it makes complete sense to us

Teaching the Collective

By Craig Dwyer
Learning, Teaching and Knowing ED6743.87
University of Calgary - M.Ed Mathematics for Teaching
April, 2012
dwyerteacher@gmail.com
@dwyerteacher
www.teachingparadox.edublogs.org
What is a Learning Collective?
! In a recent talk at the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London, Ken
Robinson delivered the keynote speech and the made the following comment, We teach
children in groups, but not as groups. This is a profound statement with applications and
considerations for all levels of education and society; but what does it mean? What is a
group of learners? How do people learn as groups? How does a teacher accomplish
such a task? There are no fast and easy answers to these questions. In order to get into
the heart of this matter, we need to delve deeply into very problematic waters that open up
seas of possibilities and interpretations. And even then, how do we know where we are?
! Teaching is very difcult term to dene, as Davis (2004) has suggested by tracing
the cultural and historical webs of association connected to perceptions of what teaching
is. Even in present time, if you put a group of twenty teachers into a room and asked them
to dene teaching, you more than likely get twenty different answers. The common node
between the denitions will more than likely have something to do with learning. Again, we
are at an impasse. What is learning? This question again will send us into murky and
foggy waters where are our personal interpretations will guide our denitions. There may
be another common node that learning is something about knowing. Well, what is
knowing? These kind of questions have kept people awake late at night for thousands of
years, and are beyond the scope of this paper.
! I would like to begin my journey in a more humble and simple place by starting with
an analysis of the two words in the title; learning collective.
Learning
! If we take the dictionary denition of the word learning, we are immediately struck
by a couple of interesting ideas. First, it is a verb, or an action, and it has to do with
acquiring something, be it knowledge, truth, habits or mannerisms. So, the question is,
how do we acquire these things? Where do we go to get them? And, what do we have to
do?
! Throughout all of these denitions and examples, a common thread exists. There is
change. The person can now ski, when they could not before. They can speak French.
They are acquainted with a new idea. They have memorized the poem. She is now
patient.
! Yet, I feel troubled by these denitions. Can the person ski as well as Hermann
Maier? Do they speak French as uently as Dumas? Do they know everything about that
learn verb
learned [lurnd] or learnt, learning.
verb (used with object)
1. to acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience: to learn French;
to learn to ski.
2. to become informed of or acquainted with; ascertain: to learn the truth.
3. to memorize: He learned the poem so he could recite it at the dinner.
4. to gain (a habit, mannerism, etc.) by experience, exposure to example, or the like;
acquire: She learned patience from her father.
new idea? Will they be able to recite the poem at a dinner in ve years from now? Is she
as patient as her father? The answer to all of these is probably not. So, have they
learned?
! The change that occurs during the process of learning (be it an hour, a week, or a
lifetime) is an ongoing process. We never stop learning. It is inherent to human life, and
to all life on Earth. Change occurs at a rapid pace; the destruction of a habitat due to a
disaster, or the transformation of a deeply held belief when confronted with a strong
perturbation. Change also occurs at a glacial pace; the transformation of an ecosystem
due to new weather patterns, or the evolution of a persons ways of thinking and seeing the
world through study and reading. In all cases, learning is evolving, and knowledge is
continually challenged and replaced with new knowledge. Knowing and learning are
dynamic.
! Davis, Sumara and Luce-Kapler (2007) provide a useful metaphor and visualization
that I would like to co-opt for a different purpose.
Linear Change
! In this model of change, learning and
knowing are gradual, and continually rising.
We learn and we gain knowledge in a slope
of line. The knowledge that we had before is
improved on and it gets larger and larger. We
may travel along the line, up or down
(memory and forgetting). In this model, their
is only one way to know, or to learn. The way
of the line. Everything there is to know, exists
on a straight line with easily dened starting
points, ending points, and variables that are
tightly controlled. The goal is clear, and with
the right work, it is attainable. In this model,
where is innovation? Where is outside the box thinking? Where is the novelty and the
different possibilities? It is a problematic assumption. In the 1800s, scientists believed
that they were on the cusp of knowing all their is to know (Capra, 1997). Many believed
that science would provide all the answers, and we would, in essence, know everything.
In this worldview, learning would stop at the end of the line.
Spiral Change
! This model provides a different set of ideas. Like
the linear line, it is moving upwards, towards a goal.It
curls back over itself suggesting change and revisiting,
and it gradually gets bigger and wider. Time affects the
knowing and learning, yet it is not as neat as the
straight line. Near the bottom of the spiral the partial
circle is small (no knowledge, yet to be learned), but as
the learner grows, the circle and the space in-between
the edges of the boundaries grow, suggesting their is
more room to build. The line itself will continue on, and
the space in between will continually get larger and
more expansive. It still, however, suggests growth
towards a known goal, a destination. It makes the
assumption that there is only one possibility, and thatpossibilitymoves in this shape. It is
still, at its core, a simple model and simple view of how we know. It is a line.
