I’ve been doing a lot of reading about complexity theory recently. There are different terms used when discussing complexity – I’ve heard complexity thinking, complexity theory and complexity pedagogy – but, at the broadest possible level, they are all roughly similar. It’s an idea borrowed from the physical sciences and especially systems thinking, to try to explain the behaviour and interaction of different elements within systems. These systems can be classed as simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. A complex system is one that exhibits non-linear relationships, one that organises itself to increasing complexity and develop emergent learning. One of the crucial features of complexity theory is the notion that it places relationships between elements, and the nature oft those relationships at the centre of its study.
This is one of the reasons that some scholars suggest that complexity thinking has a particular relevance to education – unlike other frameworks or theories borrowed wholesale from physical or other social sciences. These scholars suggest that one of the weaknesses of much educational research is that it focuses on one particular aspect or phenomenon, and ignores the others. This is a reductive way of looking at education – and reductionism is a natural instinct when faced with the incredibly complex world – but it still is a limiting factor that privileges certain aspects while ignoring or marginalising others. For example, some theories of education might focus on the notion of the teacher and his or her actions in the classroom. Other theories look towards the actions of the students. In most of these examples, the process of education is reduced to specific phenomena in order to manage the cognitive burden of studying; such an approach may work well in the physical sciences where there is a clear cause and effect – but it will work less effectively in complex systems where non-linear relationships influence the system. Nevertheless, there is often a research to embrace approaches to education that emphasis one particular aspect at the expense of others – for example, direct instruction rather than project based learning, or the effect of streaming versus mixed ability classrooms. Both of these examples create unhelpful binaries, and it speaks to the complex nature of education and education systems around the world that these binaries have failed to produce solutions that are effective in all domains.
One of the criticisms of complexity theory is that it’s simply a matter of applying new words to quite old fashioned ideas. At first glance, it might appear that it shares elements in common with more progressive approaches to education, but I think this is actually incorrect. Like complexity thinking, progressive approaches to education encapsulate a wide-ranging number of characteristics. However, most of them place an emphasis on the development of the individual student, and adopt student-centred learning, interdisciplinary curricula, and a focus on developing the whole potential of a child, rather than a narrow academic or subject-based approach to education.
The crucial difference between progressive approaches to education and complexity-inspired approaches is in the nature of transphenomenality. That is, rather than simply replacing one focus of education with another, as we do in many variants of progressive pedagogy, complexity thinking compels us to consider the relationships between the different elements as being as important, if not more so, than the constituent elements themselves. Complexity pedagogy is a study of interactions and influences, as much as it is about individual phenomena.
More to come…