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Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education
Educational Philosophy and Theory Special Issues 1st
Edition Mark Mason Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Mark Mason
ISBN(s): 9781405180429, 1405180420
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 1.58 MB
Year: 2008
Language: english
Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education
Edited by
Mark Mason
special issue of World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, show-casing the work
of UWS academics in bringing complexity informed approaches to social inquiry.
Her book, Adventures for Organisations near the Edge of Chaos, is due for completion
in 2008.
Jay L. Lemke is Professor of Educational Studies at the University of Michigan
and Co-editor of the journal Critical Discourse Studies. He took his PhD at the
University of Chicago in theoretical physics and is the author of Talking Science (1990),
Textual Politics (1995), and numerous contributions to the theory and applications
of functional linguistics, social semiotics and multimedia semiotics in education
and sociocultural studies. His current research interests include analysis of meaning-
making and experience across multiple timescales and issues of institutional and
organizational change.
Rebecca Luce-Kapler is Professor of Language and Literacy in the Faculty of
Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her research
focuses on writing processes and technologies. Her book, Writing With, Through and
Beyond the Text: An ecology of language, brings together her work with women writers
and her understanding of learning, writing, and teaching. She has been a fiction
writer and poet for over 25 years, and is the author of a collection of poetry, The
Gardens Where She Dreams.
Mark Mason is Associate Professor in Philosophy and Educational Studies in the
Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong, where he is also Director of
the Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC). With research interests in
philosophy, educational studies, comparative education and educational development,
he is Regional Editor (Asia & The Pacific) of the International Journal of Educational
Development, Editor of the CERC Studies in Comparative Education Series (co-published
by Springer), and President of the Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong.
He has published some fifty articles, chapters and books in these research areas. His
philosophical research interest in complexity theory and education led to the invitation
from the Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory to edit this book.
Keith Morrison taught in schools in the UK for many years before moving into
higher education. He has worked in higher education for over twenty-five years, in
the UK and Macau, formerly at the University of Durham, UK, and currently as
Professor, Vice-Rector and Dean at the Macau Inter-University Institute. He is the
author of twelve books, including Research Methods in Education (6th edition), School
Leadership and Complexity Theory, and A Guide to Teaching Practice (5th edition), and
around one hundred articles in his areas of interest. He is the editor of the journal
Evaluation and Research in Education. His current fields of research include research
methodology and evaluation, critical theory and policy scholarship, complexity
theory and management, curriculum and assessment development, management
and leadership, and the sociology of the curriculum.
Mark Olssen is Professor of Political Theory and Education Policy in the Department
of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey. His most
recent book is Michel Foucault: Materialism and education, published by Paradigm Press
in 2006. He has also published recently a book with John Codd and Anne-Marie
O’Neill, titled Education Policy: Globalisation, citizenship, democracy (Sage, 2004); an
x Notes on Contributors
edited volume, Culture and Learning: Access and opportunity in the classroom (IAP
Press); with Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear, Critical Theory and the Human
Condition: Founders and praxis; and Futures of Critical Theory: Dreams of difference, also
with Peters and Lankshear (Rowman & Littlefield). He has published extensively in
leading academic journals in Britain, North America and Australasia.
Deborah Osberg is a lecturer in Education in the School of Education and
Lifelong Learning at the University of Exeter in England. Her work is inspired by
Prigoginean complexity and Derridean deconstruction, and she uses the closely
associated notions of ‘dynamic relationality’ and ‘emergence’ to rethink aspects of
educational theory and practice. She is Editor-in-Chief of Complicity: An International
Journal of Complexity and Education.
Mike Radford is based in the Canterbury Christ Church University (UK) Faculty of
Education and is Programme Director for the Doctorate in Education programme.
His PhD on philosophical and psychological issues in relation to the concept of
intelligence was completed at Leeds, and he has substantial teaching experience in
schools and universities across the UK. His research interests include aesthetic,
religious and spiritual education as well as issues in social and educational research.
He has published papers on complexity and educational research in leading
international journals.
Nora H. Sabelli is Senior Science Advisor at the Center for Technology in Learning,
at SRI International. She earned her PhD in theoretical chemistry at the University
of Buenos Aires, Argentina, for research undertaken at the University of Chicago.
Her research interests are in the use of new scientific metrologies in science
education, including complexity, visualization, and other applications of modern
technologies.
