So often in teaching we talk of learning intentions and learning outcomes. Our teaching is often judged to be either successful or not depending on whether the learners managed to achieve what we set out to do. This is not controversial but there are pitfalls in demanding too strict an alignment between what is intended and what is learnt. Rather than bring this into a conventional educational discussion about the differences between ‘authoritarian’ and ‘laissez-faire’ teaching, or direct instruction and minimal guidance, or providing practical experiences for pupils and teacher lecturing from the front, Wenger (1998, p. 267) reminds us that ‘the real issue underlying all these debates is the interaction of the planned and the emergent’.
There is of course a relationship between what is intended by teachers and what pupils end up doing but it is not a simple one. It is not correct to assume that highly rigid and controlling teaching extinguishes the agency of its pupils, and it is similarly also not correct to say that open-ended learning intentions tend to unleash pupils’ autonomy and engagement. Rather we should expect and assume that pupils exercise their agency all the time and that there is always an emergent element to what is learnt. We should pay attention to what emerges too as it tells teachers vitally important information about how and whether pupils are understanding something. It can even open many teaching opportunities that we had not anticipated beforehand.
We have already seen how the assembly line workers in automotive factories gradually began to learn and practice speaking English to each other (see ‘why culturalism and computationalism are not opposed?’). Not only did this become far more important to the workers themselves and their families and communities than the repetitive and dull work they were doing but Ford himself took advantage of this emergent learning by providing instruction and lessons for workers to become even more proficient in English.
I am often struck by the sound of industrial machinery in much modern popular music. While there is a musical genre that has become labelled ‘industrial’, which is generally attributed to a fusion of electronic rock with a punk influence from the mid-70s, the sounds and rhythms of machinery can be heard ubiquitously in much other popular music. Perhaps the most clear example of the influence of mechanical sounds in the development of music is again from the factory workers in Detroit in the 1950s and 60s and the development of Motown music. Inside the Motown musical compositions you can hear the rhythm of the machinery, the drone of the belts and the screeching descants of drilling humanised with the yearning emotion that makes it so compelling. What is emergent in this case is clearly derived from the all-pervading noises of the workplace and the tendency for minds to wander while doing tasks that have become so automatic and repetitive that they barely warrant thought or attention. For the individuals creating this music often in their free time and often in collaboration with others, this brought about new friendships, new opportunities, made hitherto hidden talents more visible, and eventually was to delight millions of people at gigs, festivals and on vinyl recordings.
There are many other examples of these emergent practices in history which may well not have been intended or caused by those in authority but the emergent practices themselves would likely not have happened had it not been for the circumstances of the setting. Unlike the example of the Motown music above, some of these emergent practices can be characterised by forms of concealment, defiance or disobedience. One interesting artefact that guided tours of Chester Cathedral commonly stop and reflect on is the nine-men’s morris gameboard messily carved into one of the pillars of the nave. The carving is clearly illicit as it is in one of the darkest corners of the whole cathedral and perhaps bears testimony to what bored monks and pilgrims did in the 15th Century instead of contemplating the endless recitations. I sometimes wonder whether this gaming was just for amusement or whether there were bets and gambling too. In a similarly way the prohibition laws against drugs nowadays or alcohol in the past have resulted in practices of concealment and defiance. The assumption that by banning these substances and enshrining this in law would stop people from accessing them is simplistic and naïve. Instead, what emerges from laws like this is that the practice of obtaining these illicit substances is driven underground and falls into the hands of organised criminals who are often too well-versed in ‘playing’ the policing practices of the time to ever get caught. It is simplistic to say that there is a clear causal relationship between prohibition and the rise of organised crime, speakeasies, county lines and so on but it is also true that the latter would likely not have become so prominent or emerged in the first place had it not been for prohibition.
