A review of Melanie Mitchell’s MOOC “Introduction to Complexity” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reader's response: Complicity: An international journal of complexity and education
2007
While complexity science has been a part of the fields of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, organizational and systems theory, and nonlinear dynamics for quite some time, it has only recently been taken up by researchers in the field of education. The on-line journal Complicity: An international journal of complexity and education does an admirable job of introducing the reader to wide-ranging discussions within education that engage the reader with a theoretical basis to which complexity has been applied. The research and discussions reported are very recent, and have the feel of cutting-edge reporting.
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...
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 ...
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.
2005
Thanks also to Professor Philip Higgs at the University of South Africa for his kindness, generous hospitality and advice during a difficult time with the research, and for introducing me to the work of Gert Biesta. I am deeply indebted to my four supervisors: Joan Solomon for having offered me an opportunity to do this work, despite a lack of theoretical background in this field. Without this initial supportive gesture this work would not have begun. Roger Harrison for his encouragement, and support throughout the process. Paul Cilliers for his patient engagements with my many, tedious emails about the paradoxes of complexity, a task he undertook with considerable good humour, and Gert Biesta, my principal supervisor, for his inspirational theoretical input and for always `complicating the scene' thereby taking me further and further out of my depth. I now know that when one is out of one's depth, it is not simply a case of learning how to swim We survive in unimaginable ways.
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.
Towards complexity thinking in education with Juri Lotman
Lexia. Rivista di semiotica, 39-40 Re-Thinking. Juri Lotman in the Twenty-First Century, 2022
This paper discusses the potential of Juri Lotman’s semiotic theory for a complexity-based understanding of learning and education. Complexity thinking as a separate approach to research and practice in education has arisen as a response to the growing need to understand how learning systems, such as individual students, schools, and whole societies, can become more adaptable in the light of the accelerating change of our environment. While the issues of learning, teaching or education are not explicitly discussed in Lotman’s semiotic works, his theoretical investigations of creativity, unpredictability and cultural dynamics can serve as suitable ground for envisioning education in ways that transgress the currently dominant paradigm of learning as a controlled linear process with predictable outcomes. We will focus on the dynamics between two different orientations of semiotic activity in Lotman’s semiosphere: on the one hand, we will view learning as non-linear meaning-making oriented towards generating new information; on the other hand, we will focus on how the process of learning is guided by various educational models that serve as stabilizing mechanisms that in turn are continuously transformed by the learners’ unpredictable choices. The tension between these two tendencies is what allows learning systems to develop while maintaining their identity. In the last part of the article, Lotman’s unique take on artistic modelling in which he sees the potential for making sense of extremely complex systems is considered as a means for addressing educational change and channelling learning towards greater adaptability.
Thoughts on a Pedagogy OF Complexity
Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education
There is now a developed and extensive literature on the implications of the ‘complexity frame of reference’ (Castellani & Hafferty, 2009) for education in general and pedagogy in particular. This includes a wide range of interesting contributions which consider how complexity can inform, inter alia, research on educational systems (Cochran-Smith et al., 2014; Radford, 2008) and theories of learning (Mercer, 2011; Fromberg, 2010), as well as work dealing with specific pedagogical domains including physical education (Atencio et al., 2014, Tan et al. 2010), clinical education and in particular the learning of clinical teams (Noel et al., 2013; Bleakley, 2010; Gonnering, 2010), and learning in relation to systems engineering (Thompson et al., 2011, Foster et al., 2001). This material has contributed considerably to my thinking about the subject matter of this essay which is not the implications of complexity for pedagogy but rather how we might develop a pedagogy OF complexity and, mo...
Three Generations of Complexity Theories: Nuances and Ambiguities
The contemporary use of the term ‘complexity’ frequently indicates that it is considered a unified concept. This may lead to a neglect of the range of different theories that deal with the implications related to the notion of complexity. This paper, integrating both the English and the Latin traditions of research associated with this notion, suggests a more nuanced use of the term, thereby avoiding simplification of the concept to some of its dominant expressions only. The paper further explores the etymology of ‘complexity’ and offers a chronological presentation of three generations of theories that have shaped its uses; the epistemic and socio-cultural roots of these theories are also introduced. From an epistemological point of view, this reflection sheds light on the competing interpretations underlying the definition of what is considered as complex. Also, from an anthropological perspective it considers both the emancipatory as well as the alienating dimensions of complexity. Based on the highlighted ambiguities, the paper suggests in conclusion that contributions grounded in contemporary theories related to complexity, as well as critical appraisals of their epistemological and ethical legitimacy, need to follow the recursive feedback loops and dynamics that they constitute. In doing so, researchers and practitioners in education should consider their own practice as a learning process that does not require the reduction of the antagonisms and the complementarities that shape its own complexity.