The problems of sustainability are increasingly understood as ‘emergent’, in the context of complex and interconnected global ecosystems and economies. Scientific phenomena are also increasingly seen as emergent, with macroscopic systems emerging from microscopic interactions. Many of the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) may also be seen as a consequence of greater recognition of the mind as a complex system, and cognitive development an emergent process. Emergent science education, considers both science, and the mind of every child as a complex system.
The world is a more complicated place than it used to be, although Science is increasingly recognising how complex it has always been. Complex systems theory, or ‘systems thinking’, is having considerable impact on the pure sciences, in Physics, Chemistry and Biology, but it has so far had little impact upon early years and primary school science educators. Understanding requires a significant mental shift away from reductive thinking about nature and natural causation, toward a holistic appreciation of interconnected systems. This is a tough, and for many an unsettling, paradigm shift that suggests that many important events and phenomenon, including the emergence of life itself may be both unpredictable and uncontrollable. To many it may suggest a level of spontaneous self-organization and autonomy that appears almost magical. Yet examples abound all around us, and we recognise that traditional science remains unable to accurately predict extreme weather events, geothermal activities, and power grid failures. Given the remarkable historic successes of science and technology it is all too easy to assume that some breakthrough discovery will one day reveal the simple causes that our science has so far missed. But the truth is that ‘emergence’ as first coined by Lewes in 1875, provides compelling explanations for the fact that that the whole may often be greater than the sum of its parts. Emergence is not a new idea, it can be traced back even before Aristotle wrote about it in his 1st Century BC Metaphysics.
Whether we consider the processes involved in overcoming friction, in the creation of a resistance to electrical current, the formation of a hurricane, or the course of a pandemic, intuitively we imagine small actions only ever have small effects, and that large effects must be the result of larger actions. The inconvenient truth however is that in all of these systems we now know that even the very smallest actions often trigger interactions that result in massive, sometimes catastrophic and at other times startlingly valuable transformative effects. This is the nature of ‘emergence’. Mundane counterintuitive examples of this ‘butterfly effect’ include the emergence of the salt, that we apply to season our food, from a combination of Sodium, a metal, and Chlorine, a poisonous gas! Others include the emergence of Water from the potentially explosive combination of hydrogen and oxygen, and even the emergence of life itself from a combination of inert chemical compounds.
Emergent Science Education has actually been promoted in the UK for use in early childhood educational contexts for a quarter of a century, and yet its impact on policy and practice remains limited. The idea was introduced to the Association for Science Education (ASE) in a 2000 keynote address that was published in the National SCIcentre 2000 and ASET Conference Report (Siraj-Blatchford, 2000 . The contribution was also acknowledged in the first issue of the Emergent Science Journal (Deighton et al, 2011, p8).
- Deighton, K., Morrice, M., and Ovberton, D. (2011) Vocabulary in four to eight year-old children in inner city schools, Journal of Emergent Science, Issue 1 (March 2011)
- Siraj-Blatchford, J. (2000) Emergent Science, keynote presentation to National SCIcentre 2000 and ASET Conference, reported in McKeon, F., (Ed.), National Centre for Initial Teacher Training in Primary School Science, University of Leicester
- Siraj-Blatchford, J. (2022) Emergent Science Education for Sustainability, Journal of Emergent Science, Association for Science Education, Vol. 23
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