Fractal Change
! This image is taken from fractal geometry. It starts with a simple seed, in this case
a Y. There is only one rule to build this image; at the end of every branch of the Y, build
another Y. If the rule is allowed to iterate, we get a picture that looks very much like a tree
(using this seed, other seeds will cause other images). In our
metaphor, what would the seed be? If we assume the seed to
be knowledge and learning, we can see how a great variety of
possibilities would arise over the course of a learning life. That
life may be one person, one cell, or an entire forest.
! The main point with this fractal tree is that there is
variation, there is a multitude of change, and it is unclear
where the learning will go. You are faced with
anextraordinaryamount of choice, either conscious or
unconscious, personal or environmental, etc. Do I go this way,
or that way? The branches you travel along will bring you to different points, with different
perspectives. This image also continues along a path, but the destination is unclear. In
the other two diagrams, what happens if you were to go backwards on the line or the
spiral? Well, it would result you going back on your learning, or your circle getting smaller,
your knowledge decreasing. In this case, going backwards should be encouraged,
because it opens up more possibilities, and presents different paths and ways of knowing.
We can get lost in our own fractal tree and spend a lifetime trying to know and to learn.
There is also the possibility to be traveling along multiple points at the same time,
suggesting that learning is not held to a single place in time, in a single biological frame.
! Think of this from an evolutionary perspective, or from a sociological perspective.
What would have happened if the dinosaurs had not died out? Would mammals have
evolved into primates and eventually into humans? Who knows. How about the closing of
the Silk Road? Would Columbus have set sail to nd a new route to Asia and discovered
the Americas? Would the colonization of this new frontier been necessary? Would I have
been born? Possibilities are embodied in our history, and they are endless. Many great
writers of science ction have taken these ideas and created amazingly beautiful alternate
universe based on simple changes in the past (See; Bradbury, A Sound of Thunder, 1952;
and Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 1962).
! Learning is dynamic. It is changing. It evolves.
Collective
collective [kuh-lek-tiv]
adjective
1. formed by collection
2. forming a whole; combined: the collective assets of a corporation and its subsidiaries.
3. of or characteristic of a group of individuals taken together:the collective wishes of the
membership.
4. organized according to the principles of collectivism: a collective farm.
noun
5. collective noun
6. a collective body; aggregate.
7. a business, farm, etc., jointly owned and operated by the members of a group.
8. a unit of organization or the organization in a collectivist system.
! A collective is both an adjective and a noun. It modies, identies, or quanties
something else. It is also used to describe and symbolize groups, or combinations of
things. The collective assets is referring to the combination of money and land holdings of
a particular group of investors. Each piece of land, and each dollar they have, still belongs
to each individual. It is an aggregate, a collection of items that are gathered together to
form a total quantity. It is a number.
! If we parse through this denition a little further, we see a different set of values.
The collective wishes of the membership, is referring to a set of something that the
members of the group hold. There is something in common among these people that is
beyond a mere number. They are more than just a collective of landholders adding up
their assets to make a whole. There is something shared among them; a value, or a rule,
or a set of ideals or principles that are accepted by each one of them, and that they
believe in strongly enough to, as a group of individual people, wish for something. They
have culture.
! With this in mind, what would be considered a collective? Johnson (2001) suggests
that collectives are all around us; ants possess collective intelligence, cities are a thriving
form of collectivity, our brains are a collection of individual neurons, video gamers and the
communities they reside in, and even articial software. The common thread between all
of these seemingly diverse parts is that
they self-organize, they form a whole
that is more than the sum of its parts,
and they are decentralized (or bottom-
up) systems. In other words, a
collective is a collection of diverse
agents that make up a grander whole.
! When these elements are added
together, emergence is possible. Capra
(2002) denes emergence as The
phenomenon takes place at critical
points of instability that arise from
uctuations in the environment,
amplied by feedback loops.
Emergence results in the creation of
novelty, and this novelty is often
qualitatively different from the
phenomenon out of which it emerged.
Many other theorists have many other
denitions, yet emergence is a term that is embodied in other terms like knowing, learning
and collectives.
