Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education
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Envisioning curriculum as six simultaneities
This paper uses the discourse of complexity thinking to envision curriculum as six partial and coupled facets that exist simultaneously: curriculum as structure, curriculum as process, curriculum as content, curriculum as teaching, curriculum as learning and curriculum as activity. Such a curriculum is emergent and self-organising. It is emergent in two ways: (1) in its deliberate intention to foster new learning, activities and teaching without knowing or dictating exactly what will emerge, and (2) in the sense that curriculum is an ever-evolving reality that is brought forth in the ongoing interactions of the six coupled facets. A self-organising curriculum enables a teacher to create ‘a space for running’ and foster ‘interactive running in that space’ to meaningfully honour both the requirements set by authorities and the interests of children and teachers, rather than a pre-determined curriculum. This model of curriculum was developed and is discussed in the context of the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand
Thoughts on a Pedagogy OF Complexity
There is now a developed and extensive literature on the implications of the ‘complexity frame of reference’ (Castellani & Hafferty, 2009) for education in general and pedagogy in particular. This includes a wide range of interesting contributions which consider how complexity can inform, inter alia, research on educational systems (Cochran-Smith et al., 2014; Radford, 2008) and theories of learning (Mercer, 2011; Fromberg, 2010), as well as work dealing with specific pedagogical domains including physical education (Atencio et al., 2014, Tan et al. 2010), clinical education and in particular the learning of clinical teams (Noel et al., 2013; Bleakley, 2010; Gonnering, 2010), and learning in relation to systems engineering (Thompson et al., 2011, Foster et al., 2001). This material has contributed considerably to my thinking about the subject matter of this essay which is not the implications of complexity for pedagogy but rather how we might develop a pedagogy OF complexity and, more specifically, a pedagogy of what Morin (2008) has called ‘general’ (as opposed to ‘restricted’) complexity. In other words how should we teach the complexity frame of reference to students at all appropriate educational levels
Reducing the Complexity Gap: Expanding the Period of Human Nurturance
Socio-techno-cultural reality, in the current historical era, evolves at a faster rate than do human brain or human institutions. This reality creates a “complexity gap” that reduces human and institutional capacities to adapt to the challenges of late modernity. New insights from the neurosciences may help to reduce the complexity gap. This paper argues that an extension of the period of human nurturance is one element that may serve to reduce the complexity gap. The argument herein is a synthesis of a variety of literatures that serve to support the notion of rethinking how long humans must be nurtured and educated