Emergent Teaching inspires teachers to teach with more spontaneity and creativity within an educational environment that is highly constrained. It demonstrates, through descriptive stories, creative strategies and provides an intellectual foundation for emergent teaching. The authors show how teachers can relate subject matter to students' lives and experience. They illustrate rituals and processes that help establish a caring learning community. Finally, the book applies the theories of complexity and chaos while reaffirming the natural wisdom that teachers possess within themselves. The authors have chosen a narrative format that "models" rather than "tells," and encourages readers to connect to their own stories and experiences.
The book is consistent with the theoretical understandings and research in the complexity sciences but takes a narrative approach, giving examples and illustrations of ideas through stories, myths, and parables that act as metaphors and illustrations. Key topics and practices embedded in these stories include:

teaching the whole person strategies for creative teaching new understandings of processmeaning-centered learningbuilding community in the classroomstrengthening the student/teacher relationship project-based learning using art and nature in teaching embodied learningincorporating story and narrative in teachingrites of passageembracing the unpredictable, uncharted spaces in teaching

By Sam Crowell and David Reid-Marr

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1What Is Emergent Teaching?
2Indra's Net: Non-Separation as the Foundation for Emergent Teaching
3Process From An Emergent Perspective: Event-Centric Teaching
4The Shape of a Snake: Non-linearity and Emergence
5Fostering a Learning State of Mind: Play, Joy, and Irreverence
6Creativity: The Ceaseless Imperative
7Aunt Kath Serves Tea: Ritual and Emergence
8In the World - Teaching What Really Matters
9When the Curriculum Disappears - A Holistic Perspective
10The Path to Emergent Teaching in Classrooms and Schools
Epilogue
References