Entry points to emergent curriculum planning: Windows into teachers' concerns, priorities, and practice

Emergent curriculum can be misconstrued as a liberal approach where children are given absolute agency and control over the curriculum. To the contrary, emergent curriculum planning and teachers’ contributions are just as important in this co-constructivist model of teaching and learning. Unfortunately, the struggle of reconciling the child-centered philosophy with adult agendas presents an oxymoron at the heart of this complex approach: planning for unpredictability. The review of existing literature rendered a framework of six possible entry points, or starting points, for emergent curriculum planning. Teachers’ concerns, decision-making, and priorities pertaining to these initial choices are of importance as they define the direction the curriculum can take. Understanding teachers’ priorities and concerns when choosing entry points for emergent curriculum planning will aid teachers, curriculum specialists and educational leaders in their efforts to understand the degree of authenticity in their program’s delivery of the emergent approach, as well as the impact of teachers’ priorities and concerns on the emergent curriculum planning. To explore the nature of teachers’ decisions behind emergent curriculum planning, the aims of this research were to (a) synthesize a comprehensive framework of entry points to emergent curriculum planning; (b) uncover and explore teachers’ priorities when choosing entry points for emergent curriculum planning; and (c) uncover and explore teachers’ concerns when choosing entry points for emergent curriculum planning.

Q methodology was primarily chosen due to its demand for individual teacher participants to systematically rank the perceived likelihood of various entry points in the process of constructing a curriculum, specifically within the context of an emergent approach. This ranking process was facilitated through a forced distribution matrix, thereby promoting a structured examination of the participants' beliefs, values, and present circumstances with regard to curriculum development.

The subsequent application of statistical factor analysis resulted in the identification of three distinct clusters, or shared viewpoints on the emergent curriculum planning priorities: Child-Teacher Dichotomy, Process-Demands Moderation, and Policy Imposed Pedagogy. Subsequently, the data obtained from post-sort interviews played a crucial role in providing valuable insights that contributed to a comprehensive description and explanation of the decisions and priorities inherent to each identified cluster.