This essay reflects the shared experiences of four college faculty members (a biologist, a psychologist, a computer scientist, and a feminist literary scholar) working together with K-12 teachers to explore a new perspective on educational practice. It offers a novel rationale for independent thinking and learning, one that derives from rapidly developing interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiries in the sciences and social sciences into what are known as ''complex'' or ''emergent'' systems. Using emergent systems as a model of teaching and learning makes at least three significant contributions to our thinking bout teaching, in three very different dimensions. It invites us into an awareness that the brains of individual students and teachers operate as emergent systems that are neither possible nor desirable to control fully. It invites us to appreciate as well that the activities and benefits of a classroom are not all individual interactions between teacher and student. Interactions among students and teachers are collectively contributing to a somewhat unpredictable project with an insistently social dimension, which is in turn crucial to the individual achievements of all involved. Finally, emergent pedagogy encourages us to consider more carefully the relations between the individual classroom and the larger educational community of which it is a component, including a challenge to rethink the matter of assessment.
<p>We write collaboratively, as a recent graduate and long-time faculty member of a small women’s liberal arts college, about the mental health costs of adhering to a feminist narrative of achievement that insists upon independence and resiliency. As we explore the destabilizing potential of an alternative feminist project, one that invites different temporalities in which dis/ability emerges and may be addressed, we work with disability less as an identity than as a generative methodology, a form of relation and exchange. Mapping our own college as a specific, local site for the disabling tradition of “challenging women,” we move to larger disciplinary and undisciplining questions about the stigma of mental disabilities, traversing the tensions between institutionalizing disability studies and the field’s promise of destabilizing the constrictions of normativity.</p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong>academia,<strong> </strong>dis/ability, disability studies, education, feminism, identity studies, mad pride, mad studies, mental health, mental illness, queer studies, temporality, women’s colleges</p><p><em><br /></em></p>
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