Cognizing in the Classroom: A New Teacher’s Reconceptualization of the Curriculum Based on Systems, Complexity, and Cognition

• In Event: Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Praxising Complexity

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model for curriculum that mirrors a metaphor for cognition. Our intent is to provide a healthy counter-weight to the linear, mechanical-minded models that overpopulate the educational field.
Systems and complexity thinking form the foundation for this paper, on top of which enaction, a developing paradigm in cognitive science, provides the main theoretical framework.
Enaction theory asserts that there is no objective reality independent of one’s perceptions. Every living system is said to ‘bring forth a world’ via interactions with its environment. Meaning is enacted by the interplay of an organism and its environment (Maturana & Varela, 1987; Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). The history of those meaning-making interactions is embodied in the structure of the system-environment relationship, a process known as coupling.

A review of the literature provided concepts which led to the adoption of a vortex as a metaphor for both enacted cognition and curriculum. The vortex shape was chosen for three reasons. First, they are better understood as dynamic phenomena rather than static objects – they exist only in action. Second, they are the result of the interplay between opposites (i.e. high and low pressure, system and environment) and from this duality a new, single entity emerges. And third, they are complex, organizationally-closed, autopoietic systems: recursive feedback drives their behavior, which is not entirely predictable (i.e. nonlinear) but operates within a range of possibilities based on its embodied history (i.e. structural coupling).

As a species’ biological complexity increases, so does its cognitive ability. Human cognition can be divided into two coupled relationships: the system to its outer world and to its inner world. Each of these relationships can be divided again to account for sensorimotor interactions based in the physical domain, and linguistic interactions based in the human domain. Therefore, cognition can be viewed as the result of four coupled relationships: a human to its physical and social environments, and to its physical and psychological selves. The proposed models for enacted cognition and curriculum are based on these four couplings.

Enaction problematizes several assumptions in public education. If every living system ‘brings forth a world,’ then it is fair to say that every student brings forth a curriculum. There is no single, objective curriculum independent of one’s own perceptions. Within America’s current high-stakes testing culture, sense-making from the student’s perspective is rarely taken into account in local curricula.
Enaction also problematizes pedagogy itself: “Development, and therefore, learning, is essentially an endogenously self-generating process; it is therefore unnecessary – and impossible – to ‘instruct’ it from the outside. This runs directly counter to the widespread notion that ‘learning’ is a process of ‘instruction’” (Stewart, 2010, 9).

This paper challenges the linear conceptualizations of teaching and learning so common in today’s schools by proposing a curricular perspective informed by complex systems and enacted cognition. We feel that such a perspective advocates for students and their stake in education.

Author

• David Barshes, The classroom system