Emergent Curriculum

In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understandings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. The particular interruptive orientations that the authors bring forward include: possibilities for responding to and cultivating the conditions for emergence in ways that disrupt the managerial concerns of everyday practice; troubling the co-optation of emergence by human-centred consumptive practice; and unsettling emergence in conversation with settler colonialism and antiblackness in the places and spaces of early childhood education.

The purpose of this research; a laboratory preschool located in one of the northern states of the United States of America and operating under the Child Development Institute, explains the practices about the Emergent Curriculum and builds a bridge between theory and practice in preschool education. It is thought that bringing good examples of a laboratory school in the United States with a long history in the field of education to the national domain literature will be especially useful for teachers, researchers and specialists working on this field. The method of the study was carried out by the observational case study which is one of the qualitative research designs. In addition, the document analysis method was used to support the information obtained from the observations over time. Obtained data consisted of observations made by the researcher in the preschool, unstructured teacher interviews, and information obtained from the handbook of the kindergarten. The findings are discussed in the headings on the basis of the Emergent Program: Beginning of the day: Arrival in preschool exploration time and gym, large group time/class meeting, activity time and free play, large and small group activities, use of learning centers, outdoor, role of teacher in practice and role of family and parent involvement practices.

This article addresses four intentions that make up a balanced curriculum approach: Guided Discovery, Following Children's Interests, Interactive Modeling, and Compelling Materials.  When teachers address these four intentions they commit to rich, interesting, engaging experiences for young children that build knowledge, skill, and relationship.

This is the chapter that I co-authored with Rachel L.S. Harper for the SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education. Get it here: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_SAGE_Guide_to_Curriculum_in_Educatio.html?id=8t0sCgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false

Curriculum and its’ reforms have received increased attention in international policy in recent years as a means to making education relevant to societal changes. Major curricula reforms focus on providing learners with abilities of learning new skills and knowledge for effective living in the midst of rapid technological change. The reforms have given rise to a range of emergent curriculum trends which have significant implications on how teachers should teach. This paper explores and highlights some of the emergent curriculum trends and the implications for teachers who implement the curricula. The implications are informed by an abundance of research examining how teachers, as facilitators can foster students’ learning by understanding curriculum theory and processes, providing differentiated differentiation; facilitating learner-centered instruction; utilizing multiple instructional strategies, developing global citizens and lifelong learners, and developing emergent curriculum integration of technologies for curriculum delivery.  The paper concludes by pointing to the fact that since emergent curricula trends are geared towards the basic purpose of promoting the full realization of individual’s whole life, teachers should align their teaching to correspond to the trend, acquire more knowledge and skills for responsive teaching, meet the needs of students for all-round development and should manifest basic characteristics and direction of curriculum development essential for global citizens.

This study aims to examine objectives, content, learning experiences and
evaluation components of the curriculum for first grade elementary school implementations inspired by Reggio Emilia approach, and by doing so, to reveal how teacher roles change in such teaching processes and provide recommendations for the implementers. The study was carried out by using holistic single case design. Participant observation, document analysis and semi-structured interview tools were used in order to obtain in-depth information. 32 participants, including first grade elementary school students, class teachers, atelieristas and school psychologist, voluntarily took part in the study. The data of the study were analysed with descriptive analysis technique. The study found that the participants made use of the teacher observations and
the school philosophy as well as the official curriculum when setting the learning outcomes for the activities inspired by Reggio Emilia approach. As for the creation of the content, it was seen that the provocations to raise children’s curiosity, circle chats and the students’ demands were taken into consideration. The learning experiences in the implementations inspired by Reggio Emilia approach were examined for their features in five different aspects including activities, teacher roles, physical, social and emotional environment. In the physical environment, features similar to schools embracing Reggio Emilia approach came out both in the materials and the space. In respect to the emotional environment, it was seen that during the activities inspired by Reggio Emilia approach, the children experienced learning by doing with desire and excitement, learned from wondering, took pleasure and developed self-confidence throughout this process. For the social environment, it was found that the children and teachers were cooperating and helping each other, the forest practices contributed to this state and the course continued with codecision. As for the activities, it was concluded that in addition to the projects developing by the child’s curiosity, the activities which children can participate actively and individual differences were taken into consideration. The study concludedthat the teachers took various roles such as curiosity seeker, researcher, student in order to let students carry out their learning. It was discovered that these roles caused anxiety at the beginning but then they led to satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. It was revealed that in the implementations inspired by Reggio Emilia approach, teachers wrote documentation as evaluation tools and besides this; worksheets, multidisciplinary work and rating scales were used. In conclusion, it can be stated that the first grade elementary school implementations inspired by Reggio Emilia relate to the theoretical framework of the approach to a great extent, especially emergent curriculum insight is adopted by the participants and in addition to this, this approach leads to variance in teacher roles.

