When Complexity Theory Meets Critical Realism: A Platform for Research on Initial Teacher Education

• In Event: Redrawing the Map: Toward a Complex Theory of Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

Problem and Objectives
Multiple scholars have concluded that teacher education research needs more complex and holistic approaches (e.g., Anderson & Stillman, 2013; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Valencia, Martin, Place & Grossman, 2009). Accordingly, researchers have taken up a number of theoretical frameworks (e.g., activity theory, ecological theory, structuration theory, complexity theory) that avoid reducing teacher education to its pieces and instead aim to account for its complex social, cultural, policy, and political contexts. Along these lines, Paper #1 elaborates the theoretical framework for this session based on the integration of complexity theory and critical realism (CT-CR).

Theoretical Perspectives and Related Literature
In the social sciences and education, “complexity theory” has been used to examine individuals, social phenomena and organizations—understood as systems—and how these change, learn, and evolve over time (Mason, 2008; Morrison, 2008; Wheatley, 2006). Rather than parts, complexity theory focuses on wholes, relationships, and open systems (Byrne, 1998; Davis & Sumara, 2006). Rather than predictable linear effects, complexity theory posits that multi-dimensional relationships, complex feedback loops, and dynamic interactions among agents and elements are responsible for patterns and phenomena (Cilliers, 1998; Haggis, 2008). Following work in sociology (Byrne, 1998, 2001; Reed & Harvey, 1992), we integrate key ideas from complexity theory with ideas from critical realism, a philosophy connecting aspects of the natural and social worlds at the level of deep causal mechanisms (Bhaskar, 1987; Sayer, 1992). Critical realism holds that although reality is not fixed nor immediately accessible, it has some aspects that exist beyond our knowledge and conceptions of them, including causal mechanisms that produce empirically observable events (Danermark, Ekstrom, Jakobsen, & Karlsson, 1997).

Guided by CT-CR, our research team is conducting a series of studies intended to develop an explanatory theory of teacher education. These studies reflect critical realism’s stages of development of explanatory models (Danermark, Ekstrom, Jakobsen, & Karlsson, 1997), which begin with complex, but concrete description and analysis of the components of a phenomenon (Paper #2), then proceed to theoretical redescriptions that accounts for structures and relationships (Paper #3). Development continues with the identification of patterns of practice consistently linked with student learning, which suggest possible key mechanisms that make a phenomenon possible (Paper #4) and then returns to the concrete level, by considering how structures and mechanism manifest and interact at different levels and conditions.

Contributions to the Field
We refer to CT-CR as a research “platform” to suggest that this combination allows for causal explanations about teacher learning and teacher education systems without being reductionist or linear. CT-CR’s description of the agency-structure relationship accounts for human agency by acknowledging that under certain conditions, agents have the capacity to initiate causal sequences. CT-CR also permits examination of teacher education in relation to intersecting systems of social inequality based on class, gender and ethnicity (Walby, 2007). As a research platform, CT-CR opens new questions, places to look for explanations, and ways to understand the initial conditions, system interactions, and underlying causal mechanisms that facilitate the emergence of desired outcomes in teacher education.

Author

• Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Boston College