A new generative complexity science of learning for a complex pedagogy

Proposal for the SIG Chaos and Complexity Theories at AERA 2007 Title: A New Generative Complexity Science of Learning for a Complex Pedagogy Ton Jörg IVLOS Institute of Education University of Utrecht The Netherlands [email protected] Introduction My paper focuses on the link between thinking in complexity and the field of learning and education. It seems time to go beyond describing complexity and formulate a theory about the complexity of learning for education. The needed reform of our thinking may imply not only a new science of learning, from a complexity perspective, but also a new language of learning: a language for education. This new theorizing about learning from a complexity perspective shows that the complexity of reality may be different from the reality as assumed by many educators in the field of learning and education. Complexity thinking may offer a new map of reality: a fluid map showing the dynamic complexity of that reality. A reality of learning and education which remained unknown in its dynamics. This notion of a lack of emphasis on adequate theorizing about that reality is basic for the change needed in this field. The complexity perspective accepts that reality is more complex than we always believed it to be: “we are at the beginning of a new scientific era. We are observing the birth of a science that is no longer limited to idealized and simplified situations but reflects the complexity of the real world.” (Ilya Prigogine, quoted in the program book of CCR, 2005) The real message is that we should not take complexity for granted: “The complexity of the world is real” (Axelrod & Cohen, 1999, p. 2). We should not only try to describe complexity in the real world but also try to understand the complex dynamics of it, and the nature of the complex processes involved. We should become more explanatory of the complex dynamic processes and the mechanisms involved in the processes of generating effects which may be nonlinear in time (Ibid., p. 2). To my mind, this view is very much inspired and informed by the work of the Russian educational psychologist Lev Vygotsky and by the French pedagogue and philosopher Edgar Morin. It gives an opening for a richer, more fluid description of reality: of learning and development as basically emergent processes evolving through human interaction. To link complexity with the field of learning and education is not an easy task. Most people in this field simply stick to describing complexity, assuming that “an approach that works well for describing complexity (decomposition into parts and interactions) is an explanation of how the system’s operations came to be what they are” (Clancey, 1997, p. 243). These people are taking complexity as a kind of ‘given’ reality, and taking its relationship with that reality of learning and education for granted as well. So, one may state that the field of learning and education seems to have encountered a conceptual deadlock. The field seems not able to develop a new, complex view of learning as a potential nonlinear process with explosive possibilities in the spaces of possibilities (see Barab & Kirshner, 2001; Davis & Sumara, 2006). What is really needed is to become explanatory about (dynamic) complexity and education, as Vygotsky already advocated in his main work (Vygotsky, 1978). More recently, Bruner stated that we have to rethink educational psychology (Bruner, 1996, p. 53). To do so, we may have to reform our thinking (Morin, 2001; Mainzer, 2004; Biesta, 2006). This reform of thinking implies a thinking in dynamic complexity, the complexity of the radical social process of ‘coming into being’ of the learner as a whole person (Biesta, 2006), and the hitherto still unknown causal dynamics of the multidirectional processes involved in such complexity (Vygotsky, 1978). Only by taking this challenge seriously, we may be able to reinvent the field of learning and education (Jörg, 2004b). It may be the start for giving birth to a new science (Vygotsky, 1997; see also Prigogine, above; Jolles et al., 2005). Toward a new science of learning through communicative human interaction To invent such a new science calls for a radically new understanding of reality, and of recognizing the representation of it, and of its object of inquiry: in short “the principle of a science about [what is] the real” (Vygotsky, 1997, pp. 328-329). Typically this process (of redefining the object of inquiry) will necessitate us as scientists to break free, and, doing so, enable us to identify a hitherto unknown kind of generative mechanisms, so for the first time elucidating a pattern of determination already efficacious in the world (see Bhaskar, 1986, p. 104). The practice of education has shown already some of such hitherto unknown, unpredictable effects (e.g. the case of Anh Linh, in Jardine et al., 2006). How might complexity be linked to such practice, then, should be the fundamental question to be answered from a complexity perspective. A question like this may become the start for redescribing learning and education in complex terms (cf. Osberg, 2005), even of ‘A New Learning Science’ (Jolles et al., 2005). Consequently, it may lead to the development of ‘A New Language of Learning’ (see Biesta, 2006). What seems necessary for that is, at first, an agenda of rethinking. We need not only a rethinking of the traditional concept of interaction, as being inadequate (Clancey, 1997, p. 243), but also a rethinking of complexity (Jörg, 2004b, 2006a,b). All this rethinking may bring us not only to a new concept of learning, but also to the development of a new language of learning. Such a focus of rethinking may lead to a trans-disciplinary