This article was downloaded by: ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"]

On: 05 January 2015, At: 19:26

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Curriculum Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors
and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tcus20

Cognition, co‐emergence,
curriculum
A. Brent Davis , Dennis J. Sumara & Thomas E. Kieren
Published online: 29 Sep 2006.

To cite this article: A. Brent Davis , Dennis J. Sumara & Thomas E. Kieren (1996)
Cognition, co‐emergence, curriculum, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 28:2, 151-169, DOI:
10.1080/0022027980280203

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0022027980280203

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information
(the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor
& Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties
whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose
of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the
opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by
Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and
should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor
and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,
demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to
or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-
licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly
forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
 J. CURRICULUM STUDIES, 1996, VOL. 28, NO. 2, 1 5 1 - 1 6 9

Cognition, co-emergence, curriculum

A. BRENT DAVIS, DENNIS J. SUMARA,

and THOMAS E. KIEREN
This paper describes a theory of curriculum co-emergence by which the various
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

components of curriculum action (e.g. students, teachers, texts and processes) are
understood to exist in a dynamic and mutually specifying relationship. Drawn from
studies in biology, ecology, cognition, phenomenology and contemporary philosophical
hermeneutics, this theory of co-emergence is used to analyse two classroom interactions:
an elementary school lesson on fractions and a secondary school unit on the topic of
anti-racism. Through these examples, the co-emergent and intertwining natures
of knowledge (individual and collective) and identity (individual and collective) are
explored. The paper concludes with a discussion of how a conception of curriculum as
a co-emergent phenomenon can help us to overcome the unhelpful dichotomies that
tend to be enacted in both child- and subject-centred pedagogies.

Whatever we do in every domain, whether concrete (walking) or abstract (philosophical

reflection), involves us totally in the body... Everything we do is a structural dance in the
choreography of existence. (Maturana and Varela 1987: 248)
What is my answer to the question of knowing? I surrender to the belief that my knowing
is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation.
(Bateson 1979: 93)
I am experience. With each breath. Experience. Regardless of context, I am running a
course... Currere is to run. (Pinar and Grumet 1976: vii)
A fractional amount is missing. We know that it is more than one-fourth and it is less than
three-fourths. Can you find an amount that it might be?
This Missing Fraction Mystery has been presented to a class of eight-year-
olds. In their groups of two and three, the students begin searching for
possibilities and a number of different strategies quickly emerge. Many use
their Fraction Kits1 to build solutions; others make diagrams on paper; some
write mathematical sentences; a few either talk about it with their partners
or sit quietly in apparent thought. During this action the teacher moves
among the students, observing, listening, chatting, and requesting that some
of the work be written or drawn on the chalkboard. Soon there are a dozen
different solutions on display, a few of which are presented in figure 1.
Asked for elaboration, Tasha explains that she 'just got it'. Sarah suggests
that her own solution (^ + ^ ) works because 'a half is two-fourths and

A. Brent Davis is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education in the Faculty of

Education, University of British Columbia, 2125 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada
V6T 1Z4. He is interested in the implications for mathematics teaching of recent develop-
ments in ecological thought and curriculum theory.
Dennis J. Sumara, an Assistant Professor of English language arts education and curriculum
theory in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, conducts research into the
function of the literary imagination within school settings.
Thomas E. Kieren is the Killam Annual Professor of Mathematics Education at the University
of Alberta. He conducts research into mathematical understanding, curriculum and cognition.
0022-0272/96 $12·00 © 1996 Taylor & Francis Ltd
 152 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

One half
Jnd three
sixteenths 10 . 1 _ n

ii
•
Tasha's Solution Sarah's Solution Jiema's Solution
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

1.1. 1 . 1 .
T l T f T5 + 3Z + 10 +
. 1 0 - -5 +. 1 -1 0 -0 . 5-1
T T r T T T T

l +
. l . +l . l
2.5 ? I T 2T6+5T2

Marty's Solutions Victor's Solution Sam's Solution

Figure 1. Some solutions to the Missing Fraction Mystery.

three-sixteenths is a bit smaller than one-fourth'. The class discusses Jiema's

answer and eventually agrees that it is a proper solution because it is 'exactly
one-sixteenth less than three-fourths' and 'way more than one-fourth'.
Marty explains that his second solution works because 'It's obviously
more than one-fourth, but less than three-fourths', adding, 'An eighth is a
half of a fourth'. Victor describes a process of repeated division, suggesting
that his diagram was limited by the constraints of the drawing utensils, not
by the boundaries of his imagination. Sam describes his response in terms
of 'adding in' and 'taking away' —and the final term in his number sentence
seems to have been something of an afterthought as he recalled the original
question.

The problem of diversity

These examples provide some limited sense of the range of the students'
answers. In this paper we explore this sort of diversity of action, asking:
'How does it arise?' and, 'How might its presence affect the way we think
about curriculum?'.
Our starting point is to challenge a few of the premises that seem to
underlie the activities of many curriculum makers. We question, for example,
the convictions that learning outcomes should be pre-specified and that, once
such objectives are selected, learning sequences can be devised to ensure that
they are effectively achieved. In brief, two pervasive-and we believe
troublesome-'assumptions' 2 seem to be almost universally enacted in
schools: first, that we are able to identify the skills and the knowledge
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 153

that learners will need to become full participants in society and, second, that
learning is controllable.
Evidence for these assumptions can be found in our everyday language.
Consider, for example, our pervasive use of computer metaphors in
characterizing cognition. Learning and thought are often described as
matters of inputting, processing and retrieving data. From this perspective,
cognition is thought to be about acquiring appropriate (inner) representa-
tions of some pre-given (outer) reality. Such orientations to curriculum and
to cognition undergird programmes of study that seek out convergence rather
than embracing diversity. The question, ' i + •§• = ?' for example, especially
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

