Teaching to emerge: Toward a bottom-up pedagogy

Abstract

This paper focuses on the conceptual model of an academic course inspired by complexity theory. In the proposed conceptual model, the aim of teaching is to form a learning organization: a knowledge community with emergent properties that cannot be reduced to any linear combination of the properties of its parts. In this approach, the learning of the participants depends not so much on their individual action, as on being the coevolving parts of a self-organized whole. In this design, the role of the educator is to catalyze emergence and to facilitate bottom-up knowledge production. To achieve this, we present a systematic way to orchestrate in-class face-to-face activities in small groups while utilizing common web technologies to facilitate online collective action.

Keywords

• complex systems
• complexity theory
• emergence
• learning
• teaching
• pedagogy
• small groups
• group work
• systems
• collaborative learning