Challenge to Emergent Pedagogy:

Beyond Emergent Pedagogy. What Happens When Agents Resist:
A Report from the Summer Institute

The articulation of this great irony, that the act of recognition is always an act of "determinateness" and "fixing," and thus will always be resisted, goes back at least as far as Hegel's 1807 essay on "Lordship and Bondage."
Hegel, articulates the stages in The Phenomenology of Mind: those of mutual recognition, opposition, consciousness, labor, and self-enfranchisement.

As we concluded our opening presentation, we asked participants to write on-line, and then to read aloud to the group, a short story about some change they made--or chose not to make--in their teaching or learning or life. One of the teachers refused to read her contribution to the group: "We are not children. Adults don't like to be read to, and I try to respect what people want." Her refusal to perform publicly her own relationship to change was our first indication that our attempts to gather all participants into a single story--however commodious, however complex and paradoxical--were going to be continually met with resistance.

Resistance/defiance or identity with other/outside, locks or at least limits movement/growth/action. Begins cycle of Disengagement/dis-enfranchisement.

Paul Willis’s description of Midlands ‘lads’ in Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977). Willis demonstrates that the "lads" in his study "disqualify themselves from the middle class," "self-produce themselves as workers "by defining themselves, in antagonism, as others of bourgeois culture.

Lila Abu-Lughod’s description of Egyptian Bedouin women in “The Romance of Resistence" (1989): "If the systems of power are multiple, then resisting at one level may catch people up at other levels." (Her example is Egyptian Bedouin women who free themselves from the control of their mothers-in-laws by becoming more directly and narrowly dependent on their husbands. In the name of increasing freedom, the women are "backing in" to new forms of subjection.)

Extending Hegel's "self-enfranchisement":

Hegel's essay also provides, presciently, a cogent analysis of how a student might move out of the sort of "self-damnation" that Willis laments, beyond the seemingly inevitable stand-off between recognition and resistance: "precisely in labour where there seemed to be merely some outsider's mind and ideas involved, the bondsman becomes aware...of having and being a 'mind of his own.'"

Resistance begins the defining of self.
Engagement or moving “in”, requires accepting agency / defining self
Defining self requires interacting and accepting “other”, accepting the “outside”.
Once trust is established between inside and out and self confidence is gained, then exploration of other can begin without fear of losing self.
Through work/engagement self is further developed and constructed.

It seemed to us that precisely this phenomenon--actively contributing to the data-gathering and observation-making that is the work of science, and to the pedagogical innovation that is teaching students to do the same--would enable our participants to move beyond the conventional "resistence" that so many students demonstrate in relationship to their teachers. The classes which succeeded best were certainly those in which participants were asked, not to attempt replicating an experiment in which the results were already known, but rather to gather data for new ways of organizing the world. Through such labor, they were laying the foundation for what Hegel calls "formative self-enfranchisement."

They flourished, for example, in the "evolution revolution" designed for them by a colleague in biology, who asked them to sort and classify a wide diversity of life forms, according to schemes which made sense to them. They were able to acknowledge the validity of the organizing patterns they themselves had designed.

Another colleague in geology helped them to understand the complexities of "global change" by asking them to describe what they knew about what happens in their classrooms: What causes changes in students' attention spans? What happens if a perturbation--a distraction--occurs? Recognizing how their classrooms worked as systems, they were able to extrapolate to the complex interactions underlying climate change, to see how small changes in one area could have very large effects in another.

Another colleague in computer science used "water-based computation" and the computer program "Alice" (an object-based way to teach the properties, methods and functions of computing). These activities helped participants move from computer "literacy" to "fluency": "getting the concepts behind the applications, being capable of applying these skills in various contexts."

All of these exercises were composed of multiple trials and errors, with plenty of time and space for asking questions about what was working (or not), and why (or why not).

Lessons for Educators:

Strive for engagement, but again realize that that in itself is a line that some may not cross.
Allow for time to build trust….students trusting you, and you trusting that students will eventually choose to engage/explore.