Complexity and education: Inquiries into learning, teaching and research

Abstract

Foundational articles on complexity theory were published almost sixty years ago but received little attention outside of science.In the last thirty years, interest in complexity theories has grown dramatically, and inquiries into complexity have evolved into a multidisciplinary body of complexity science.In Complexity and Education: Inquiries into Learning, Teaching and Research, Davis and Sumara make a significant contribution to complexity's continued evolution.Though rooted in scientific inquiry, insights from complexity theory and science are increasingly being applied to areas within the social sciences and humanities.Of the plethora of articles and books that utilize complexivist insights, relatively few focus on applications in the domain of education.For the majority of educationists complexity is an unfamiliar concept, however, growing recognition of its relevance to education is signaling a shift in the way we might conceptualize and enact teaching and learning.Recently, understandings from complexity have been applied to a number of areas in education, including curriculum, leadership, teacher education and research design, to name only a few.Davis and Sumara forward an original transdisciplinary exploratory discourse on complexity thinking and educational practice and inquiry.In Complexity and Education, complexity is viewed as neither a single coherent 'theory' nor a new discipline within the tradition of 'science' but as a radically new way of thinking.As complexity is a dynamic, evolving area of inquiry and understanding, providing an exact, static, universal definition of it proves difficult.For the same reasons, the authors readily acknowledge the futility of any effort to provide a comprehensive, prescriptive account of complexity and education.Complexity thinking is not a metadiscourse but a broad notion that facilitates the recognition of profound similarities among a wide array of phenomena.Inquiries motivated by complexivist sensibilities take a variety of nonlinear (i.e.complex) systems as their subject matter (e.g.climactic, economic, biological and social systems).As envisioned by Davis and Sumara, complexity thinking constitutes a new direction of inquiry and analysis that departs from traditional linearreductionist analyses and offers effective alternatives to experimental and quantitative research methodologies.A key concept in the authors' theorization of complexity and education is based on the observation that all complex systems learn.For Davis and Sumara, a learner is "a complex unity that is capable of adapting itself to the sorts of new and diverse circumstances that an active agent is likely to encounter in a dynamic world" (p.14).This broad description allows other complex unities (such as cells and cultures) to also be viewed as learners, an insight that is prompting a shift in the conceptualization of learning from a process of Newtonian mechanics to one of Darwinian dynamics.The strength of this assertion lies in the natural fit of complexity thinking to educational discourse.