Creativity, perturbation, richness, recursion, relations, rigor, and passionall align with a complexity thinking approach to teaching and learning [3, 7?0]. There is a paucity of X-396 site literature on complexity science in nursing and yet Davidson et al. state that “the concepts within the science of complexity will shape the future of nursing inquiry, practice and education” [11, p. 17]. Some literature that describe concepts from complexity in education was found in nursing [11, pp. 372?74], medicine [12], dentistry [13], and interprofessional training [14]. Given this gap in explicating how complexity can help change education, we offer one example of how we enacted a collaborative inquiry of complexity thinking with faculty colleagues, which surfaced in the collective new possibilities for teaching and learning in the classroom. The integration of the arts, creative play, and AKB-6548 price perturbations within a complexity approach is shown. Let us turn to our example.2. The Workshop: Creating Spaces of PossibilityThis story begins with an opportunity to engage with 10 nursing colleagues in a three-hour workshop using four activities that engaged learning about complexity thinking. As a group2 of three–call us perturbers rather than facilitators–we met to discuss possibilities for the workshop. Our own teaching, research, and leadership have changed with complexity thinking [15?8]. We share, with other nursing authors [19?22], the deep dissatisfaction with content-driven curricula where teachers dispense information in a linear format with predetermined learning outcomes [3, 23]. The concern with this content-driven, dispensing model is that students learn to look for what teachers want in order to give it back without necessarily learning how to learn, think, critique, and engage with ideas and each other. The idea of creating spaces of possibility for learning together surfaced and resurfaced at our planning meetings and continued to emerge during our online communications about how we believed the workshop might unfold. Oriented by complexity thinking we are comfortable with nonlinear processes, ambiguity of learning outcomes, and distributed control and decisionmaking [8?0]. We are also inspired by the belief that a successful collectivity is not just more intelligent than the smartest of its members, but that it presents occasions for all its members to be smarter–that is, to be capable of actions, interpretations, and conclusions that none would achieve on her or his own [7, p. 136]. We decided to approach the workshop with our colleagues as a collaborative inquiry. We also considered critical questions [24] that we believed would spark our inquiry for the threehour workshop. We asked “What is emergent learning?” and “How do we, as educators, engage a community so that new learning surfaces?” The following situates our thinking about emergent learning.Nursing Research and Practice with colleagues. We decided to work with three strategies that we believed would be most likely to create spaces of possibilities and emergent learning: integrate metaphor and use a non-linear design and collective activities. We want to speak briefly about each of these strategies beginning with metaphor.4. Use of Metaphor to Open Collective to the WholeWith the essential elements for emergent learning [7, 8] in mind, we invited participants to read one or more of the three readings we chose based on complexity thinking and education: Doll [3], Menin [12], and Mitchel.Creativity, perturbation, richness, recursion, relations, rigor, and passionall align with a complexity thinking approach to teaching and learning [3, 7?0]. There is a paucity of literature on complexity science in nursing and yet Davidson et al. state that “the concepts within the science of complexity will shape the future of nursing inquiry, practice and education” [11, p. 17]. Some literature that describe concepts from complexity in education was found in nursing [11, pp. 372?74], medicine [12], dentistry [13], and interprofessional training [14]. Given this gap in explicating how complexity can help change education, we offer one example of how we enacted a collaborative inquiry of complexity thinking with faculty colleagues, which surfaced in the collective new possibilities for teaching and learning in the classroom. The integration of the arts, creative play, and perturbations within a complexity approach is shown. Let us turn to our example.2. The Workshop: Creating Spaces of PossibilityThis story begins with an opportunity to engage with 10 nursing colleagues in a three-hour workshop using four activities that engaged learning about complexity thinking. As a group2 of three–call us perturbers rather than facilitators–we met to discuss possibilities for the workshop. Our own teaching, research, and leadership have changed with complexity thinking [15?8]. We share, with other nursing authors [19?22], the deep dissatisfaction with content-driven curricula where teachers dispense information in a linear format with predetermined learning outcomes [3, 23]. The concern with this content-driven, dispensing model is that students learn to look for what teachers want in order to give it back without necessarily learning how to learn, think, critique, and engage with ideas and each other. The idea of creating spaces of possibility for learning together surfaced and resurfaced at our planning meetings and continued to emerge during our online communications about how we believed the workshop might unfold. Oriented by complexity thinking we are comfortable with nonlinear processes, ambiguity of learning outcomes, and distributed control and decisionmaking [8?0]. We are also inspired by the belief that a successful collectivity is not just more intelligent than the smartest of its members, but that it presents occasions for all its members to be smarter–that is, to be capable of actions, interpretations, and conclusions that none would achieve on her or his own [7, p. 136]. We decided to approach the workshop with our colleagues as a collaborative inquiry. We also considered critical questions [24] that we believed would spark our inquiry for the threehour workshop. We asked “What is emergent learning?” and “How do we, as educators, engage a community so that new learning surfaces?” The following situates our thinking about emergent learning.Nursing Research and Practice with colleagues. We decided to work with three strategies that we believed would be most likely to create spaces of possibilities and emergent learning: integrate metaphor and use a non-linear design and collective activities. We want to speak briefly about each of these strategies beginning with metaphor.4. Use of Metaphor to Open Collective to the WholeWith the essential elements for emergent learning [7, 8] in mind, we invited participants to read one or more of the three readings we chose based on complexity thinking and education: Doll [3], Menin [12], and Mitchel.
