Emergence: Complexity Pedagogy in Action

Abstract EN

Many educators are looking for new ways to engage students and each other in order to enrich curriculum and the teaching-learning process.

We describe an example of how we enacted teaching-learning approaches through the insights of complexity thinking, an approach that supports the emergence of new possibilities for teaching-learning in the classroom and online.

Our story begins with an occasion to meet with 10 nursing colleagues in a three-hour workshop using four activities that engaged learning about complexity thinking and pedagogy.

Guiding concepts for the collaborative workshop were nonlinearity, distributed decision-making, divergent thinking, self-organization, emergence, and creative exploration.

The workshop approach considered critical questions to spark our collective inquiry.

We asked, “What is emergent learning?” and “How do we, as educators and learners, engage a community so that new learning surfaces?” We integrated the arts, creative play, and perturbations within a complexity approach.