Inna Semetsky joined the Research Institute of Advanced Study for Humanity at
the University of Newcastle in Australia after a two-year (2005–2007) Postdoctoral
Research Fellowship in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. Her book,
Deleuze, Education and Becoming, was published by Sense Publishers in 2006 in
their series, ‘Educational Futures: Rethinking Theory and Practice’. In 2004 and
2005 she guest-edited two special issues of Educational Philosophy and Theory,
‘Peirce and Education’, and ‘Deleuze and Education’. In 2007 she was guest editor
of a special issue, ‘Semiotics and Education’, of Studies in Philosophy and Education,
published by Springer.
Dennis Sumara is Professor of Curriculum Studies and Department Head in the
Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His
research focuses on phenomenological studies of imaginative engagement, with an
emphasis on how these create opportunities for tactical interventions into nor-
malizing discourses of identity and identification. His most recent book, Why
Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, interpretation, insight, was
awarded the National Reading Association Ed Fry Book Award.
Foreword: Complexity and
Educational
EPAT
©
0013-1857
Original
xxx
knowledge
2007 Philosophy
Blackwell
Oxford,
Foreword Article
:Publishing,
UK Complexity
systems
Philosophy
of Ltd.
Education
and
and Theory
Society of Australasia
knowledge systems
Michael A. Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mark Mason has done us great service in assembling these chapters from a distin-
guished group of international scholars who are well known or who have devoted
space in their thinking and writing to complexity theory and its relation to education.
This collection brings together a total of fifteen chapters: an introductory set of five
chapters; two chapters that address the issue of complexity theory and philosophy
of education; five chapters that pick up on the theme of complexity theory and
educational research; and, finally, three chapters that address complexity theory
and the curriculum. The final effect is a comprehensive and significant introduction
to complexity theory in educational theory and philosophy.
Given that Mark Mason, the editor of this book, has already addressed the
contents of the book and that there are no less than five introductory chapters,
I will not repeat the points raised or confine myself to issues that have been raised
or attempt to summarize arguments or interpretations. This also obviates the need
for much of a Foreword on my part. John Urry (2005) introducing a special issue
of Theory Culture and Society commented that the social and cultural sciences over
the last few decades have experienced a number of incursions including Marxism
of the 1970s, the linguistic and postmodern turns of the 1980s, and the body,
performative and global culture turns of the 1990s. Without commenting on the
simple metaknowledge schema he introduces he then goes on to introduce the
latest turn—‘complexity’—which he describes as follows:
This turn derives from developments over the past two decades or so
within physics, biology, mathematics, ecology, chemistry and economics,
from the revival of neo-vitalism in social thought (Fraser et al., 2005),
and from the emergence of a more general ‘complex structure of feeling’
that challenges some everyday notions of social order (Maasen and
Weingart, 2000; Thrift, 1999).
It is, he says, in the 1990s that the social sciences ‘go complex’ which he dates
from the 1996 Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences,
chaired by Wallerstein and including non-linear scientist Prigogine, who together
wanted to break down some of the divisions between the social and natural sci-
ences. Complexity thought he dates from the 1990s and also the global spread of
‘complexity practices’ and its popularizations, including applications to the social
and cultural sciences.
The historiography of these successive turns does not attract Urry’s attention
although to me it demands more of an explication and one that in a very real sense
bears on the complexification of the social sciences and philosophies of practice
like philosophy of education. An analogy and related phenomenon is the history of
the avant garde in twentieth century modernism and its uneven geographical spread
across cultural capitals of the world—Paris and Impressionism, Moscow and for-
malist linguistics and poetics, Vienna and Dadism, Paris and Cubism, New York
and Abstract Expressionism etc., and the dissipation of the avant garde as a series
of successive paradigms, each critique-ing the other, as it traveled to the west coast
and finally gave up the struggle and died among the eclecticism of a postmodern-
ism in arts and architecture that admitted strands of diverse and multicultural
thought and experience, as well as a total consumerism that incorporated art.
We could also tell a similar story of disciplinary reception of new formalist
techniques and developments in mathematics and physics and their penetration
into the social and cultural sciences, and indeed into philosophy (although this, it
might be argued, had a different trajectory especially with developments in logic
and philosophy of time, from Kant onwards), especially after Minowski’s elegant
equations gave mathematical expression to Einstein’s theories of relativity in the
early twentieth century. The subsequent mathematicization of ‘space-time’ and its
vectorization in the social and cultural sciences, as much a series of flows and
influences from the arts, indicated that epistemologically speaking scientific com-
munities exhibited an increasing complexity in their influence and formation, and
in the development of formalist methodologies and techniques adopted from devel-
opments in mathematics.