when presented alongside several others of similar form, offers little

opportunity for uncovering the inevitable diversity of student action; rather,
it is intended to assist learners in acquiring representations that match with
the mathematics of the real world. The measure of learning in this
representationist frame is the level of correspondence between student
responses and pre-specified solutions. Learning is thought to have some
predetermined outcome: both teacher and student will know exactly what
comprises this end-point. Furthermore, when this desired product of
learning is achieved, we tend to think that the teaching caused the learning
to take place.
The diverse work of the learners in our opening vignette occasions us to
think otherwise. How could the teacher be considered the 'cause' of these
students' actions? Is it reasonable to attribute, as much of the research into
teaching and learning over the past half-century has done, the complex and
varied actions of learners to particular teacher actions? Or is it necessary
to look more carefully at the dynamic, ever-evolving fabric of social
experience and cognitive action which co-emerges within particular events
of curriculum?
The orientation to inquiry that seeks to isolate particular events and
to identify the relationships between factors that are believed to be
separable - an orientation which has been mistakenly referred to as 'scientific'
(Foshay 1991) —is one that is now being challenged on several levels,
particularly in relation to its usefulness in the educational setting. Consistent
with the conclusions of researchers working with chaos (Gleick 1988) and
complexity (Waldrop 1992) theories, and as supported by the students'
actions during the Missing Fraction Mystery, we argue that we cannot hope
to predetermine the consequences of any particular teaching or curricular
act. Like any social event, learning is a complex phenomenon; it resists the
linear and causal reductions that are often imposed in misguided efforts to
control it. From this perspective, learning should not be understood in terms
of a sequence of actions, but in terms of an ongoing structural dance-a
complex choreography-of events which, even in retrospect, cannot be fully
disentangled and understood, let alone reproduced.
An idea that we find helpful in dealing with the issue of causality in
learning is Maturana and Varela's concept of structure determinism,3 a concept
that Varela (1992: 50) introduces through the analogy of a wind chime:
Imagine in your mind's eye and ear a mobile, with thin pieces of glass dangling like
leaves off branches, and so on. Any gust of wind will cause the mobile to tinkle, the whole
structure changing its speed, torsion of branches, etc. Clearly, how the mobile sounds
 154 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

is not determined or instructed by the wind or the gentle push we may give it. The way
it sounds has more to do with the kinds of structural configurations it has when it
receives a perturbation or imbalance. Every mobile will have a typical melody and tone
proper to its constitution. In other words, it is obvious from this example that in order
to understand the sound patterns we hear, we turn to the nature of the chimes and not
to the wind that hits them.

As we listen to a chime, it is easy to think that its sound is causedhy the wind.
However, as Varela argues, it is more powerful (and indeed more
explanatory) to think of the sound as resulting from the structure of the wind
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

chime. To be sure, a gentle breeze or our touch in passing provide

opportunity for the chiming, but that sounding is determined (caused) by the
structure or design of the chime itself.
The same is true of human action-although we must qualify our use of
the term 'structure' before pursuing the analogy. Unlike the relatively simple
structure of chime, our structures are highly complex and plastic, arising
from the continuing interplay of biological constitution and socially and
historically framed experience. Building on Merleau-Ponty's (1962) funda-
mental intuition of our double embodiment-whereby our bodies are
understood simultaneously as physical-biological structures and lived-
phenomenological structures-one's self4 is a dynamic and fluid structure
that is constantly changing and that is always re-configuring itself.5
Understood in this way, the human self does not evolve and develop in any
linear or sequential manner through a process of accretion. Rather, as
Heidegger (1962) has suggested, the self is always thrown into a world of
historically effected conditions, and at the same time contributes to the fabric
of those ever-evolving conditions. What we say about our lived experiences,
then, is not simply an account of what has happened. Narrating the events
of our intertwined relations contributes to a re-interpreting of already-lived
events in relation to unfolding events. From this perspective, an understand-
ing of self is not abstracted from the world which contains it but, rather, is
the world. Knowing, being, and doing are not three things. They are one.
What does this suggest about the lived experience of curriculum action?
Returning to the students' work, we notice that Tasha seemed to feel that
the logic of her solution was evident in her action of laying out the pieces;
no further explanation was needed. Sarah and Jiema used drawings and
descriptive expressions. Victor made use of a more abstract notion by
extending the fraction kit. Marty's and Sam's solutions-which are quite
different from one another-were expressed symbolically. It seems problem-
atic to regard these solutions as indicators of a process whereby children
create mental models that match or reflect an external reality... there was
simply no original being copied or mirrored. Further, if the word 'cause' is
used in any strict sense, the very diversity of the solutions seems to deny the
usefulness of any claim that they were caused by the teacher's actions.
Of course, we must be careful not to dissociate the teacher from the
situation-he did, after all, ask the orientating question. The critical point,
however, is that these students' world of lived action was not determined by
the teacher's action, nor strictly constrained by what was already provided.
These students were participating in the creating or unfolding of the world,
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 155

while at the same time effecting their own structures. In a phrase, they and
their world were co-emerging.

Knowing is doing is being

Departing from conventional conceptions of cognition, by which thought is
conceived as an internal and largely invisible process, Varela et al. (1991)
argue that a fuller understanding of the phenomenon of learning must
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

embrace the dynamic and complex interplay of individual and environment,

refusing to separate knowledge from action, refusing to forget the body.
For them, knowing is doing which, in the end, cannot be extracted from an
understanding of self-identity (being).
This conflation of knowledge, action and identity marks a radical
departure from the pervasive and commonsensical conception of knowledge
as an object to be sought after, acquired, possessed and used. In bringing
together doing, knowing and being, enactivist6 theorists have directed our
attention to that body of unformulated, tacit, embodied knowing that we
continuously enact as we move through the world. That knowledge which
is available to our consciousness- we might refer to it as 'formulated' (Taylor
1991a) or 'narrated' (Bruner 1990, Kerby 1991)-represents only the tip of
the iceberg of our knowing. Further, as we will elaborate later, equating
knowing with doing and being effectively obliterates the problematic
Cartesian gap between personal and collective knowledge; these collapse in
the phenomenon of shared or joint action.
The shift in attention to unformulated knowledge/action places us at odds
with the overwhelming emphasis in most curriculum discourse on formal
and formulated knowledge-a focus which is deceptively easy to defend.
Commonsense tells us that learning is first and foremost about thought-but
these arguments tend to take for granted that troublesome distinction
between thought and action. Furthermore, if learning is thought to have
some particular end-point (i.e. producing predetermined representations of
the 'correct' answer to be used in some future existence in the world), then
it is necessary to separate knowledge from action and identity. After all, it
is impossible to believe that knowledge, action, and identity co-specify one
another if one believes that curriculum objectives are to be pre-specified prior
to self-identified action-in-the-world. That is why curriculum tends to focus
on the formulated rather than the unformulated. The formulated becomes the
pre-specified theme of a short story, the perimeter of a rectangle, the product
of 4 X 4, while the unformulated is often marginalized as the intuition, the
fantasy, and daydream, the impulse or the hunch. Is there any way that this
unuseful separation between what is known, what is done and who one is can
be overcome during events of curriculum?
Again we might use the activity reported in the opening vignette to
illustrate our point. In a typical mathematics class, the temptation might have
been to focus on the final products of the students' efforts-i.e. their symbolic
representations and their logical arguments-in order to assess the appropri-
ateness of their actions and to judge the worth of the activity. Enactivism
 156 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

