The current context of skill-based curriculum and high-stakes, outside mandates makes teaching exceedingly difficult. This educational climate creates a challenging environment in which to identify opportunities for engaging students in inquiry-based, emergent forms of curriculum centering on issues and topics they name. Through side-by-side narrative inquiry, this article focuses on the perspectives drawn from a co-teaching experience of a third-grade teacher and a university professor who worked together to adjust teaching approaches from a skill-based to an emergent, knowledge-generative pedagogy. By engaging young people around issues the students identified, the teacher engages in a pedagogical pivot. While the teacher embraced new practices related to emergent curriculum, she resisted naming it as justice-oriented teaching. This inquiry raises issues around curriculum and student agency, framing curriculum as social justice, and pedagogical agility.
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