…the universe has come to be seen as “relentlessly nonlinear.”
-Davis and Sumara
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.
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:
(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:
(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.
8 Comments
I like Davis and Sumara’s work, too. Their earlier book, Engaging Minds: Learning and Teaching in a Complex World (with co-author Luce-Kapler), is also excellent for seeing learning as occurring in an ecology of ideas “bumping” up against one another. But even in an ecology, they write, “There are no shortcuts in learning.” It takes much time and many “small experiences.”
Charles, thanks for the reference to another book. I want to try to untangle practice and theory here (but that may be antithetical to the whole idea of complexity, as I understand it right now). “No shortcuts in learning” is a good motto, I suppose, but I’m not thinking of complexity theory as a shortcut to learning. If anything, the transmission model appears to represent a shortcut.
I’ll have a look at Engaging Minds.
Doug,
This will require further study on my part!
It reminds me of the flat-worlders who keep telling the education sector that our students must prepare for a world that doesn’t exist yet – be lifetime learners because that is the only way to evolve along with our economy and society.
And since we have no infallible way to predict the direction that this evolution will take, any acquired knowledge, however esoteric it appears, may serve a future function.
Who could have guessed that the typing class I took in high school – on a manual typewriter with blank keys – would help me use a computer keyboard!
Diane
Hi,
How fascinating. I just spent a lovely afternoon with Judith Green discussing these ideas. In some ways making me ask, and think. She gave me Liquid Life by Zygmunt Bauman. But quite a few things here to look at. I’m still sorting all the construction pieces. Though in the main that material is valuable to me. I heard her touch on this somehow but will need to try to search my memory. Clearly you are hard at work this summer while I am playing with making things and generally a bit lazy.
My disgust over several years with testing actually first evolved from what it did not look at that contributed to learning for my students. No I said that incorrectly. It was not able to look at learning processes. So it seemed as I know you have stated, like the temperature taken because I’m sitting at the doctor, even if it is for the broken wrist. But actually….as i talked on my long ride home about the metaphors teachers employ in describing their relationship to school from a book I’m reading…I thought about teacher conductors, or teacher beehives and eventually realized that I was looking for a comparison that does touch on the many kinds of layered issues simultaneously at work. Arriving at the moon. Teacher as the moon. Considering it for tides and other effects on our earth. Of course at this point the kids asked me to stop talking “to myself”. I think however moon. Which has nothing and everything to do with your post for me…yes, summer will end and I must get serious again.
Enjoyed reading. Sarah
One of the benefits for me of going to the library is that I sometimes find a book on the shelf near the book I was looking for, and the surprise is more valuable than the original target. We do need good metaphors, and I plan to introduce one here the next time I write about this. Dynamic phenomena are what we’re looking at.
I’m looking forward to this next piece you write, as actually I’ve used “artist” which Maslow in his last writing proposed as the necessary stance of the next century…..or the best he could grab to describe the learner/teacher as an artist and certainly Eisner speaks to this. The problem is so few are artists that the language of that doesn’t speak to them….and this again removes meaning for someone you might be speaking with about the work you are doing and holding onto as a group. But I have decided that might be good for me in my stance to use this, but is it so comprehensible? …, I’ve used as “poet makers,” again limited, because of how that is seen.
I think, asking everyone involved, listening and seeing if one meta-metaphor springs forward would be interesting. This is actually from a book by Yero on teacher self-reflection….which actually is an excellent accessible work. I started to create a meme to this ….but I lack the network to carry it out. And reading about memes rather threw me as well. Having failed I think in my first go round to understand what this blogging actually was, a system of group thought. Using it in a self system…seeing, however, it differently now…So anyway I would really like a metaphorical construct.
And again thank you for this hard work. I’ve been meaning to be in touch.
Sarah, your comments are helpful to me in understanding what direction to go here. Your idea about creativity as a core quality of emergence is very close to my own thinking. So the “case” for creativity might be made with this model of learning. Reflection, too, is written about in an article, The Potential of Reflective Journals in Studying Complexity in Action, in the 2005 issue of the Complicity journal.
Excellent link. Just read it.
Very good.
As you know long time reflective journaler that I am…
However that process which I brought a piece too on-line in the form of a bouncy happy blog. I think is very important to my working. And it would seem to me we could design this into children reflecting and conversing on their growth through time. Good article.
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