Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education
Not a member yet
271 research outputs found
Sort by
The Complexities of Interdisciplinarity: Integrating Two Different Perspectives on Interdisciplinary Research and Education
No full textThe aim of this article is to open a conversation between the complexity & education community and the field of interdisciplinarity (as well as its close relative, interprofessionalism). It starts by describing two very different streams of thought in the literature on interdisciplinary research and education: One that focuses on the socio-cultural dynamics among disciplinary ‘knowers’ and one that emphasizes the complexity of the phenomena studied by these disciplinary knowers. Next, the author argues that recent epistemological thinking associated with the complexity & education community can help to integrate these streams of thought—offering a way for interdisciplinary inquiry to respect both the complexity of knowers and the complexity of the known
(Re)Imagining Teacher Preparation for Conjoint Democratic Inquiry in Complex Classroom Ecologies
No full textThis paper explores the classroom-level implications of complex ecologies, especially regarding the interactions among the cognitive and social/relational aspects of learning. Our focus is upon the ways teacher preparation must be re-imagined if educators are to be ready to facilitate genuinely educative and democratic learning in our country’s increasingly diverse classrooms. We explore the works of John Dewey, Gregory Bateson, James Hillman and others to consider the ways in which teacher educators must be explicitly prepared to understand pathology as a product of the interactions among the elements of the complex ecologies of classrooms and social systems, rather than as an individual quality of students who struggle in the classroom
Response to Nadia Stoyanova Kennedy & David Kennedy. Communicative Competencies and the Structuration of Expectations: the Creative Tension between Habermas’ Critical Theory and Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory
No full text I elaborate on the tension between Luhmann’s social systems theory and Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and argue that this tension can be resolved by focusing on language as the interhuman medium of the communication which enables us to develop symbolically generalized media of communication such as truth, love, power, etc. Following Luhmann, the layers of self-organization among the differently codified subsystems of communication versus organization of meaning at contingent interfaces can analytically be distinguished as compatible, yet empirically researchable alternatives to Habermas’ distinction between “system” and “lifeworld.” Mediation by a facilitator can then be considered as a special case of organizing historically contingent translations among the evolutionarily developing fluxes of intentions and expectations. Accordingly, I suggest modifying Giddens’ terminology into “a theory of the structuration of expectations.
