Educational Change as a Complexity-Riddled Enterprise

• In Event: Getting to Bedrock: Diverse Perspectives on Emergence, Nonlinearity, and Relationality in Education

Abstract

Given the decline of the bureaucratic view of organizational change (Weber, 1947),
scholars have sought alternative paradigms to explain how organizations, such as schools, operate
and change (Heckschner & Donnellon, 1994). There is a fair amount of scholarship which applies chaos and complexity theories (Carr-Chellman, 2000; Davies, 2004; Fullan, 2001a; Maxcy, 1995; McQuillan, in press; Reigeluth, 2004) and systems theory (Banathy, 1996; Carr-Chellman, 1998; Joseph & Reigeluth, 2005; Peck & Carr, 1997) to the study of school reform. While much of what we associate with these theories initially surfaced in the hard sciences (Briggs & Peat, 1999; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984) it has been increasingly applied to the social sciences (Kiel & Elliot, 1996) and this application to the social sciences will serve as the framework here. As a whole, these theories view schools holistically, as collections of individuals which have boundaries, and internal functions, and common purposes (Hutchins, 1996). They stand in contrast to theories of organizations in which systems can be understood by looking at constituent pieces, or theories which utilize fragmentation or reductionism (Morrison, 2002). I find it useful to describe the concepts from these related theories and
how they illuminate aspects of educational change, An examination of the
important concepts from these new sciences (Doll, 2008; Wheatley, 1999) approach to
organizational change will include: nested systems, feedback, bifurcation, autopoiesis, self-reference, dissipative structures, morphic fields, and strange attractors.

Proponents of such an application of post-Newtonian theories may be able to provide guidance for those looking to understand the dynamics of complex social systems (Reigeluth, 2004). These are systems in which mandated policies cannot be expected to be followed erbatim (McLaughlin,1990) and in which systems can be perturbed, but rarely managed directly (De Greene, 1996).

School systems have been relatively resistant to change partly because reformers have been
generally ignorant of the complexity of schools as social systems and have improperly treated
them as simple cause-effect machines (Rust & Freidus, 2001). Principals can easily retreat to the simplistic cause-effect model of organizational change, but they are likely to be disappointed in the results. This study seeks to provide support for principals and principal educators to reorient their perspective of schools, viewing them as inherently complex, and never simple, social systems. While there have been those critical of the hard-science roots of these theories and their applicability to education (Benson & Hunter, 1994; Hunter & Benson, 1997), their complaints, however, have centered on its application to micro-level analysis such as teacher-student or student-student interactions. In this case, they are applied to the entire school system- a complex
system that is very much in line with the types of systems for which the theory was developed.

Authors

• Brian Robert Beabout, The University of New Orleans

• Eugene Gary Kowch, University of Calgary