The Continued Relevance of the Basics of Complexity Theory to Educational Spaces

• In Event: Back to Basics: Using Complexity Theory as a Theoretical Framework for Educational Spaces

Abstract

This presentation provides an overview of the foundations of complexity theory and its modern extensions to argue for its continued relevance to the educational spaces that we work in.
Background
This presentation starts with a brief overview of the theoretical foundations of complexity theory going back to the middle of the last century with the formulation of force field theory (Lewin, 1951), information theory (Shannon, 1948), general systems theory (von Berthalanffy, 1968) and cybernetics (Ashby (1957). These four perspectives provide the building blocks for modern complexity theory, which has forwarded such interesting processes as the edge of chaos (Waldrop, 1992) and self-organized criticality (Bak, 1996). Any argument about the relevance of complexity theory to education needs to start with a clarification of what we mean when we talk about complexity. Hence, this presentation will attempt to define that construct, along the lines of Koopmans (2017), followed by a discussion of its applicability to the educational space and its malleability to intervention and reform.
What is Complexity?
Complexity is traditionally understood as the state of being complex, i.e., a whole consisting of many interrelated parts. Complexity theory has elaborated on this idea as follows:
The complexity of cognitive and information structures, as can be found in Shannon’s entropy, which operationalizes the unpredictability of systems’ behavior, and Piaget’s accommodation, describing the increasingly differentiated cognitive schemata of the developing child;
The irreducibility of interactions that constitute systems to the behavior of their individual components, i.e., the whole is more than the sum of its parts, as is the case with classrooms, schools and districts;
Complex transformation, which describes a wide array of discontinuous transformations, challenging the notion that changes in outcomes are proportional to changes in the input conditions (the linear model).
Applications to Educational Spaces
History provides some great examples of the application of complexity theory to education, such as Vygotsky (1978) who described the dynamical tension between development and instructional support (zone of proximal development), Piaget (1967) who formulated the discontinuity in children’s intellectual development in terms of disequilibrium and accommodation, and Weick’s (1976) loosely coupled systems, which have helped us understand how the relative autonomy of classrooms affects professional development efforts at the institutional level. More recent examples to be discussed are Stamovlasis’ description of discontinuity in science learning among middle schoolers (Stamovlasis, 2006), Pennings and Mainhart’s (2016) examination of the moment-to-moment teacher-student interactions, and Koopmans’ (2016) analysis of school reform at the edge of chaos.
Significance
This presentation provides a much needed clarification of what we mean by complexity, and what we can learn from the theory. Educational spaces are systems that require description at multiple levels including the interaction between those levels through feedback loops. Furthermore, these spaces may vary in their propensity toward transformation, i.e., the extent to which they are in a self-organized critical state. The implementation of educational interventions and associated research requires a knowledge about this propensity that is often absent from extant work.

Author

• Matthijs Koopmans, Mercy College