Reader's response: Complicity: An international journal of complexity and education (original) (raw)
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Complexity theory and education
… Research Association, Hong Kong Institute of …, 2006
Abstract: This paper introduces central tenets of complexity theory and current issues that they raise, including: the consequences of unpredictability for knowing, responsibility, morality and planning; the significance of networking and connectedness; non-linear learning ...
Complexity as a theory of education
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, 2009
Educational research, as a domain of academic inquiry, is a relatively young field. Most of its major journals have been established since the 1960s, and only a few of them were in place a century ago. University-based colleges and faculties of education are similarly recent. Very few have been around for more than a half-century. For the most part, when they were first established, colleges and faculties of education drew their personnel from specialists in psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, management, and the subject matter areas. And even though the situation has changed so that a huge majority of current faculty members have been credentialed by schools of education, the derivative nature of the field continues to be manifest in the names of its subfields and departments: educational psychology, educational philosophy, educational history, mathematics education, and so on. Few branches, with the obvious exception of curriculum studies, can justly be seen as proper to e...
Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity in Education, 2010
Brent Davis and Dennis Sumara's Complexity and Education: Inquiries into Learning, Teaching, and Research is an insightful, clearly-written, and provocative contribution to the body of educational complexivist literature-an account we think particularly relevant for researchers and practitioners engaged in a transformative educational ethic. Evoking the phrase "more than human" (Abrams, 1996) as a sensibility where human concerns and action are nested within broader worlds of meaning, and the notion of knowing as adhering to a logic of adequacy, not optimality (a position Maturana and Varela (1998) also hold), Davis and Sumara present complexity thinking as a "pragmatics of transformation" (p. 74) offering "explicit advice on how to work with, occasion, and affect complexity unities" (p. 130). Davis and Sumara take care not to position complexity thinking as a "hybrid" seeking "common ground" (p. 4) or a "metadiscourse" (p. 7), but as a deeply complicit and participatory way of acting which might offer education itself as an "interdiscourse" (p. 159), and simultaneously as a pragmatics with which to engage in the practical educational project. Davis and Sumara see complexity thinking as irreducible participation across multiple, interrelated systems of organization. They introduce the term level-jumping to describe knowing or learning as the capacity to participate in such a multiplicity of separate, yet inseparable, systems (e.g., biological, individual, social, evolutionary). We could quibble with the authors' use of the term level, one of those linear terms so embedded in everyday language, and which may easily suggest "higher" and "lower", or leaving one level behind while moving to another. Yet the authors' point is precisely that these levels or organizational systems are embedded in the action of learningsimultaneously interconnected and inseparable. What such terms render visible is the © Copyright 2010. The authors, RANDA KHATTAR and CAROL ANNE WIEN, assign to the University of Alberta and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author also grants a non-exclusive license to the University of Alberta to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
Revisiting Educational Research Through Morin’s Paradigm of Complexity
I was recently invited by Deborah Osberg and Wiliam E. Doll Jr., the new editors of the journal Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education to reflect on Ton Jörg’s paper “Thinking in Complexity about Learning and Education: A Programmatic View“. The reflection I developed in my paper Revisiting Educational Research Through Morin’s Paradigm of Complexity follows the epistemological and anthropological critique characterizing the “paradigm of complexity” proposed by Edgar Morin (1977/1992, 1980, 1986, 1991, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2008). It invites one to question the way one conceives changes and transformations brought by the use of the notion of complexity itself. In this perspective, instead of focusing on the content of Jörg’s theoretical propositions, my intent is to question and comment on what I interpreted as being some of the implicit assumptions which frame his reflection. The aim of this paper is therefore to question the way one conceives the use of a specific theoretical approach (i.e., theories associated with the concept of complexity) in order to promote changes in educational practices and theories. The position I am adopting in this paper translates indeed the conviction that any reform of thought has to be conceived in conjunction with a reflection about the idea of reform itself (Morin, 1999). It is therefore assumed that the use of the notion of complexity, to be critical and to bring significant changes, supposes not only to use a specific theoretical vocabulary, but also and above all to change the way scientific activity itself is conceived in order to bring about such a transformation. The reflection proposed is articulated around five axes: Morin and the Paradigm of Complexity; Program versus Strategy of Research; Prescription versus Interpretation; Monoreferentiality versus Multireferentiality; Distance and Generalization versus Contingency and Implication. Additional contributions from Deborah Osberg, Klaus Mainzer, Gert Biesta, Brent Davis, M. Jayne Fleener David Kirshner and David Kellogg, Bernard Ricca, and William E. Doll, Jr, are available at http://www.complexityandeducation.ualberta.ca/COMPLICITY6/Complicity6\_TOC.htm