prompts us to attend as closely to the preceding actions-the unformulated

exploration, the undirected movement, the unstructured interaction,
wherein the body is wholly engaged in mathematical play-as to the formal
mathematical ideas that might emerge from those actions. As Merleau-Ponty
(1962: 137) concisely phrased it, 'Consciousness is in the first place not a
matter of "I think that" but of "I can" '.
If we look again at Tasha's solution it is evident that she seems to have
some tacit understanding of the mathematical task undertaken. Yet, when
asked how she arrived at her solution, she suggested that she 'just got it'.
No other explanation was given. What can we say about Tasha's
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

mathematical understanding? Was her answer just a guess? Or did she have
some sophisticated understanding of mathematics that she was unable to
translate into oral expression? If we believe that thought is somehow separate
from action we would be led to believe that Tasha really did not know the
mathematical concept being explored. Being unable to explain her cognitive
process would suggest that she is merely guessing. If, however, we believe
that doing is knowing, and that unformulated knowledge/action is as much
a part of the identity of the learner as formulated knowledge, we will believe
that, in fact, Tasha is thinking/acting/being mathematical.
We do not wish to overstate the point by claiming that curriculum
theorists have been ignoring the role of the body in learning. The increasingly
popular constructivist epistemologies, for example, make this same point.
In particular, radical constructivism (von Glasersfeld 1984) has identified as
its subject/object of study the individual's cognition. But while such
cognition is based on, and drawn out of experience in an environment, the
interactional dynamics with the environment are only considered from the
point of view of the individual. Similarly, while social interaction is seen as
a contributor to cognition, it is not considered in its own right, but only in
terms of the felt constraints on the individual. Thus, while constructivism
has given us the basis for insight into individual cognition, it has proved an
inadequate framework for (albeit although an important contributor to) the
re-interpretation of teaching. Simply put, constructivism does not invite or
enable us to address such critical issues as our tremendous interactive
capacities, our complex social situations, or the moral/ethical dimensions of
schooling.7 As such, it is of limited value-and might even be argued to be
counterproductive 8 -in discussions of teaching and education.
This point might be illustrated by comparing the constructivist's and the
enactivist's answers to the question, 'What is the role of the teacher?'.
The former might put it as follows: the student constructs the knowledge;
the teacher constructs the student. In other words, the teacher actively builds
a model of the learner's knowing as the learner, in response to a host of
influences and experiences, builds his/her conceptualizations. While these
coincidental constructive activities are clearly interrelated and dynamically
reciprocal, there is a sense that each of the participants is engaged in
constructing a reality which is, in the end, unavoidably subjective.
Enactivism, in departing from constructivism, does not focus so
exclusively on the individual's actions nor solely on the individual's
structural dynamics. Emerging from its affiliation with contemporary
ecological thought, the subject of investigation is not the child but, to
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 157

paraphrase Bateson (1979), the learner-in-her/his-environment. That is

to say, the concern is not with how the cognizing agent conies to know the
world, but with how learner-and-learned, knower-and-known, self-and-
other 9 co-evolve and are co-implicated. Context is not merely a place which
contains the student; the student literally is part of the context.
Put differently, enactivist theorists begin and end their analyses with an
acknowledgement of the fundamental inextricability of all things. This is not
to say that we cannot or should not make distinctions (between the reader
and the text, for example), but that we must bear in mind that such
distinctions are mere conveniences. As ecological theorists such as Bateson
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

have alerted us, we cannot think of subjects and objects as unities that
are coincidental but independent. Far from merely existing relatively
autonomously in the same location, individual and environment continually
specify one another. Just as I am shaped by my location, so is my location
shaped by my presence.10
This has long been the view of hermeneutical understanding espoused
first by Heidegger (1962) and later by Gadamer (1990), Ricoeur (1984) and
others. Hermeneutical understanding continually seeks to excavate the
ever-evolving conditions which make understanding possible. This does not
mean that causes for understanding are sought; rather understanding is
understood as a continuous cycle of re-vision and re-interpretation. Learning
something new depends upon knowing something; at the same time new
knowledge helps to re-shape old knowledge. It is a circle of experience of
understanding which has indiscernible beginning- or end-points.
When students and teacher are thought of as part of their context (rather
than in a context) we can begin to see that one or the other does not cause
action or knowing or identity for the other. Rather, the students and the
teacher are seen as bringing forth a world together; the teacher's actions are
determined by his or her own dynamic structure, but are also occasioned by
the interactional dynamics with students as they bring forth (i.e. quite
literally, help to shape) the world. From this perspective, the teacher is not
understood as shaping a student's thought, action and/or identity. Rather,
the teacher participates with the students in the bringing forth of a world of
understanding. While the teacher and the students have different histories,
and hence bring forth and reflect the world differently, enactivism suggests
that the teacher and the students are working on a common project-the
simultaneous bringing forth of themselves and the world-even if their
respective interpretations of their actions and experiences differ.
This view of learning as 'bringing forth' acting, knowing identities which
co-specify one another helps us to understand that the school curriculum
does not and cannot exist apart from the world. It cannot-indeed, must
not —be thought of as a collection of learning objectives intended to prepare
a person for the world, simply because the mere act of teaching contributes
to the dynamic, unpredictable, complex unfolding of an as-yet unrealized
world. This formulation, however, presents us with a conundrum: How
can we prepare a student for a world that, in part as a result of our efforts
in such preparation, will be much different from the world in which we
currently find ourselves?
By intervening-by educating-we affect not just learners, but the
 158 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

