Combining Complexity Theory, Ecological Systems Design, and Teacher Identity to Study Teacher Learning

• In Event: The Problem of Linear Thinking in Research on Teacher Learning: Can Complexity Theories Help?

Abstract

Problem and objectives
This conceptual and methodological paper combines Complexity Theory, Ecological Systems Design, and Teacher Identity to consider contemporary teaching and teacher learning as situated, dynamic work. Over the last decades, much research on teaching and teacher development has emphasized positivistic views of cause and effect (e.g., Krathwohl, 1993), and treated the many variables in play as discrete and removable from their natural context. As response, post-qualitative methodologists have critiqued those views as overly structural or rigid (e.g., St. Pierre, 2010), yet critics often stop there rather than offering methodologies or empirical studies of their own. As productive alternative, this paper integrates Complexity Theory (itself a sub-set of Chaos Theory) with Ecological Systems Design (a treatment of systems as multiple interlocking contexts and sub-contexts) and Teacher Identity (a dynamic view of teachers as both products and agents) in order to enrich understandings of teaching and teacher learning.

Theoretical framework and contributions
First, complexity theory (also known as ‘complex adaptive systems theory’) is a cluster of perspectives on the functioning of large systems composed of myriad moving parts (Merion, 1999). Complexity theory has been used to investigate the cosmos, ant colonies, and the human immune system, to name a few. As a central tenet, it holds that any complex adaptive system—such as the galaxy or, for present purposes, the landscape of teaching in the U.S.—is comprised of interacting agents that in the aggregate form a dynamic, living system that leans toward equilibrium. Its parts (called “agents,” but what we might call “teachers, students, and other education stakeholders”) rely on highly complex systems of communication, adaptation, cooperation, and perseverance in order to function.

Second, applying this heuristic to the ecological system of education emphasizes that any teacher exists at the center of multiple, nested systems of practice related to her work: her classroom (the microsystem), the school and district (the mesosystem), the state (the exosystem), the broader educational climate (the macrosystem)—and the fact that these levels change and inter-relate over time (the chronosystem). Within and across these contexts, teachers are connected to each other (and to various policies, features, and historical influences) in all kinds of ways, for all kinds of reasons, with varying amounts of intimacy producing identifiable outcomes.

Third, teacher identity offers a framework for examining how these complex interconnections come to rest in real individuals working in actual classrooms (Author, in press). Teacher identity allows consideration of how teachers combine their own context-specific learning with generalized knowledge and rules of the profession. It allows a view of teachers as both individuals and parts of nested social systems. It splits the overly linear dichotomy between determinism and agency because it treats teachers as complex agents who both shape and are shaped by their work in complicated but identifiable ways.

This paper discusses how the three frames fit together to investigate teaching in ways sensitive to the diversity of teachers and students, the embedded nature of teacher learning, and the teacher-directed nature of lasting educational improvement.

Author

• Brad Olsen, University of California - Santa Cruz