! If we set back and look at human society and we see that we live in many
collectives that are a major part of our lives. Our families would be an example of a
collective group. It is made up of individual parts, yet it has its own unique character and
is its own entity. Picture a family sitting around the kitchen table and planning a vacation,
or a party. The ideas and conversation spark new ideas as the different members of the
group contribute their own perspectives and musings, and then a nal plan that could not
have been created by a single member arises out of the interactions between the
members. The collective of the family allowed for new ideas to emerge.
! Along the same lines, but much larger, an entire country could be a collective.
Japan, where I have lived for close to ten years, is a great example. Here, the individual is
encouraged to be an active member in their own groups, and to seek identity from those
groups. People here speak openly and proudly of the groups they belong to, be it work,
organizations, hobbies, or political. They see it as part of who they are, and it is
Traits of Collectivist Culture
! ! Each person is encouraged to be an active
player in society, to do what is best for the
nation as a whole
! ! The rights of families, communities, and
the collective super-cede those of the
individual
! ! Rules promote stability, order, obedience
! ! Working with others and cooperating is the
norm; everyone relies on each other for
support
! ! In addition to individual identity, citizens are
encouraged to identify as a community
inseparable from the self. They openly acknowledge that these collectives form their
individual identity.
! More to the point to our current discussion, a classroom would be a great example
of a collective. If a classroom is left to its own, the students will self-organize and form
ideas that were not possible as individuals. Emergence will happen, whether you want it
to or not! Teamwork and collaboration between students can create an innity of different
ideas and artifacts. So, if they are a collective, how are they are a learning collective?
Learning Collective
!
! For a moment let us step back and look into the past of human evolution and
consciousness. Merlin Donald (2001) has suggested that human consciousness has
evolved over the last few million years and has undergone four major stages. It is
important to note these stages are dynamic in nature, and did not happen suddenly, but
rather slowly bubbled to the surface over vast amounts of time.
! The rst stage was what he called episodic consciousness. In this stage, human
thought was limited to the surrounding environment and was based on short term survival.
I need a rock to break open this nut. This is our most primitive technology. Donalds next
stage was Mimetic consciousness. In this
stage, humans began to copy (learn) from
each other by miming the people around
them. This resulted in tools that took more
skill to make and manufacture, and the
holders of those skills showed (taught) others.
! Moving along, we come to mythical
consciousness. This is the stage where
humans moved beyond just creating artifacts
for survival, and began to create stories and
art to explain their existence. This would
have surely seen an explosion of language,
and the oral-story telling tradition. The stories
(cultural knowings) would have been passed
down from generation to generation, and
these memories would have been stored in
the collective cultural. This would have
ofoaded the brain of the burden of recalling
details, and instead the culture became a
repository of learning and knowing. This
would be represented in the cave painting at
Lascaux, which both served as artifacts of beauty and inspiration, and as warnings, advice
and help for future generations.
! Finally, we get to his last stage, which is theoretical consciousness. In this stage,
we have abstract thinking and ideas. Among the many forms of abstractions we use today
would have been metaphor, mathematics, and advanced technology. All of these
advances continued to free the mind to think other thoughts, and store information in the
culture.
! The purpose of illustrating this theory is that it shows how a collective
understanding through culture evolved. Knowledge did not have be discovered or learned
by each new individual. Rather, it was built into the cultural understandings around us,
and we tap this resource when we need it. It shows how a shared mindset and similarities
between agents would result in increased cognitive capacities. Donald says, Collectivity
Autopoeisis (Maturana and Varela,
1987)
The authors trace the idea of a system
that creates itself from a biological
perspective (the cell and its membrane
exist is a world where the two parts
create a whole) up through bodily
systems, to human interactions, to
cultural behavior. They dene cultural
behaviour as, the transgenerational
stability of behavioural patterns
acquired in the communicative
dynamics of a social environment. We
are to culture as a sh is to water. We
live in it. Any discussion of knowledge
and knowing that does not include
social element is awed.
has thus become the essence of human reality. Although we may have the feeling that we
do our cognitive work in isolation, we do our most important work as connected members
of cultural networks. Our cultural invades us and sets our agendas.
! Put differently, a learning collective is essentially an organization of diverse agents
(consciousness in the case of humans) that produce meaning, creating new and emergent
forms. Through the evolution of our consciousness, we have arrived at this branch in the
fractal tree of humanness.
! There have been many changes in the world since the days of our ancestors in the
caves of Lascaux. Our cave paintings, oral stories, tool manufacturing, and early gods,
have been replaced with the internet, twitter and facebook. Advances in communication
technologies and networking have made us more connected to our various collectives
than at any other time is human history. We live in a time of a new and emergent type of
culture.