perspective, offering “a new way of looking at the dynamic process of social influence” (Axelrod, 1997, p. 151; Jörg, 2004a,b, 2006b,c). This new way of looking may imply the linking of complexity thinking with the fields of Cognitive Science and Brain Research and the field of learning and education (Jolles et al., 2005; Jörg, 2005, 2006a,b,c). A New Science of Learning and a Complex Pedagogy Now, it seems possible to link the new science of learning with a new view of Pedagogy: A Complex Pedagogy (see Kirshner, 2002). We may start with the basic question for Pedagogy which is about the complexity of reality: is it possible to connect the future of the pupil with the educator’s present? (see Luhmann & Schorr, 2000, p. 247; italics in original) This question implies the importance of the temporal dimension above the social dimension (Ibid., p. 247, with reference to the German pedagogue and philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart). A description like this illustrates the impossibility of education by recognizing the complexity involved. The educator faces the problem of steering the process of education without knowing the dynamic complexity which is involved in the process, being part of the very process himself! (Ibid., pp. 245-247) So, the first task for an educator is becoming aware of this fundamental problem of education. The challenge for taking complexity more seriously, and not taking it for granted, implies a moral obligation for the educator too: “The educator is thus morally obliged to do something that he cannot comprehend: to consider something as possible even though he cannot understand the conditions of possibility.” (Luhmann & Schorr, 2000, p. 158) The Dutch pedagogue Gert Biesta refers to this problem as follows: “… to be a teacher or to be an educator, therefore, implies a responsibility for something (or, better, someone) that we do not know and cannot know” (Biesta, 2006, p. 30). There is a lot of uncertainty in the whole process of education as a fundamental complex process. The educator can never be sure about his performance in the process of education. So, the educator has to face the real problem that he/she may obstruct the complex process of coming into being (see also Osberg, 2005, p. 82). The ‘learning in the wild’ is the very reality of real learning: a reality beyond control, but very vulnerable in practice (cf. Clancey, 1997, p. 243; cf. ‘Cognition in the Wild’, by Hutchins, 1995). A New Language of Learning The reform of our thinking about learning and education implies a different use of concepts, of principles and metaphors. To keep open the discourse between the new science of learning and the field of education, i.e. the educators, we need to formulate a new language of learning to be derived from that new science. It is a new language having a basic function for education (cf. Biesta, 2006, p. 14). The new language of learning may open the vistas of a new reality of learning and education, of a different practice: of learning as creation or an invention (Biesta, 2006, p. 68). A practice which may show seemingly impossible ‘effects’ (see Jardine et al., 2006; cf. Jörg, 2004a, on the Matthew and Comenius Effect). The rethinking of interaction and the temporal dimension of dynamic complexity of communicative human interaction as “a thoroughly practical process in which patterns of action are formed and transformed” (Biesta, 2006, p. 129; see also Vygotsky, 1978) implies quite a lot of changes in the use of concepts for that discourse. The individual learner for instance, should be understood differently as well: from a perspective of a radically social understanding of individuals (Stacey, 2003), based on relationships which are reciprocal (Jorg, 2004a). Process concepts like ‘interactivity’, ‘connectivity’, ‘generativity’, ‘reciprocal influences’, ‘reciprocation’ and ‘reciprocal interpenetration’, of ‘bootstrapping’ each other as learners (Bruner, 1996), and their linking with concepts like ‘trajectories of change’ evolving in ‘spaces of possibility’ (Davis & Sumara, 2006), enabled through truly generative mechanisms of ‘guided’ change, are central new elements of our new theorizing about the complexity of learning and education. Learning, then, may be described and explained as connected processes of inter-action between and intra-action within each learner participating in communicative human interaction, generating potential nonlinear effects in time. The description of learners as ‘coming into being’, of coming into the world with others, as human beings, boundless and unpredictable (see the work of Vygotsky; cf. Biesta, 2006, pp. 84-85), may become a new scientific description based on the new science of learning and education. “It is through others that we become ourselves” (Vygotsky, 1978). This adage of Vygotsky is a description which goes beyond control, and beyond the common notion of instruction. It may be stated that Vygotsky really was ‘a visitor from the future’ (Bruner, 1987). References Axelrod, R. (1997). The complexity of cooperation. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press. Axelrod, R. & Cohen, M. D. (1999). Harnessing complexity. New York: The Free Press. Barab, S. & Kirshner, D. (2001). Rethinking Methodology in the Learning Sciences [Special Issue]. Journal of the Learning Sciences, vol. 10: 1&2, pp 5-15. Bhaskar, R. (1986). Scientific realism & human emancipation. London: Verso. Biesta, G. (2006). Beyond Learning. Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Bruner, J. (1987). Foreword. In R.W. Rieber & A.S. 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Vernieuwing in het hoger onderwijs - Onderwijskundig handboek

Vernieuwing in het hoger onderwijs - Onderwijskundig handboe