situations that surround those learners. It is thus that Varela's (1992: 61)
characterization of living as 'laying down a path in walking' (versus following
a pre-specified path) applies not just to the individual, not just to the realm
of human action, but to the entire biosphere: 'Many paths of change are
potentially possible, and which one is selected is an expression of the
particular kind of structural coherence the unit has, in a continuous
tinkering'.
'I' am not distinct from 'you'; 'us' cannot be separated from what is
thought to be 'not-us'. In fact rather than thinking in terms of us and not-us
we prefer to encode the inextricable nature of world and person as the unity
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

of us/not-us. Although it seems to each of us that we are somehow autonomous

and independent beings, we are, in fact, woven into the world that we
perceive as 'other'. We acquire our shapes simultaneously and interactively.
Discussions of education, then, are not simple matters of determining what
might be important to know, for what we know cannot be separated from
what we do and who we are. It is thus that education is thoroughly
caught up in the culture's processes of re-creating, re-interpreting and
re-negotiating itself.
In the simple act of choosing to teach this idea and not that one, we are
participating in this shaping process. In other words, the teacher is always
and inevitably implicated in all that she or he teaches. That model of
instructional practice that seeks to mirror the ostensive objectivity of the
subject-matter by rendering the teacher invisible is thus not viable; it has
forgotten that what we teach is always about us. There can be no objective
re-presentation of valueless knowledge; understood in terms of our acting in
the world, all knowledge plays a role in shaping that world. Whether we wish
to assume moral responsibility or not, we who are involved in formal
education are actively engaged in the transformation of ourselves, our
students, our situations, our culture and our world—even as we attempt the
mere transmission of 'knowledge'. Bruner (1986) suggests that education
should serve as a 'forum for negotiating and re-negotiating meaning'. The
enactivist agrees, but adds that this is already occurring. What is needed is
a deeper awareness of the way we participate in this re-negotiation-in effect,
an increased awareness of our ecological situatedness.
This is not to say that we should attempt to select the world we would
like to have and then to specify the path that must be followed to achieve it.
That has been the project of this century's curriculum developers, and it is
founded on a conception of knowledge as cumulative and essentially
unchanging. In challenging this conception, enactivism points to the futility
of attempting to select a path, understanding that the best we can do is
participate in the continuous tinkering, laying down the path as we walk.
The focus thus shifts from preparing students for some future, distant,
predicted world 'out there' to the immediacy of the lived experience of the
teachers and learners. Schooling events are not ^preparation for life; they are,
as Dewey (1902/1956) suggested they must be, events of life itself. From this
perspective, the concerns of the educator include an awareness of the moral
implications of participating so deliberately in the shaping of our culture and
an attentive responsiveness to the dynamics of the learning situation.
The teacher moves back and forth between the particularities of the current
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 159

situation and the generalities of the cultural-historical context, understand-

ing that each unfolds from and is enfolded in the other.
We move now to a second classroom vignette, using it both as a means
for further illustrating and as an entry point for elaborating on these ideas.

The problem of prejudice

For Ingrid, choosing to read the novel The Chrysalids (Wyndham 1958) with
her grade 10 English students was largely a response to the increasing racial
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

tensions in their inner-city high school-tensions that were aggravated by

displays of racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes of elected officials and
other prominent public figures. For Ingrid, who had experienced a great deal
of persecution in her life, these expressions of hatred were simply unbearable:
I grew up in a neighbourhood where being overweight and Jewish meant that I was
continually teased, harassed and excluded. Well, I'm still overweight and still Jewish
and I know what it's like to be hated.
Although Ingrid had lived a life which included knowing what it was like to
experience hatred from others, she was also quite aware that not everyone
had had these sorts of experiences and that many of her students simply could
not identify with the victims of prejudice. It is thus that The Chrysalids-a
fantasy novel about suppressing difference through a systematic extermi-
nation of human 'abominations'—was selected as the focal point of what
Ingrid came to call her 'anti-hatred' unit. Ingrid believed that by reading the
book her students would develop a deeper understanding of the issues of
racism and hatred in their own world.
She was wrong. Far from provoking an emotional response, in fact, most
students found the text dull and slow-moving. Although their written
assignments suggested that they had an academic understanding of the issues
dealt with in the book, only a few of the students seemed to make any
connection between the story and their lives. Maria's response was typical:
I found the book quite boring and hard to get into. Nothing happened for a long time.
It got interesting when we found out about Sophie's six toes, and then a bit at the end
when the Sealand people came, but that's about all.
When asked if she thought that the kind of oppression depicted in the book
occurred in her high school or community she suggested:
Not really. I mean, yeah, there's kids that get bugged in school for different things - like
if they're overweight or something-but nothing really bad. I think that we all get along
really well in this school.
Ingrid found the situation frustrating, and she struggled with the question
of why the experience of reading this text did not enable these students to
'see' the world differently-or at least in the way she hoped they would see
it. Was it not, after all, the role of the fictional text to provide, if only
vicariously, those experiences that we would not otherwise have?
The enactivist response to this situation is well articulated by Gadamer
(1990) who offers us an alternative account of 'prejudice'. For him, prejudice
is not intended to evoke the same negative connotation as such terms as
 160 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

'racism' and 'bigotry'. The term, rather, refers to our way of seeing or
interpreting situations-ways that are conditioned by a history of acting and
living in particular historically effected social settings. While it is true that
prejudices limit what we are able to see, it is also true that, were it not for
our prejudices (our pre-judgements), we would not be able to see at all.
This point is well illustrated in Sacks's (1993) account of a middle-aged
blind person whose sight, after nearly a lifetime of blindness, was restored
through a cataract operation. On the day his bandages were removed, Virgil
did not (as we might expect) jump up and exclaim, 'I can see!'. Although he
was aware of a profusion of light and colour, his history of blindness meant
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

