Complexity and Classroom Learning (original) (raw)
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Complexity, Emergence and Embodied Cognition in Education
Innoeduca. International Journal of Technology and Educational Innovation
fenómenos a partir de más básicos son nociones básicas para entender y mejorar el aprendizaje. Por un lado, con conceptos complejos los estudiantes se desconciertan y el aprendizaje se vuelve muy difícil. Por otro lado, los procesos en los que emergen nuevos fenómenos parecen ser mágicos o ilusiones cognitivas. Parecen basarse en cualidades adicionales que no están incluidas en los fenómenos subyacentes. ¿Puede el docente simplificar las nociones complejas sin cambiarlas? Para ello, argumentamos que la complejidad y el proceso de emerger no son exclusivamente inherentes a objetos o fenómenos. También dependen del sistema perceptivo, motor y cognitivo del estudiante. Así, si el profesor ayuda a conectar nociones y fenómenos con el conocimiento innato y corporizado de los estudiantes, entonces estas nociones se vuelven menos complejas y el fenómeno emergente pierde su magia: se conecta lógicamente con los fenómenos subyacentes. En este artículo presentamos evidencia empírica del efect...
2007
In modern,Western societies the purpose of schooling is to ensure that school-goers acquire knowledge of pre-existing practices, events, entities and so on.The knowledge that is learned is then tested to see if the learner has acquired a correct or adequate understanding of it. For this reason, it can be argued that schooling is organised around a representational epistemology: one which holds that knowledge is an accurate representation of something that is separate from knowledge itself. Since the object of knowledge is assumed to exist separately from the knowledge itself, this epistemology can also be considered ‘spatial. ’ In this paper we show how ideas from complexity have challenged the ‘spatial epistemology ’ of representation and we explore possibilities for an alternative ‘temporal’ understanding of knowledge in its relationship to reality. In addition to complexity, our alternative takes its inspiration from Deweyan ‘transactional realism ’ and deconstruction. We suggest...
International Journal of Complexity in Education, 2022
This paper discusses the legitimacy of framing school classrooms as complex adaptive systems (CASs) with the aim of advancing discourse about the extent to which systems within education can be usefully designated as complex. Perspectives differ on criteria for applying a complexity framing to human systems, a consequence of the lack of any single definition of complexity theory, or agreement on the framing of CAS in human networks. However, the literature on complexity and education appears to both open (ajar) and close the door on descriptions and theoretical treatment of classrooms as CASs, and as a site for complexitysensitive empirical research. The paper begins by presenting an overview of complexity discourse with respect to education, articulates conceptual framings for CAS and classrooms then moves on to advance the principal arguments in opposition to a conception of classrooms as CASs. Arguments from those in the field who are receptive, albeit tentatively, to applying a CAS lens to classroom systems are then explained. The paper concludes that whilst these arguments have merit, the legitimacy or otherwise of framing classrooms as CASs hinges to some extent on how classrooms and CASs themselves are framed. Finally, a primer is presented for an empirical complexity-sensitive classroom study undertaken in July 2020, findings from which will be published later this year.
Complexity and Truth in Educational
This paper considers the impact of complexity theory on the way in which we see propositions corresponding to the reality that they describe, and our concept of truth in that context. A contingently associated idea is the atomistic expectation that we can reduce language to primitive units of meaning, and tie those in with agreed units of experience. If we see both language and the reality that it describes and explains as complex, this position becomes difficult to maintain. Complexity theory, with its emphasis on non-linear and dynamic interactions between multiple variables, within indeterminate and transient systems, supports the case for a connectionist and holistic analysis. Theories are more likely to be under-determined by evidence and open to interpretation, with the potential for ‘certainties’ weakened. If educational situations are complex, then the drive towards specific and focused research findings that will support policy and practice, and the associated notion of control, is illusory. Rather than providing evidence for prescription, research is thus understood as descriptive and explanatory, within a range of interpretative possibilities. Action takes place within a necessarily incomplete and constantly changing situation, more appropriately understood in terms of survival than control.
Rising Above? Implications of Complexity for Theories of Learning
2018
A recent article—Conceptualizing Debates in Learning and Educational Research: Toward a Complex Systems Conceptual Framework of Learning—analyzed the long-running cognitive versus situative learning debate and proposes that a Complex Systems Conceptual Framework of Learning (CSCFL) could provide a principled way to achieve a theoretical rapprochement. In this session, we bring together major educational and learning theoreticians for cognitive, situative, embodied, and socio-cultural perspectives to consider, debate, and to perhaps (or not) “rise above” currently engaged major issues, debates, and disagreements that fundamentally influence educational research in a wide range of areas.