The Emergent vs Emergence Curriculum
What is the difference
These are two different curriculums that sound similar but are different.
The Emergent Curriculum
Emergent curriculum is based on the premise that children are most successful at learning when curriculum experiences account for their interests, strengths, needs, and lived realities
This is based on the idea that whatever emerges in a child should be used to explore. It facilitates learning from the child, not from external sources.
The Emergence Curriculum
This is what I call the emergence curriculum.
This is a different idea that we are the result of our inputs, and that we should feed students with stimuli that represent the best of our civilization at the same time as feeding them obstacles and what’s missing so that they have the drive to create and grow.
The Emergence Curriculum
Emergence is the idea that something new and unexpected arises from simpler parts coming together - and the new thing has properties that none of the individual parts have on their own.
The problem is that many grow up in great education systems with great families and abundant wealth, but they lack a drive, because they don’t need to.
At the same time there are many talents who emerge from poor areas without the best inputs, but they developed an intense drive to overcome their environment and become something far greater. Some of this is partly by luck, but most are held back by it.
The limitation of the emergent curriculum is that things can only emerge that the student has been exposed to already.
The emergence curriculum leaves none of this to chance, and seeks to take students to the best cathedrals, listen to the best music, to have the best teachers that can be found. Or, if they are unable, surrounds them with as much great material, as possible.
So that if they are the average of their inputs, those inputs are pretty damn great, and if they are the best of their inputs they are likely to be even greater still.
The emergence curriculum has a bigger view of human potential, and would seek to invest more in training the teachers and curating the environment for students.
But if we don’t introduce to students real challenge, real tension, real things to overcome, then they will not create and become something greater, they will observe and enjoy what they already experience.