Perhaps the most startling examples of emergent activity as forms of concealed defiance is through the experiences and activities of those who are imprisoned. The continual and seemingly inextinguishable spirit of human invention is ever present in the many stories of those, for example in Prisoner of War camps, who in defiance of their captors made life more tolerable in many small but significant ways and who also managed to tunnel, map their environment, and obtain clothing to escape. The story of the US Admiral Jim Stockdale is one of the many examples of this. He was imprisoned in a Vietnamese Prisoner of War camp, the notorious ‘Hanoi Hilton’, for 8 years in horrendously cruel conditions. While the camp authorities unleashed a regime of extreme compliance and control over the POWs which often involved torture and brutality, Stockdale did everything he could to organise his fellow prisoners and keep them from harm. This involved inventing systems of communication in code enabling the prisoners to talk to each other, and instituting techniques that helped them to deal with torture. He was even able to communicate to the outside world and to his wife in coded messages that gave intelligence to the American authorities. These actions and the many others he took during those grim years ultimately helped him and his fellow POWs get through their incarceration alive.
Emergent activity is not necessarily the product of defiance but it of course can be. As Wenger said the art for a teacher in a classroom is to try to find some interaction between what is planned and what is emergent. Teachers may be tempted out of frustration to force pupils and students who are engaging in activity they deem irrelevant, to comply with their own planned activities and learning objectives. As has been said in other posts, however, this will not extinguish the emergent activity but more likely make it something that pupils will conceal. This will shut off the lines of interaction between the pupils and teacher and make it less likely for pupils to find meaning in what is planned for them. It runs the risk of pupils becoming like the 15th century monks of Chester Cathedral or the musical composers stuck in assembly line drudgery. Far better is for teachers to learn the lessons from how Ford encouraged his workers to learn English by taking advantage of opportunities afforded by what appears to be emerging.
Some years ago, I was privileged to work with an Associate History teacher who was fascinated by the local history of Birkenhead and who on the advice of the school he was working in, produced a wonderful local study of Birkenhead from 1901 to the end of World War Two (Bird & Jones, 2017). The study was genuinely innovative because he relied on primary source evidence from 6 families who lived in Birkenhead including their census records from 1901 and 1911, photos of their homes and neighbourhood, and military service records, and oral history from an evacuee in order to tell the story of Birkenhead through their lives. He had carefully chosen the 6 families based on the fact that some of the children of the families who were recorded as infants in 1911 grew up to serve in world war two and in some cases sadly perished in it.
This proved to be a fascinating case in point in relation to this notion of emergence. As the pupils became acquainted with the sources of evidence, and began to feel connections to the people recorded in them, their enquiries and questions began to multiply to the point where the teacher was no longer able to follow his own learning objectives. This presented the teacher with a classic teacher’s choice; either affirm and reassert his objectives and attempt to extinguish the pupils’ own enquiries; or indulge the pupils’ enquiries. He chose the latter, which turned out to be the right choice, because listening to the pupils’ enquiries gave him a far clearer understanding of the pupils’ own level of understanding, including their misconceptions. By doing this he learnt that his own objectives were far too ambitious, and could only have been achieved in mirage. Such important reflections could only have taken place through engagement in this curriculum development project, which is why it is so critical for teachers to engage in innovation and development and spend time learning and reflecting on them.
It is not correct that there is always misalignment between teachers’ learning objectives and the pupils’ emergent activities. Similarly, there is no proposal here to put pupils to work on assembly lines in order to help them learn foreign languages or unleash their musical creativity! We must distinguish between institutional cultures and settings on the one hand and pedagogies on the other. The proposal here is that we need to centre our curricular and teaching reflection on the pupils’ experience and in particular what seems to emerge as important to them. Our job must be to honour and listen to it so that we can realign our objectives to better fit with them. In this way we are far more likely to encourage pupils’ access to meaning and understanding and refresh our own understanding of pupils. Similarly for those who find themselves teaching in schools where there is a rather oppressive institutional culture of compliance, the lessons from this to learn is that pupils may be complying on the surface, but what is being concealed?
Bird, M., & Jones, M. (2017). looking Through the Keyhole at Birkenhead from 1900 to 1950 with Year 7: negotiating meanings and bacon bones. Teaching History(169), 20-27.
Collins, J. (2004). Good to Great. Random House.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.