Complexity theory and education Tara Fenwick School of Education

Dynamic nonlinear interaction among diverse parts attune to each other possibilities always emerging Systems view nested systems self organising dynamics Critical importance of disordering dynamics, or disturbances Multiple points of feedback Continual uncertainty Understanding learning and educational change as emergence

Emergence occurs through … masses of interaction among diverse elements simple adjustments – aligning with nearest actors external inputs - ‘disturbances’ that are amplified new possibilities constantly generated

Attunement Actors in complex adaptive systems notice, listen, sense to the elements around them... also attune to effects of own actions on what emerges... and respond: adapt, interrupt, etc

The Biosphere The Species Society Collectives The Person Bodily Subsystems: Organs and Cells Systems view nested systems

Self-organising dynamics bottom up not scattered – but decentered need constraints (e.g. ‘enabling constraints) simple rules – each iteration changes

Disturbance disordering dynamics interrupt stasis introduce energy, new material ‘far from equilibrium’ often need to be amplified to act on the system – to produce change (e.g. learning) Courtesy Dr. Tom Lynch, New York

Multiple feedback sources different forms of feedback amplifies some changes, redirects or ignores others looks like: ongoing improvising eventually helps creates momentum – > tipping points

1. Curriculum that creates conditions of a ‘complex adaptive system’ in a classroom

2. Teaching students ways to learn as though they are actors in a complex system

Experience is undecidable Helping students learn to attune to patterns that are emerging

Learn to improvise amidst uncertainty

Learn to adapt and reorient to what emerges

BUT also Learn to interrupt problematic patterns that may be emerging

Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment … a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering. (Karen Barad 2003) Learn to recognise and use emerging possibilities

3. Teaching people strategies for working in complex systems

attuning to the emerging systems reducing complexity boundary practices working with uncertainty Joseph Wilder M.D.

4. Deliberately incorporating disturbance

Teachers learning to recognise and ‘own’ their differences in specialist expertise and identities Facilitators introducing disturbance– provoking, challenging, questioning (Fazio & Gallagher 2009)

(Zellermeyer & Margolin 2005) Moments of conflict and dissonance – ‘dramatic tension … provides the energy for interaction’ Participants ‘attuned to the periphery and the possibility of chaos’ Learning space emerged in ‘gap between positive innovative views and negative peripheral views’ Facilitators catalysed confrontations AND explicitly supported those taking risks or suffering anxiety Facilitators attuned participants to own emotions as well as larger collective emerging (nested systems)

5. Suggesting new questions of responsibility in education and learning

What does it mean to be a human being, a person, in a universe of relational materiality? What is it for relational beings to have responsibiliaty towards each other?

‘the world is an ongoing open process of mattering through which “mattering” itself acquires meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities’ (Karen Barad, 2003) Complexity theory and education