Complexity, Equity, and Working Wickedly

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 11:25 am
  In Roundtable Session: Working With Posthuman and Postfoundational Concepts to Rethink Modern Educational Issues (Table 42)

Abstract

Wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973) have been taken up in both science and education fields as a means to address the pressing, messy, and complex real world problems that defy traditional disciplinary approaches. In this theoretical work, we return to Rittel and Weber’s original ten point description of wicked problems to explicate systemic racism and educational inequity as wicked problems, and consider how complexity theory compliments this theoretical perspective. We argue that traditional disciplinary approaches are insufficient to understand and dismantle wicked problems of inequity that emerge in complex systems in education, and that we should be wary of proposed solutions that appear to be clean, replicable, scalable, or final.

Authors

• Kathryn M. Bateman, Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg

• Brandon Sherman, Indiana University - Indianapolis