Higher Education Letter, 2019
The purpose of this study is to examine the implications, challenges and opportunities of complexity theory for the curriculum (national curriculum). In this study, "Speculative Essay" is used as research method and "Review of Documentation" is used as a tool for information gathering. The main features of complexity theory include totalism, mutual causality, mental reality, uncertainty, self-regulation, multi-sectarianism and nonlinearity. Curriculum according to the national curriculum document has seven essential elements, including student, teacher, content, teaching, learning, assessment, learning environment and school principal. The findings of the research showed that according to the complexity theory, there are some features of this theory in the seven elements of the national curriculum, but still do not cover all the implications of this theory, In addition, the findings of the paper showed that such issues as dichotomy, rule breaking, non-static, neglect of respect, and lack of linear order, multiple causality, or multiple causality can be considered challenges to curriculum and opportunities for the program. The lessons can be seen in terms of incremental, contradictory, and paradox, causal, fundamental, and gradual interaction, cooperation and communication, creative thinking, and self-study.
Complexity science and education: Reconceptualizing the teacher's role in learning
Interchange, 2007
This writing is structured around the question, "What is teaching?" Drawing on complexity science, we first seek to demonstrate the tremendously conflicted character of contemporary discussions of teaching. Then we offer two examples of teaching that we use to illustrate the assertion that what teaching is can never be reduced to or understood in terms of what the teacher does or intends. Rather, teaching must be understood in terms of its complex contributions to new, as-yet-unimaginable collective possibilities.
Educational Change through the Lens of Complexity Science: Changing Thinking for Changed Learners
Northwest Journal of Teacher Education
As education professionals work in times of exponential change, how they think is as important as what they do. Our thought processes frame our creations-and for hundreds of years that frame has been a linear, Newtonian paradigm. Due to advances in hard sciences, we now know that there are other ways of framing our thoughts and understanding our world, and that is through complexity science. Complexity science is a powerful metaphor to use in reviewing our common understandings of school systems and how to reform them to better serve students. This paper includes a primer of complexity science terms and then uses those terms as a lens on school systems for educational professionals pursuing change to meet the needs of the Net Generation of learners as we move into the Information Age. School reform is a phrase that belies the complexity of reforming an education system. Previous ways of thinking about schools and educational design have not led to the advances educational professionals hope for in our schools. Another way to conceptualize schools and how they might embrace change is through complexity science. This shift in understanding has already happened in the hard sciences, and has catalyzed a turn away from old Newtonian conceptualizations of how systems behave. Complexity science informs around notions of complex adaptive systems, initial conditions, attractor states, and bifurcation. These ideas can be used as metaphors for understanding education systems and changes within them, as well as the consistent themes that repeatedly play out in schools. A general overview of complexity science follows which describes the terms complex adaptive systems, initial conditions, attractor states, and bifurcation through the language of complexity science. These terms will be used as a metaphor through which education systems can be understood in a new way. And finally, the reader is challenged to think on one facet of the educational system through the lens of complexity.
Higher education from a complexity theory perspective
2018
Complexity theory, as part of mathematics and physics, deals with complex systems (also called dynamical systems) in which many variables and many interactions between them, expressed as non-linear dependences, are involved. Such systems describe ever evolving processes happening in nature, where only change is a constant and unpredictability is omnipresent. The complexity theory also examines the dependencies of the processes. In what extent the outcome from one process will affect the other? As educational issues (educational system itself, class community, teaching methods, online learning, student community, student engagement, staff development, curriculum development, educational policy, local or global changes of the environment) in a great extent are behaving as complex systems, the complexity theory has inherently became well established discipline in educational research. In this paper we highlight the importance of a complexity theory as a viewpoint in educational researc...