An Experimental Hope: The Case for Emergent Pedagogy

• Main Author: Stoller, Aaron
• Other Authors: Political Science
• Format: Others
• Published: Virginia Tech 2015
• Subjects: Pedagogy; Higher Education; Pragmatism; Hermeneutics; Aesthetics; Epistemology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/51952

This dissertation will make the case that education at the post-secondary level must be reimagined. Rather than being organized around abstract bodies of information, it must be centered on moments of transformation out of which teaching, learning, knowing and -- in fact -- democratic individuals emerge. This reconstruction of education takes place through two primary moves. First, I make the case that contemporary schooling is grounded in a flawed model of knowing, which draws together mistakes in thinking about the nature of the self, of knowledge, and of the world, which are contained in the epistemological proposition: "S knows that p." In doing so, I argue that the German conception of Bildung must replace "S knows that p" as the guiding paradigm of knowing within educational practice. In doing so, I develop a theory of creative inquiry in order to claim that knowledge emerges from embodied, social action and is a form of artistic practice. Second, I develop a pedagogy, which I call emergent pedagogy, based on the theory of inquiry articulated in the first half. Here, I argue that post-secondary pedagogy must emerge out of the contexts, situations, and communities in which students and faculty are embedded. In this way, pedagogy must be considered a kind of artistic practice in which methods are adapted to and intuited from unique problems experienced by the university community. Ultimately, I show that pedagogy must shift from being viewed as a kind of telling and hearing to a form of participatory making. === Ph. D.