Explaining the nature of the emergent curriculum and inference its implications in the curriculum

Curriculum, as the center of educational activity, has special importance and delicacy for the sensitive period of childhood. There are two types of views on curriculum design that give a passive and accepting role to the student or give him an active role, so addressing the nature of each program is the most important part of planning. An emergent curriculum is considered to be a program that respects the interests of the child and is designed based on the needs of the child.

The purpose of this study is to explain the nature of the curriculum and to infer the implications of the related curriculum. For this purpose, first, the philosophical fundamentals of this program were investigated. Then, by examining the etymology of the word emergent and extracting its synonymous and contradictory semantic domains, as well as analyzing the concept of a pre-defined curriculum, the nature of the emergent curriculum was explained. The chosen investigated documents are effective in understanding the research issues and in the central phenomenon of the study, so the sampling used in this study is purposeful. Therefore 250 valid national and international documents in the field of emergent curriculum and emergentism theory were investigated (including books, articles, encyclopedias, etc.). Then 80 published documents in reputable Journals were used and their validity was confirmed based on the opinions of the experts in curriculum planning and philosophy of education.

The findings of this study indicate that the emergent curriculum appears as a flexible, dynamic, and multidimensional spiral phenomenon with different cross-sections and hence it is completely innovative and constantly developing. This program has the ability to influence the learner, instructor, content, etc. that are the components of the program, for example, during the process of this program, the instructor learns. Awareness and learning are unpredictable and unexpected phenomena beyond the knowledge of all the learning process components.

In relation to the philosophical foundations of this Curriculum, from the ontological point of view, that is, the school of Emergentism, quite novel results were obtained in relation to learning and consciousness such as Jones & Nimmo, Stasey