Modelling Both Complexity and Abstraction: A Paradox?

International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 2012

This paper describes part of a study about Learning-by-Modeling (LbM). Previous research indicates that involvement with modeling scientific phenomena and complex systems can play a powerful role in science learning. Some researchers argue with this view indicating that models and modeling do not contribute to understanding complexity concepts, since these increases the cognitive load on students. This study will investigate the effect of different modes of involvement in exploring scientific phenomena using computer agent modeling tools, on students' understanding of complexity concepts. Quantitative and qualitative methods are used to report about 121 freshmen students that engaged in participatory simulations about complex phenomena, showing emergent, self organized and decentralized patterns. Results show that LbM plays a major role in students' concept formation about complexity concepts.

Interactive Learning Systems can offer students a range of representations, tools, environments and assistance to construct a model which reflects their understanding of a situation which exists in the real world. They can also offer a range of possibilities for learners to improve their communicative competence and articulate their understandings to themselves, to others or to the system itself. However, the relationship between interactivity, learning and communication is complex and can involve humans, artefacts or a combination of both. Theories based on the promotion of productive interactivity between humans in order to engender individual learning development, such as that of Vygotsky can be found at the heart of much work on the design of Interactive Learning Environments (ILEs) (Guzdial et al.example). But what do we mean by Interactive and what is the relationship between Interactivity and

This thesis provides a theoretical basis for applying complexity theory to classroom learning. Existing accounts of complexity in social systems fail to adequately situate human understanding within those systems. Human understanding and action is embedded within the complex systems that we inhabit. As such, we cannot achieve a full and accurate representation of those systems. This challenges epistemological positions which characterise learning as a simple mechanistic process, those which see it as approaching a view of the world ‘as it is’ and also positions which see learning as a purely social activity. This thesis develops a materialist position which characterises understandings as emergent from, but not reducible to, the material world. The roles of embodied neural networks as well as our linguistic and symbolic systems are considered in order to develop this materialist position. Context and history are shown to be important within complex systems and allow novel understandings to emerge. Furthermore, shared understandings are seen as emergent from processes of response, replication and manipulation of patterns of behaviour and patterns of association. Thus the complexity of learning is accounted for within a coherent ontological and epistemological framework. The implications of this materialist position for considering classroom learning are expounded. Firstly, our models and descriptions of classrooms are reconciled with the view of our understandings as sophisticated yet incomplete models within complex social systems. Models are characterised as themselves material entities which emerge within social systems and may go on to influence behaviour. Secondly, contemporary accounts of learning as the conceptual representation of the world are challenged.

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...

end, the emergence of complex thinking is described along the knowledge development of an individual, as opposed to the history of philosophy and science. Coherently, a communication based on clear, albeit ap-proximate, indications is preferred to intricate, all encompassing descriptions. What might have to be done about some practical issues is also preliminarily investigated. The article is addressed and dedicated to the readers who got in touch with the above indicated fog [pur-posely, no bibliographical reference is provided] and experienced difficulties in finding a clue about how to make some sense of it all.

… 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 ...

Artificial Life, 2010

… Journal of Complexity and Education, 2009

In this contribution the focus is on sketching a programmatic view of thinking in complexity about learning and development. This kind of thinking goes beyond linear thinking. The new thinking in complexity about a dynamic complex reality may enable us to build a new science of learning and education, which does not take the nonlinear complex reality for granted but regards it as "real": a science with a framework that does not exist yet. A new vision on learning is presented which takes the concept of interaction as a key concept, which may be linked with the notion of dynamic complexity. Thinking in complexity has its focus on "that which is interwoven". Learning and development through interaction may thus be viewed as a way of co-creating ourselves within a web of reciprocal relationships with the other. This co-creation may be described as a complex of self-generative, self-sustaining processes of mutual "bootstrapping" with potentially nonlinear effects over time. Modelling learning this way, may show learning to be a potentially nonlinear phenomenon within a new reality as the domain of possibilities and potentialities of learning. The modelling of such learning as "bootstrapping," and the concomitant effects on both partners in the interaction, shows these very possibilities and potentialities of learning in their humanly connected spaces of possibility. It demonstrates the very truth of Vygotsky's adage that "it is through others that we develop into ourselves." Based on his thoughts, we are able to develop a new view of the complex nonlinear reality of learning and education, with learners as potentially nonlinear human beings.

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.

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.

Beyond Fragmentation: Didactics, Learning and Teaching in Europe, 2011

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...

2007

Educação e Pesquisa, 2022

This study deals with a research conducted with Brazilian and Portuguese teachers through an online course that aimed to design a continuing education approach that integrated basic, undergraduate and graduate education teachers, based on the "Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future." To this end, it focused on the "lesson" that deals with error and illusion, from Edgar Morin's perspective. The problem that guided the investigation sought to analyze participants' perceptions about the influence of pedagogical practice, methodology and the proposed learning on a transformation in teaching. The research used a qualitative, action-research approach, and the data was submitted to content analysis using the IBMS Statistics program. Results indicated the occurrence of reflections about the need to consider a thought-reform approach to education, one that overcomes the fragmentation of knowledge. About student engagement in activities proposed by the teacher in class, participants were found to value interdisciplinarity, collaboration, collective work, and the mediation role, and to recognize the influence of psychological aspects on students' interest in and motivation for learning. Finally, the need to overcome determinist thoughts was considered, thus allowing participants to understand that knowledge is subject to errors and illusions also in education, and that expanding human thought can help in the search for solutions to educational problems.

Complexity thinking and understanding are vital skills for young people in these times of uncertainty and change. Such skills contribute to resilience and capacities for adaptivity and innovation. Within my teaching practice I have found students to be aware of complex dynamics, uncertainty and change, both in their lives and in the world. However, the current curriculum lacks language and process to conceptualise, articulate and develop complexity understanding. To address this problem, I developed and introduced a patterns-based design and process to a cohort of Australian secondary students. Comprising flowform patterning together with ecological metaphors, the design forms a conceptual language and practical process for thinking about, understanding and engaging with complex phenomena and change. Together these capacities are described here as complexity competence. Implemented initially to engage with time as a complex phenomenon, the design is described as the Patterns of Humantime (PHT), and the process of implementation as Complexity Patterning. Implementation during the development phase demonstrated the design's capacity as a way to understand time as a complex phenomenon, as well as facilitating a relational and identity development approach to learning. In more recent research workshops with American undergraduate Liberal Studies students, the PHT design showed to be effective for understanding complexity and indicated the design's capacity as a patterning process for engaging in collaborative projects in complex situations of diversity, change and uncertainty. Avenues to develop curriculum and evaluation materials, as well as professional development workshops, are being explored.