Participatory Culture
! Henry Jenkins (2005) denes participatory culture as one:
1. With relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
2. With strong support for creating and sharing ones creations with others
3. With some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced
is passed along to novices
4. Where members believe that their contributions matter
5. Where members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least
they care what other people think about what they have created)
! In order to illustrate this point and how it applies to learning collectives and the
generation of knowledge, I would like to use the examples of Youtube and Wikipedia, and I
would ask the reader to keep these ve points in mind.
! Both of these have become cultural mainstays in our modern world, so much so
that each of them is often used as a verb in colloquial language. When one asks a
question and the recipient does not know the answer, the answer is usually, a) google it, b)
youtube it, or c) wikipedia it (the choice of which platform depends on the person, and
possibly on an inference of the questioners preferred style of media consumption). For the
remainder of this section of the paper, I will have all of my references and citations directly
from links on either of these platforms. The spirit of sharing will be embodied.
! Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in
2001. Wiki is from the Hawaiian word for quick, and it means quick
encyclopedia. There are over 21 million articles posted on wikipedia in
283 languages (at the time of writing this on March 27th at 22:41
Tokyo Time; this number will certainly be higher by the time this paper
is nished, and I am certain that this wikipedia entry will reect this
change). It is not a perfect system of reliable information, but that is
beside my point.
! Rather, I would like to discuss this as a point of collective
intelligence, collaboration, and the passion of various groups of people
brought together into a collective they had no idea they were a part of. First, a short trip
back in time.
! In 1993, Microsoft purchased the rights to several encyclopedias and began to
create a digital version of an encyclopedia that could be utilized on desktop computers and
the internet. It was called Microsoft Encarta. They hired top talent, paid top dollar, and
spared no expenses in bringing this vision to life. Experts from all areas of academics and
culture were consulted and brought on-board to the project. All of this work was
centralized and controlled from the Microsoft ofces in Washington state. In 2008, it shut
down after a decade of poor performance in the market. At its zenith, it had over 60,000
articles posted. It was crushed by a model where no one was paid, no one was in charge,
and where people did it for fun.
! Wikipedia was created by people who were working for free because they enjoyed it
(Pink, 2009). However, it was more than that. It was the collaboration that drove people to
contribute. Right before their eyes, a tangible product was being created that they were
deeply invested in. Where else but the internet can you nd a group of people who are
interested in updating and maintaining a website based on Towel Day? Or tracking the
visual history of Handsome Dan, the Yale Bulldog? In fact, the basic idea of unusual
wikipedia articles is itself a massive entry! It is not just focused on the bizarre or the
unusual. The entry for the Moon gives a detailed analysis of its physical structure, both
internal and external, its relationship to Earth, the history of scientic space exploration,
and conspiracy theories associated with it (among many, many others). If you wanted to
sit down and read all of the links and side entries connected with the Moon, it would take
you days. All of the articles related to Earth? Weeks? Months? Who knows.
! The entries on Wikipedia grew to be huge, intricate, and complex because a
massively diverse collective of people were contributing to a massive diversity of
knowledge. The sum of all this knowledge is more than the sum of its individual parts.
The editors at Wikipedia do it because they are learning from the collective and
contributing to the collective. This is an essential point. In this model, there is no
distinction between the individual and the collective. Both are learning, and both are
beneting. The positive feedback loops apply to both circles, and amplify both to work.
! Youtube is home to an amazing variety of videos and
information, some of it strange and quirky, others informative and
engaging. Every minute, over forty-eight hours of video is uploaded
to Youtube (Allocca, 2012). Many of these videos are user
generated, low cost and shot with personal hand-held recording
devices. The majority of videos on Youtube have very few views.
Less than 1% ever eclipse the one million view mark. Very few
videos go viral.
! When they do, their are several factors that drive them into the
cultural consciousness. According to Allocca, it starts with tastemakers or famous people.
This is largely done through other sharing sites like facebook, twitter, or reddit to name but
a few in an endless sea of possibilities. A famous icon (which are broad across spectrums
of interest, for example Guy Kawasaki who is a former Apple employee and now serves as
an author and organizational speaker for corporations and government has close to one
million followers) will post a link to his or her followers who will then share it with their
followers, where it will soon explode into something far beyond the scope of the
individual(s) who started it. It is decentralized and it spreads across cultures and groups.
Someone may argue that a man sharing his love of double rainbows (please click) on
Youtube is not a benet to the cultural store of knowledge (I disagree, but that is the topic
of a different paper), but it goes beyond day-to-day life happenings or strange videos
about esoteric or unique topics.
