…the universe has come to be seen as “relentlessly nonlinear.”
-Davis and Sumara

Termite Cathedral

Will Richardson’s recent posts about the future of schools and teachers leaves me an opening for a new “big idea” that I’ve been working on lately. I finished reading Complexity and Education, by Davis and Sumara, which has me thinking about complex systems and the classroom. Complexity theory is relatively new to me, although it’s been around for several years. I’ve read about it, but never anything that was connected directly to the classroom. It’s hard to write about something that I know so little about, but in the spirit of trying to make sense, I plunge into the muddle.

Will talked about how this is a time of “epochal change” in which analytic science has lost some of its predictive and explanatory purchase on the world due to the need for new theoretical models. He said that maybe we’re “between narratives” waiting for a new story “to meaningfully resonate and take hold.”

This reminds me of a speech made by Vaclav Havel, [here, as well] a poet and former president of the Czech Republic. The speech was delivered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1994. Havel commented on the inadequacy of analytic science to give us meaningful information about complex environments. He said, among other things, that “Man as an observer is becoming completely alienated from himself as a being.” And he mentioned two ideas that might help to resolve this alienation. One is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, and the other was the Gaia Hypothesis. When I first read this, it seemed to me that these ideas were too “far out” and new-age (if that’s even a term anymore) to be of any use to teachers.

Fractal Broccoli

But now I’m learning about complexity theory from Davis and Sumara, who make a case for “complexity thinking” as an alternative to analytic science in education research. These ideas are converging for me to help me think about the classroom as a complex system. Complexity thinking is a stance toward inquiry in which the observer is implicated in the the observation, and it suggests new forms of organization and control. For example, they recommend that “mechanisms be in place to ensure that ideas will stumble across one another, not that there must be a particular sort of organizational structure in a social collective” (p. 143).

I wonder, how is “idea management” different from what is generally known as classroom management? The traditional model of education is one that represents a large body of information which schools have to “put into the heads” of students. It looks like this:

transmission model

(Davis and Sumara, 2006, p.27)

That simple graphic succinctly accounts for many of the prevailing myths of Education, elaborated by Artichoke, in which she lists various delusions embedded in education research, policy, and practice.

Complexity thinking puts the learner within a nested set of dynamic “frames,” in which meaning is negotiated on multiple levels:

transmission model

(Davis and Sumara, 2006, p.75)

These levels move from volatile, moment-by-moment, changes to relatively stable institutional and ecological forms at the outer edges. There are numerous, maybe countless, other levels depending on how you choose to look at things.

The authors point out that the contributions of complexity science to education research are not readily apparent. Therefore, the domain is itself an example of the emergent phenomena it describes. It offers several advantages over constructivist and constructionist discourses, since those theories tend to focus on either individual cognition or social/cultural conditions, whereas complexity theory presents an ecological model that accounts for change on multiple levels, simultaneously.

I don’t have time to go into this in more detail right now, but I want to pick up the idea again and look at Davis’ and Sumara’s chapter seven: Conditions of Emergence, because it has practical relevance to “idea management” in the classroom. Incidentally, they have an online journal, Complicity, that might be of interest.