Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education
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Crossing the River with Dogs: Problem Solving for College Students
No full textA review of Crossing the River with Dogs: Problem Solving for College Students, by Ken Johnson, Tedd Herr, and Judy Kysh, 2004. Emeryville, CA: Key College Publishing, 490pp. ISBN 1931914141. $49.95 USD
Harnessing the Complexity of Children\u27s Consumer Culture
No full textIn this paper I argue that consumption is a common matrix of childhood experience that children bring to curriculum, schooling and learning. Next I describe how children’s consumer culture (CCC) can be seen to share some important characteristics of complex systems. Finally, I address the question of how the emergent potential of children’s consumer culture could be utilized by educators to assist in the project of forming lifelong ethical relationships with and between peoples, places, things, and thoughts. Unprecedented changes on a global scale have revealed our traditional notions of citizenship as being deficient, partial, and incomplete. These changes prompt us, then, to examine what it might mean to be a citizen in a truly globalized and technologically connected world. Schools and curriculum have an important role to play in an unfolding political project to craft new social, natural, cultural and ethical contracts. The context through which such a project could emerge, I suggest, is from within the complex system that is children’s commercial culture. Neither school and its curriculum nor CCC and its curriculum by themselves have served as effective sites for a successful pedagogy of citizenship. However, both reveal only partial aspects of different cultures of power necessary for citizenship. Both powers exist in a schizophrenic tension. The space created between such tensions might be appropriated to foster a pedagogy for citizenship that emerges from a common curriculum of consumption. A complex systems perspective opens windows of possibilities that might offer a view of how such tensions could be harnessed for this project
Comparative Dynamics: Healthy Collectivities and the Pattern Which Connects
No full textIn this paper, I introduce the notion of “comparative dynamics” and the importance of connectivity as an essential and vital underlying principle for healthy collectivities. Such a notion resonates with Gregory Bateson’s idea of the “pattern which connects,” suggesting not only the functional importance of connectivity as an aspect of a healthy organization at some given scale, but also connectivity as an important principle, which is the basis for how all living patterns are connected together. This paper ends with some reflections on why and how teachers experience stress and burnout as an absence of connectivity while highlighting its importance in the well-being of teachers in healthy learning organizations
Teaching and Ethics in Complexity Science: The Ethics of Absolute Unitary Being
No full textThe paper argues for the significance of complexity science and its role in the ethics of teaching that is not based on moral codes. Through the work of Varela on human consciousness, and the work of Newburg and his colleagues on neurotheology, the paper explores the elements of human consciousness that are relevant for characterising an ethical act. Varela’s concepts of emergent self and autopoiesis as well as Newburg’s concept of Absolute Unitary Being provide the necessary conditions for characterizing an ethical act as essentially unconscious. Finally the paper discusses the implication of these contentions for ethics in teaching
Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change
No full textA review of Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change, by Mitchell Thomashow, 2002. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 244pp. ISBN 0262201372. $18.00 USD
Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System
No full textA review of Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System, by Alicia Juarrero, 2002. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 300pp. ISBN: 0262600471. $27.00 USD
Teaching Learning for Educational Change
No full textA review of Teaching Learning for Educational Change, by Gary F. Hoban, 2002. Buckingham: Open University Press, 192pp. ISBN: 033520953X. $45.95 USD