that he was unable to draw out meaningful images. He had no prejudices or

pre-judgements, and so he was trapped in the visual equivalent of noise.
For those of us born sighted, with a lifetime's experience integrating
vision into our lived experience, Virgil's situation seems incomprehensible.
When we open our eyes, we see a world. However, as Sacks (1993: 73)
suggests, 'We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant
experience, categorization, memory, re-connection'-activities that Virgil
had experienced in a world that had not included sight. So even though he
was suddenly presented with a new sensory capacity, he could not see.
Rather, he now faced having to re-configure the world and the identity that
had included his blindness. Vision was not something that could be added
on to who he was-it was not something thrown in to fill a void-for Virgil
to actually see, he faced a long period of re-experiencing the world. He was
faced with developing a whole new set of prejudices by which he could render
sensible this newly structured world.11 In brief, he was faced with
establishing a new identity, for, as Gadamer (1976: 9) puts it, 'It is not so
much our judgements as it is our prejudices that constitute our being'.
We do not see what we do not see. So it was with Ingrid's students. Those
few who had experienced discriminatory treatment responded as Ingrid had
expected. Alena, a Chinese-Canadian student, said this about her reading of
the book:'I became really involved with the book. I couldn't put it down ....
I was quite upset when Sophie was killed'. For Alena, the book mirrored her
and some of her friends' experience of attending this large, inner-city high
school:
In this school you have to be white and good-looking to be popular. If you're a girl you
need to have a boyfriend who is on the basketball or football team.... I don't have many
friends here.

For Alena and others who had experienced racism in their lives, the reading
of the novel became a powerful commentary on their lived experience. They
were able to understand the world differently for having read. However, it
seemed that for most of those who suggested that racism did not exist in their
lives or in their school/community, the book had little (if any) emotional fuse
to it. Although they understoodwhat the text was saying, and could effectively
participate as readers, they did not see what was outside their structural
possibilities.
This is an elaboration of one of our earlier points —that we are
structure-determined beings. We are only capable of responding in the ways
our structures permit. The result of a curricular intervention is not
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 161

determined (caused) by that intervention, but by the learners' own complex

histories and situations. The curriculum event might provide an occasion for
structural change in students but in this case, with the exception of a few
students, it did not seem to.
This event of curriculum, however, did not end here. Recognizing that,
like any literary text, this one did not stand alone in its relationship to readers,
Ingrid set about to weave a richer web of experiences around the event of
reading. Among the accompanying activities, she showed films and invited
in guest speakers who had themselves been, or were associated with groups
which had been, the targets of discrimination. One of these speakers was
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

Tony, a prominent and openly gay public official.

The most visible reaction to the announcement of Tony's visit was one
of discomfort. Kelsey's overheard comment was not atypical: 'I'm not
coming to class if there's going to be a fag in here'. Like most others in
Ingrid's class, Kelsey had shown little interest in The Chrysalids. Although
his written responses indicated that he had read it, his response to Ingrid's
announcement of Tony's pending visit suggested that his reading of the book
had likely not caused him to think differently about his homophobic opinions
and actions.
Kelsey was present for Tony's visit, however, and although he and a
number of others assumed rigid and recalcitrant postures at the start of class,
few maintained these poses as Tony's talk progressed. Kelsey was among the
first to ask a question: 'Did you ever play hockey when you were a kid?
Do gay people do that?'
A change had occurred in Kelsey's behaviour, one that was further
revealed in a follow-up interview:

I didn't really catch onto the book until after Tony had spoken to us. It was weird- like,
I was able to understand what the book was saying after listening to him talk to us about
what it was like to be gay. When I think of the book now, I think of some of the things
that Tony said and how all of a sudden I understand how life was for him-how difficult
it was.

Kelsey's response was not unique. Many others who had not been able to
re-read their own histories of experience in relation to their experience of
reading The Chrysalids were able to do so after Tony's class visit. These
're-interpretations', it is important to state, occurred in the absence of any
in-class re-readings of the novel itself; yet, it became clear that a form of
re-reading had, indeed, occurred. As Kelsey, and others, began to re-visit
their reading of the book in relation to other curriculum events (including
Tony's talk) they began to re-configure the structure of their experience.
And, as they did so, what they knew began to change. Further, as Ingrid later
reported, what they did seemed also to change. During the weeks following
this anti-hatred unit, Kelsey, and others, seemed to act differently and, in
conversations with Ingrid, demonstrated a new awareness of racism as it was
enacted in their lives.
What can these events help us to understand about curriculum?
 162 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

The texture of the curriculum

Earlier we used Varela's (1992) discussion of a wind chime to introduce the

concept of structure determinism—noting that the image of the chime is of
limited use because of the unchanging nature of the chime's organization.
Langer's (1957: 48; emphasis in original) account of the relationship between
the form and the motion of a waterfall provides us, perhaps, with a more
accessible route to the notion of structure determinism:
The waterfall has a shape, moving somewhat, its long streamers seeming to shift like
ribbons in a wind, but its mobile shape is a permanent datum in the landscape, among
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

rocks and trees and other things. Yet the water does not really ever stand before us.
Scarcely a drop stays there for the length of one glance. The material composition of
the waterfall changes all the time; only the form is permanent and what gives any shape
at all to the water is the motion. The waterfall exhibits a form of motion, or a dynamic
form.

'The material composition of the waterfall changes all the time; only the form
is permanent'. The waterfall is a 'form of motion', 'a dynamic form',
'a structure'-continuously changing, always different, yet maintaining an
integrity which allows us to recognize it as the same waterfall. Its form is
neither determined by the flowing water nor by the surrounding landscape,
but it arises in the interactive dynamic of these structures. Moreover, as these
structures interact in complex and unpredictable ways, each shapes the other,
constantly presenting new possibilities for action as they proceed.
We might add that attempts to explain the form of the waterfall by delving
into the river's history, by examining the nature of a water molecule, or by
exploring the current shape of the land would profit us little. (Even so, an
understanding of the falls is incomplete without such knowledge.) We must,
rather, focus our attentions on the structural dynamic-the form of
motion-of the phenomenon. The same is true of curriculum. As Grumet
(1988: 172) explains:
Curriculum is a moving form. That is why we have trouble capturing it, fixing it in
language, lodging it in our matrix. Whether we talk about it as history, as syllabi, as
classroom discourse, as intended learning outcomes, or as experience, we are trying to
grasp a moving form, to catch it at the moment that it slides from being thefigure,the
object and goal of action, and collapses into the ground of action.
It is not easy for us to talk about moving forms and dynamic structures; it
seems that it is the nature of our language to freeze, to fix, to isolate and to
present in one-word-after-the-other a thread of some interpretation of the
world. The same fixing and sequencing tendencies are evident in our
interpretations of classroom activities. First we prepare to read by gathering
together the relevant background information; then we read; we check
comprehension; we discuss; we write about it—one-thing-after-the-other,
lock-step. In itself, this is not problematic-we may well be incapable of
conceiving of our dynamic universe in any other terms. What is troublesome
is forgetting that the underlying phenomenon is far more complex.
Experiences are not linear, unidirectional, incremental and cumulative.
Rather, they wander, they move backward and forward, they progress in fits
and starts. They are transformative, complex and unpredictable. Curriculum
is one such form. Like Berthoff's (1990) description of the process of writing,
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 163