What is interesting to me here and is part of the kernel of investigating knowl-
edge systems is that complexity as non-lineal, emergent, self-organizing and
dynamic systems, with the advent of computers, with Claude Shannon’s 1948
‘Mathematical Theory of Communication’, with the development of cybernetics
and the Macy group (von Neumann, Shannon, Bateson, Mead etc.) after the war,
and with the development of the Internet as the preferred academic mode of
scholarly communication, the epistemological complexity of knowledge systems per se
and their interdisciplinization was set in motion as an irreversible development of
Foreword: Complexity and knowledge systems xiii
References
Fraser, M., Kember, S. & Lury, C. (eds) (2005) Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism.
Special Issue of Theory Culture & Society 22(1): 1–14.
Jones, R. (2004) Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. & Urry, J. (2004) ‘Enacting the social’, Economy and Society, 33(3) August: 390–410.
Maasen, S. & Weingart, P. (2000) Metaphors and the Dynamics of Knowledge. London: Routledge.
Nowotny, H. (2005) ‘The Increase of Complexity and its Reduction Emergent Interfaces
between the Natural Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences’, Theory, Culture & Society,
22(5): 15–31.
Urry, J. (2005) ‘The Complexity Turn’, Theory, Culture & Society 22(5): 1–14.
1
XXX
Educational
EPAT
0013-1857
© 2008 Philosophy
Blackwell
Oxford, UK Philosophy
ofLtd
Publishing Education
and Theory
Society of Australasia
Education
Mark Mason
University of Hong Kong
It’s probably a good idea to begin an introduction to complexity theory and the
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Nevertheless, having pointed out that ‘[a]t the root of this sort of physics is a phenomenon
that immediately explains why the discipline may have something to say about society: it
is a science of collective behaviour’ (ibid., p. 5), Ball goes on to suggest (ibid., p. 6) that
... even with our woeful ignorance of why humans behave the way they
do, it is possible to make some predictions about how they behave
collectively. That is to say, we can make predictions about society even in
the face of individual free will.
The physics might then not be new, but the substantial development of and rapidly
increasing interest in complexity theory in the social sciences certainly is. As Mason
indicates in the third chapter in this collection, complexity theory offers some useful
insights into the nature of continuity and change, and is thus of considerable
interest in both the philosophical and practical understanding of educational and
institutional change. Complexity theory’s notion of emergence implies that, given a
significant degree of complexity in a particular environment, or critical mass, new
properties and behaviours emerge that are not contained in the essence of the
constituent elements, or able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions.
These concepts of emergent phenomena from a critical mass, associated with notions
of lock-in, path dependence, and inertial momentum, contribute to an understanding
of continuity and change that has not hitherto been readily available in other theories
of or perspectives on change.
Developed principally in the fields of physics, biology, chemistry and economics,
complexity theory arises in some senses out of chaos theory, and before that,
catastrophe theory, in that it shares chaos theory’s focus on the sensitivity of
phenomena to initial conditions that may result in unexpected and apparently
random subsequent properties and behaviours. Chaos theory suggests that even a
very slight degree of uncertainty about initial conditions can grow inexorably and
cause substantial fluctuations in the behaviour of a particular phenomenon. Perhaps
more importantly, complexity theory shares chaos theory’s concern with wholes,
with larger systems or environments and the relationships among their constituent
elements or agents, as opposed to the often reductionist concerns of mainstream
science with the essence of the ‘ultimate particle’. While it was pioneered in
economics (Holland, 1987; Arthur, 1989, 1990), complexity theory is otherwise a
relative stranger to the social sciences. It is, as Morrison (2002, p. 6) puts it, ‘a
theory of survival, evolution, development and adaptation’. It concerns itself with
environments, organisations, or systems that are complex in the sense that very
large numbers of constituent elements or agents are connected to and interacting
with each other in many different ways.
Many authors in this collection offer an introduction to complexity theory in their
particular chapters—this on top of the fact that some of the earlier chapters (see
especially Morrison, Mason, Davis and Alhadeff-Jones) are dedicated substantially
to introducing the field. Individual authors have not been asked to remove these
introductions in their chapters for two main reasons: first, leaving them in the chapters
enables readers who are not familiar with the field to read just one or a small selection
of chapters, because they will find in that or those chapters a brief introduction to
complexity theory; and second, the introductions offered by this volume’s various
authors offer different entries to and perspectives on the field—together they thus
enhance the experience of the reader who studies the whole volume. In particular,
the first two chapters that follow this introduction to the collection are best read in
conjunction with each other, in that each is concerned with providing an accessible
introduction to complexity theory, with Morrison raising ten challenges to complexity
theory for the philosophy of education, and Mason considering some of the impli-
cations of complexity theory for educational change.
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