Emergent curriculum is a way of constructive activity or curriculum that based on interest and passion, which exploring what is relevant, interesting and personally meaningful between the students, teachers, teaching materials and surrounding interaction. Without this emergent curriculum, the activities in school might be boring and results negative feedback memorization and lack of stimulation and motion in child’s brain. The most important goals that need to be achieve by planning this emergent curriculum, is to respond to every child’s interests. Second is to inspire delight, curiosity and inquiry in the classroom. The process of emergent curriculum requires a lot of creativity and flexibility skills. Teachers are the most important person to emerge curriculum among the young children, so they are delighted, curios and inquiries in the classroom.

By the 21st century, traditional curricula focusing on disciplinary practices are no longer sufficient to answer the new question: How to design a curriculum that allows space for students to discover the world and enrich their critical thinking without fears of making mistakes? In this context, the theory of emergence has gained advocacy from educators who want to avoid simplistic, predefined and reductionist perspectives in education. This paper aims to provide a brief review of the theory of emergence and emergent curriculum, and investigate the philosophy and practices of the Reggio Emelia approach in early childhood education, which bears the features of an emergent curriculum.
With the advent of constructivist, pragmatist, and post-structuralist epistemologies, it is proposed that knowledge is neither a representation of something, nor an object to be transferred from one place to the next. It is continuously made and remade through our engagement with the world. The idea that educators should control all knowledge in the classroom becomes problematic. An emergentist would argue that meaning must be created and therefore, the classroom itself should be treated as a living organism.
The paper employs the inquiry approach, in which a variety of written documents were analyzed in correlation with each other and the most crucial findings were extracted for elaborated discussions. It was found out that a Reggian classroom exemplifies the five conditions sufficient to the emergence of a complex system, and therefore is an exemplary model of emergent curriculum. The author concludes by suggesting that contemporary curriculum design should view and treat education as a living organism. Teachers and educators should consider integrating different forms and means of knowledge into the learning process and encourage students to discover learning at their own pace, in their self-constructed community and under their own control.

By taking a cultural-historical perspective, the present case study put participatory pedagogies into practice for early mathematical learning and sought to delve into children’s emerging mathematising and the teacher’s role who attentively follows children’s initiatives. Drawing on a series of selected critical incidents that evolved as the children of a kindergarten classroom engaged with the investigation of linear measuring tools, we analysed both children’s mathematising processes and teacher’s responsive and mediational acts aiming to promote young learners’ mathematical thinking. With respect to children, the analysis demonstrated how through a series of ongoing mathematising processes, they elaborated and gradually developed key measurement concepts. Regarding the teacher's role, it was found that children’s emerging mathematising was supported by five lines of action enacted by her: (a) documenting thoroughly children’s actions, (b) posing challenging or clarifying ques...

By taking a cultural-historical perspective, the present case study put participatory pedagogies into practice for early mathematical learning and sought to delve into children's emerging mathematising and the teacher's role who attentively follows children's initiatives. Drawing on a series of selected critical incidents that evolved as the children of a kindergarten classroom engaged with the investigation of linear measuring tools, we analysed both children's mathematising processes and teacher's responsive and mediational acts aiming to promote young learners' mathematical thinking. With respect to children, the analysis demonstrated how through a series of ongoing mathematising processes, they elaborated and gradually developed key measurement concepts. Regarding the teacher's role, it was found that children's emerging mathematising was supported by five lines of action enacted by her: (a) documenting thoroughly children's actions, (b) posing challenging or clarifying questions, (c) introducing activities to the plenary as a response to children's actions, (d) motivating children to ask their classmates for help, and (e) creating connections between children's funds of knowledge and key mathematical ideas.

Negotiating curriculum design with students for students involves incorporating both the students’ needs and the lecturers’ requirements into the course structure, learning activities, resources and assessment tasks. In 2012, two lecturers and a group of first year undergraduate students worked together to design an online module within an on-campus course for a second year teacher education degree. During the semester when the online module was conducted, data were gathered from the lecturers and students in the course. Findings from analyses of these data are presented in this paper in terms of: 1) the lecturers’ and students’ initial dreams and plans when the online module was co-designed; 2) the hiccups and problems encountered during the online module; 3) the realities of the successful aspects of the online module; and 4) the lessons learned for future emergent and negotiated curriculum design practices in higher education contexts.