the co-specification of curricular relations happens allatonce (i.e. 'all-at-

once').
What does this suggest about Kelsey's experience in the curriculum that
surrounded the reading of The Chrysalidsl First, it is clear that a particular
experience, such as the reading of this text, will not 'give' students an
experience that falls outside the realm of their structure-determined
possibilities. Some paths are simply not possible. However, it is equally
important to understand that the act of reading does not necessarily end when
the book is closed. Reading can re-occur as new events unfold within the
dynamic form of curriculum. In Kelsey's case, although he did not physically
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

re-read the novel, Tony's visit contributed to a thorough re-reading. The

story had a new significance; it was cast in a new web of meaning —it was,
in effect, a different text as a result of this curriculum occasion.
This helps us to understand that the school curriculum does not and
cannot exist apart from the world. It cannot be thought of as something
intended to reflect or reveal the universe, for it is an inextricable part of the
universe. Curriculum action, like any action, becomes part of the continuous
structural coupling of curriculum actors and their world.
From this perspective curriculum action always co-evolves with the sense
of self of the students and teacher. As stated earlier, one of the implicit
'assumptions' that we continuously enact in our curricula is that knowledge —
as represented by objectives for learning and contents of textbooks-is
something that can be considered apart from the identities of learners.
(Indeed, a common criticism of modern curricula is that they have little to
do with learners' lives.) New knowledge can be added on to what is already
known; new skills can be acquired to complement old ones. Not only do we
fail to realize how new experiences compel us to re-configure (re-read) what
is already known, this conception of learning as 'accumulation' disposes us
to disregard the relationship between what we know and who we are.
As evident from Kelsey's involvement in the 'anti-hatred' unit, what is
known and acted upon cannot be separated from one's sense of self-identity.
Enactivist thought does not permit a tidy distinction between what we know
(i.e. how we act) and who we are.
This is not a trivial statement. By casting individual knowing and
collective knowledge in terms of patterns of acting, the nature of the
educational endeavour is profoundly affected. We can no longer think about
learning in strictly epistemological terms; questions of being and identity-of
ontology —immediately arise. This, of course, is hardly a new insight.
Teachers, as demonstrated by Ingrid's practice and as argued by a number
of critical theorists, have long enacted the understanding that teaching is
never merely a matter of ensuring that particular knowledge is mastered.
Teaching is never epistemologically neutral.

Bodies of knowledge

A quality of enactivist theory that might be drawn from the two classroom
examples already presented is that this interpretive framework can be used
to study action and knowledge at two very different conceptual levels - that
 164 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

of the individual's cognition and that of group or collective action-and it is

this quality that makes enactivist thought particularly well suited for
discussions of teaching and learning. In the case of the Missing Fraction
Mystery, for example, the similarities in Sarah's and Jiema's responses are
more than coincidental; there was clearly some mutual affect in their actions.
In the actual classroom setting, their solutions prompted considerable
discussion and further investigation by their peers-action that we might be
tempted to call imitative, were it not for the considerable diversity that
continued to emerge through the subsequent action.12
In Ingrid's English class, similarly, it was in the interaction of various
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

persons and circumstances that students' conceptions were profoundly

affected. Of particular interest is the sort of interaction that occurred during
Tony's visit. While we might have expected that differences in background
and lifestyle were so profound as to militate against effective communication,
quite the opposite happened. Rather than maintaining their detached stance,
even the most recalcitrant students 'forgot themselves' and participated
enthusiastically in the ensuing conversation.
The issue that we are addressing here is that of collective action. How is
it that individual humans, especially if our actions are determined by our own
particular structures, are capable of joint action that is not merely
coordinated, but rhythmic and attuned - action that leads to the putting aside
of selves, action out of which ideas and behaviours, which certainly could not
have been independently achieved, emerge?
Another of our commonsense beliefs-and one that seems more evident
among western cultures - is that the individual is not only the unit of survival;
he or she represents the highest order organism at this point in evolutionary
history. Enactivist theorists dispute this notion, seeking to reinstate the
importance of having a body which has a particular integrity, but which is
in no way independent. Contrary to the western democratic idealization of
the individual-or, in Taylor's (1991b) words, the 'cult of authenticity'-
where the isolated selves are seen to reside within the separated minds (which
are, in turn, located in the brain), an enactive, embodied13 curriculum insists
that notions of self and mind must be woven both through the entire human
body and through the web of relationships in which that self takes shape.
The field of study often referred to as 'Complexity Theory' (Waldrop
1992) can help us here. Briefly, the objects of study of this theory are those
complex behaviours that emerge when simpler systems come together to
form more complex unities. Cells unite to form organisms or organs; organs
couple to form bodies. As these sub-systems come together, structures arise
and complex behaviours emerge that transcend each of the component parts.
The emergent character of these higher order structures cannot be
understood by examining the sub-systems; we must attend to the actual
structure that arises, treating it as a unity in and of itself. The self, we are
arguing, is one such structure, emerging in the complex dynamic of bodily
functioning, co-emerging with historical effect and context.
The same theoretical framework can be used to address the question of
our collective knowledge. As already noted, on the level of the individual,
knowing is understood in terms of action-that is, we continuously enact our
knowledge. But what of that which seems to be held among us?
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 165

