget about MOOCs for a moment, they are wonderful, but can be a distraction) ...

1. Its not so new - as in your example, and the variety of case studies we - and others - are exploring in terms of emergence. 

2. Redefining:  open / the new open / social learning / ... add to taste ... 

requires us to shift away from outcomes, goals, aims etc - certainly as they have been colonised by the bureaucratic administration of 'schooling' - which in the UK now includes the requirement that all PhD students report - in person - to their supervisors every one or two weeks - reimposing physical space on a hybrid, networked world - can you beat that?  

And 'an interest' that both opens up the space and invites people in, and 'holds' the space is a really neat way to reconceptualise / reconfigure that pedagogical discourse, thanks. 'Holding space' is such a tentative balancing act, full of paradox and ambiguity, no? 

Hi All - I'll come in at this point in the 'space' - hopefully it will be at the right place (and I cant help thinking of the metaphors in Phillip Pullmans 'Dark Materials' trilogy (which I have finally made the space to read) - the metaphor there is using the 'subtle knife' to cut through to different worlds - it  keeps appearing in my mind (but that's just me). 

Intentionality (Joyce), opening space and holding it (Brenda), Ba as virtual space (Ila) ... (Stephen Downes, in the MOOC research JAM, yesterday, said he preferred 'presence' to 'space', but I think the terms overlap) and purpose (Scott) all really open up new thoughts and challenges for me - thanks. And I also love the idea of 'emergence as the embodiment of the unexpected'. 

Where does this go?  For me, it opens up a new train of thought which goes something like this: 

1. Emergence is often characterised as the co-evolution of structure (see 'space') and agency (of the participants).  

However ...

2. This rather assumes that the intentionality is on the side of the participant, and the structure (and the given) is on the side of the provider/designer/ teacher. 

What strikes me in all this discussion is that it might be better to see 'structure' as having its own intentionality (open, closed, challenging, comforting, consolidating, innovative, and so on ...) alongside the intentionality of the participant.  

This then shifts the model to ... 

3. The dance between the implicit intentionality of the structure / space (which has its own 'presence' if you take Stephen Downes view) and the intentionality of the participant.  Wow.  That moves things on very interestingly, though I am not sure where it will end up ... 

Perhaps one trajectory would be ... 

4. Learning which is open to transformation (that's another theme, opened up in posts above) is the co-evolution of these two clouds (?) of intentionality.  

But maybe I'm getting into metaphor overload here ...