In terms of current popular debate, the question of knowledge is cast most

often in terms of the location of knowledge. That is, the suggestion that all
knowledge is fallible, in this climate of postmodern critique, now seems to
be a point of widespread consensus. Despite this general agreement,
however, we have made little headway on the issue of the ultimate source of
collective knowledge. In a phrase, we are not sure if it reflects something that
has a prior, real existence, or if it is essentially a mental activity. Is truth
discovered (objective) or created (subjective)?
To the enactivist, this is a non-issue that finds its roots in the modern
conception of identity. Positing ourselves as essentially independent,
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

isolated, static beings, we are forced to choose between locations of truth: it

is either out there or in here. In both cases, the knower is separated from the
known world. We try to span the chasm between these two things with a third
thing called 'knowledge', unsure if it should be located in the real world or
in our subjective realities. Enactivist theory avoids this problem by denying
the initial premise. Cognizing agent (the mind) and world are not two distinct
categories, for in this formulation we have forgotten the body. As
Merleau-Ponty (1962) elaborated, the body is simultaneously of oneself and
of the world. My body separates me from other bodies at the same time
that it places me in relationship to them. My body is shaped by the world
that it participates in shaping. There are not three things, then: mind,
world and, between them, a body. Rather, the body renders mind-and-world
inseparable.
Just as the sub-systems of our body come together in a more complex
unity, so our individual bodies come together in joint action, leading to the
emergence of properties and patterns of acting that might be thought of as
our collective knowledge. Knowledge is not some mysterious cloud hanging
over a Platonic or a social plane; it is found in our action and our interactions,
shaping our perceptions and identities both collectively and individually.
One might thus draw an analogy between one's physical body and a
culture's body of knowledge. In neither case are there three things; just as
mind-and-world are made inseparable by the body, knowers-and-known-
world are brought together in a body of knowledge. Similarly, just as my
changing body is the locus of my personal identity-simultaneously
separating me from and situating me in the world-so our dynamic
knowledge is the locus of our collective identity-providing an integrity that
simultaneously distinguishes us from a background while placing us in
communion with that background. Our body of knowledge-that is, our
established and mutable patterns of acting-can thus be thought of as our
collective self, co-emerging with the world we inhabit and which en-habits
us. And, just like our physical bodies, bodies of knowledge (and the
collectives they define) can be understood in terms of post-Darwinian
evolutionary processes.
This point brings us back to the classroom and to another of the
'assumptions' of modernist epistemologies: that we are moving ever nearer
to an ultimate Truth. Enactivist theory, like pragmatism (i.e. Rorty 1989),
rejects the notion, choosing to replace the goal of optimal knowledge with
the criterion of adequate or satisfactory action. In a phrase, truth or correct
 166 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

knowledge is what works in a situation-an idea that is founded on a 'survival

of the fit' rather than a 'survival of the fittest' logic.
Applying this idea to individual cognition and to collective knowledge
suggests that learning is not a matter of becoming ideally suited to external
conditions, but of behaving satisfactorily. It is not a process of selecting
'correct actions' but of discarding those actions that do not work. This shift
in thinking helps us to account for the sort of diversity of student action
observed in the Missing Fraction Mystery. If the students were pursuing a
pre-given ideal form, their answers should have approached that form as the
class period progressed. But, far from converging on any solution, the
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

answers (and the thinking that supported those answers) became ever more
diverse and complex.
The overall function of the embodied curriculum, then, is not to limit
possibilities by selecting optimal traits (which have been determined in
advance of the lived experience of curriculum), but rather to discard those
which seem obviously destructive to the curricular community. This may be
considered a 'good enough' theory of curriculum, where the goal is to
uncover not what is ideal, but what is possible. Of course, when the
relationships among students, teachers and subject-matter are considered in
this way, we must be prepared to face a much more ambiguous set of
curricular—relations which would be uncomfortable in a world that expects
clear limits and boundaries.

What is curriculum?

To understand curriculum, we must understand knowledge-for regardless

of one's epistemological orientation, the two phenomena are inseparable.
They are not merely tied together in our conceptions of schooling; our
interpretations of one, and the actions supported by these explicit and tacit
interpretations, inevitably affect the shape of the other.
Knowledge, as we have argued, is neither uncovered nor invented, but
emerges in-that is, it is enacted through - t h e history of our participation in
a dynamic and responsive world. It can never be understood merely in terms
of either the actions of the subject or the qualities of the object because it
emerges in the mutually specifying dynamics of their activities and reactions.
In this sense, knowledge is like the subject-matter of a conversation: its
nature and its structure can never be anticipated, let alone fixed.14 Like the
conversation, what our knowledge is depends upon the interplay of setting,
culture, participants and era. Far from merely representing the universe
(thereby setting us apart from it), then, our knowledge places us in
conversation with it. But we dare not confuse the stability of our knowledge
with the possibility of absoluteness, for our patterns of acting must be as fluid
as the world in which we act.
The co-emergent curriculum, then, is not something which needs to be
invented, created or predetermined. Nor is it the result of particular
methods, texts or activities. Rather, the co-emergent curriculum emerges
from an understanding of human existence and cognition-to borrow a term
from post-Darwinian evolutionary theory-as processes of natural drift in
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 167

which human subjects co-emerge with the environments which contain

them. Because these environments are always the sum total of all the
historically effected interactions which comprise them (human and non-
human), they function in a circularity of existence in which what is new
evolves from what is old and, at the same time, what is old is modified
(re-structured) by what is new.
An understanding of curriculum as co-emergence acknowledges this
circularity of experience, casting education not merely as an interpretive
process, but as one which plays a vital role in the continual re-configuring
of individual and collective identities. Further, any activity (such as
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

mathematics or reading) that we conventionally think of as part of a school

curriculum is also understood as co-emergent—seen not as a component of
knowledge that can be extricated and isolated for study, but as crucially
connected to all other relations that comprise curriculum.
Politically, the idea of curriculum co-emergence helps us to see more
clearly the importance of the pedagogical relationship (van Manen 1991) as
a location for effective learning. Only a teacher who is attentive to the
students in her or his care will be able to promote the kind of learning
occasions described in this paper. When learners become immersed in such
situations, with teachers who understand curriculum as a co-emergent
process, it becomes possible to move beyond what is already known or what
has already been established. Students, from this perspective, are not asked
merely to reproduce or to report on knowledge. Working with their teachers
they are asked to generate knowledge. Agency occurs within this interactive
production. This orientation helps us to overcome the solipsism associated
with child-centred pedagogies and, at the same time, to avoid the prescriptive
tendencies of content-centred pedagogies - for it is understood that child,
teacher and subject-matter engage interactively in the production of new
understandings.
As such, curriculum is, allatonce, concerned with the small and the large,
the unexpected and the planned, the private and the public, the theoretical
and the practical. There are no real boundaries here; each is enfolded in and
unfolds from the other. And this is the critical point for us: enactivist theory
provides us with a means—that is, a way of speaking (and, hence, of
acting)-to circumnavigate the dichotomous landscape of modern curricu-
lum thought. Even the traditional boundary separating teacher and learner
is blurred, for in the play of knowledge-in curriculum-all are fully
implicated.

Notes

The Fraction Kits in this case consisted of standard sheets of paper cut into halves, fourths,
eighths, and sixteenth pieces. See Kieren, Davis and Mason (forthcoming) for an
elaborated description.
This word is set apart from the text by quotation marks because we do not wish to imply
that the 'assumptions' to which we refer are deliberately construed and clearly articulated.
Rather, they form part of our 'commonsense', affecting the way we act, but not necessarily
formulated or readily available to consciousness.
 168 A. B. DAVIS ET AL.

3. Maturana and Varela first presented this idea in Autopoesis and Cognition (1980) and later
in The Tree of Knowledge (1987). Varela, along with Thompson and Rosch (1991), has
since elaborated on these ideas.
4. We are deliberately conflating the body and the self here.
5. To be more accurate, the body/self is not really a thing that undergoes change. It is rather
better understood in terms of the process of change itself.
6. Following Varela et al. (1991) we will be using the term 'enactivism' to refer to the
theoretical framework that we are using. We hope the appropriateness of the term
becomes clear as this paper unfolds.
7. Ernest (1991) has offered 'social constructivism' as a socially minded alternative to
radical constructivism. While this understanding of constructivism more explicitly
acknowledges the social construction of knowledge, it still fails to acknowledge the
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

inextricability of knower from known. In effect, the idea that the world and its subjects
function and evolve simultaneously remains unacknowledged.
8. To elaborate, let us look to the field of mathematics education research. Few current
research reports fail to acknowledge an allegiance to this epistemological perspective-a
fact that is troublesome because, in spite of the 'revolution' it has inspired, constructivism
has done little to bring forward the political, gender, racial and other social biases that
are implicit (enacted) in the subject-matter, in the teaching practices, and in the simple
fact that mathematics is situated at the core of the modern curriculum.
9. We have joined the components of these dyads to represent visually a fundamental
inseparability of one part from the other.
10. Lovelock (1979) develops this idea and extends it to the level of planetary dynamics.
11. Sadly, Virgil's story ends quite tragically. Unable to cope with the changes demanded to
live a sighted life, Virgil fell into depression and became agnostic—psychically blind-not
long after the operation.
12. Pirie and Kieren (1994) argue that even if the children were imitating one another, such
actions would be seen as structure determined. That is, without a certain history of
experience or elements in one's structure, one cannot even copy or duplicate the work
of another, much less replicate it, and thus make it an element of one's own cognitive
action.
13. From this point in the paper on, 'embodied' is used to signify the inextricability of
body/mind and of bodies of knowledge/physiological bodies.
14. Gadamer (1990) elaborates on this idea in Truth and Method.

References
BATESON, G. (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton).
BERTHOFF, A. E. (1990) The Sense of Learning (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann).
BRUNER, J. S. (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press).
BRUNER, J. S. (1990) Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
DEWEY, J. (1902/1956) The Child and the Curriculum: and The School and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
ERNEST, P. (1991) The Philosophy of Mathematics Education (London: Falmer Press).
FOSHAY, A. W. (1991) Scientific inquiry: explanations and limits. In E. C. Short (ed.) Forms
of Curriculum Inquiry (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), 89-100.
GADAMER, H.-G. (1976) Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press).
GADAMER, H.-G. (1990) Truth and Method, 2nd edn (New York: Continuum).
GLEICK, J. (1988) Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books).
GRUMET, M. R. (1988) Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press).
HEIDEGGER, M. (1962) Being and Time (New York: Harper).
KERBY, A. P. (1991) Narrative and the Self (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
KIEREN, T. E., DAVIS, A. B. and MASON, R. T. (forthcoming) Fraction flags: learning from
children to help children learn. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School.
 COGNITION, CO-EMERGENCE, CURRICULUM 169

LANGER, S. K. (1957) Problems of Art (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).

LOVELOCK, J. F. (1979) Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University
Press).
MATURANA, H. R. and VARELA, F. J. (1980) Autopoesis and Cognition: The Realization of the
Living (Dortrecht: Riedel).
MATURANA, H. R. and VARELA, F. J. (1987) The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of
Understanding (Boston, MA: Shambhala).
MERLEAU-PONTY, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul).
PINAR, W. and GRUMET, M. R. (1976) Toward a Poor Curriculum (Dubuque, IA:
Kendall/Hunt).
PIRIE, S. E. B. and KIEREN, T. E. (1994) Beyond metaphor: formalizing in mathematical
Downloaded by ["Queen's University Libraries, Kingston"] at 19:26 05 January 2015

understanding within constructivist environments. For the Learning of Mathematics, 14

(1), 39-43.
RICOEUR, P. (1984) Time and Narrative, Vols 1-3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
RORTY, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University
Press).
SACKS, O. (1993) A neurologist's notebook: to see or not to see. The New Yorker, 10 (May),
59-73.
TAYLOR, C. (1991a) The dialogical self. In D. Hiley, J. Bohman and R. Schusterman (eds)
The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press), 304-314.
TAYLOR, C. (1991b) The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, ON: Anansi).
VAN MANEN, M. (1991) The Tact of Teaching (London, ON: Althouse).
VARELA, F. J. (1992) Laying down a path in walking. In W. I. Thompson (ed.) Gaia, A Way
of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press),
48-64.
VARELA, F. J., THOMPSON, E. and ROSCH, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science
and Human Experience (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press).
VON GLASERSFELD, E. (1984) An introduction to radical constructivism. In P. Watzlawick
(ed.) The Invented Reality (New York: Norton), 17-40.
WALDROP, M. M. (1992) Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
(New York: Simon & Schuster).
WYNDHAM, J. (1958) The Chrysalids (Markham, ONT: Penguin Books).