! The occupy movements across the world, the pro-democracy demonstrations in
Egypt, and vital news headlines and stories also travel in this manner. TED talks are now
on university syllabuses. Diverse groups of unicyclists are sharing videos from all over the
world and pushing their craft to a previously unimagined level. Language is no longer a
barrier to entry, the visual and visceral is winning. In short, Gutenberg and the printing
press created a revolution of the written word, and Youtube (and all of the similar agents
like it, Vimeo, and DailyMotion to name a few) are creating a new knowledge sharing
revolution based on audio and video.
! These videos invade our culture, and as Donald said in the previous section, culture
is where our knowledge and learning lives. Communities are born and participation is
rampant. These videos stop being inside jokes or local issues, and they become ideas
and phenomenon that all of us can participate in, contribute to, and enjoy. They are, what
Allocca calls creative participating communities. It is much more than 68,985,467 people
watching Nyan cats (as of March 28th at 10:17 Tokyo Time), it is a group of people sharing
their ideas, remixing other ideas, and creating new ideas. It is emergence in action. It is
our new Lascaux.
! Marc Prensky (2001) called the people who inhabit this world the Digital Natives.
Technology is their rst language. They are a connected group of people who share and
collaborate, who exist in a participatory culture, and who think and process information in a
fundamentally different way from the generation before them. They are individuals who
inhabit a larger collective, and who, as Maturana and Varela would say, actively create the
shape and existence of the their own collective.
!
The Threshold
! At this point, I am hopeful that you are
on my side that the collective is a powerful
agent in learning and knowing. As we
continue, I would ask you to cross a threshold
(to steal a term from a colleague) with me,
and continue with the assumption that the
dichotomy our culture places on collective/
individual is based on a false premise. They
are not separate agents, but rather
complementary and nested within each other. One cannot exist without the other. An
individual cannot be without a larger collective to reect back on themselves, and a
collective cannot be without the individuals that make it up. Both are essential for the
survival of the other, and both are implicit in the process of learning, knowing, and
intelligence. Finally, what benets one, benets the other.
! Now, we are faced with an obvious question;
What does this mean for
teaching?
Working Denition
a learning collective is the
organization of diverse agents
(consciousness in the case of
humans) that produce meaning
creating new and emergent forms
Teaching as Orienting Occasions for
Emergence
Learning Systems in Action
! Now that we have looked at a collective and dened our basic terms, I would like to
get into the rising action of the narrative and discuss what this looks like in the classroom.
The title of this section is a denition of teaching. Their are many denitions of teaching,
and each teacher will probably have their own denition. Also, that denition will change
on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute basis. This particular metaphor is more of
a meta-view of what teaching is to me.
! The rst two words are incredibly problematic. Teaching is a term with a long
history that is rooted in conceptions of knowing and learning (Davis, 2004). A simple
search on a popular online thesaurus gives a stunning array of synonyms for teaching,
each with its own implicit sets of values and assumptions. The web of associations is
overwhelming. Equally problematic is the word as. I could have used the is, but instead I
chose this because is suggests change and an openness to the fractal process of learning
and knowing.
! Rather than jump in to such entanglements, I would ask the reader to follow me into
my own web. It is important to note however, that my own personal denition is one that I
have come to through my own experience, readings, and studies. I am not attempting to
suggest that this is THE denition of teaching, rather it is MY denition of teaching (for
now, who knows where it will evolve to next).
! My view of teaching is grounded in complexity science. Before that, I came from a
perspective of ecology and sustainability, but I have found the body of knowledge behind
complexity science to have even more powerful metaphors and facets of awareness. The
seminal book in my travels down this fractal path has been Engaging Minds (Davis, 2006).
For the most part, the ideas presented here are from that work, and others by the same
authors.
! In the rst line of this paper I presented a quote by Ken Robinson from the LWF
conference. During that same speech, he made a different quote that stuck with me. He
referred to education as a complex adaptive system. What does this mean?
! As Renert (2012) has summarized, complexity science, whose early roots can be
traced to Poincar and the invention of chaos theory (Waldrop, 1992) shows that complex
systems are holistic, indivisible, and do not lend themselves to piecemeal analysis. They
are open, evolving systems that maintain their identity in the face of constant
environmental ux through the iterative processes of self-organization (autopoiesis) and
emergence.
! Many of these terms have been introduced in the previous section. Yet, there is
much more to complex systems that just a handful of terms, and the terms are completely
different depending on which discipline you nd yourself in. Biologists, ecologists, network
programmers, economists, and physicists (to name a few) are all using the language of
complex adaptive systems, and using different language to dene the terms (see Waldorp,
1992 for an excellent trans-disciplinary overview). In education, there is a growing body of
literature that is using terms from complexity, chaos, and fractal geometry. The rest of this
section will focus on investigating one such set of terms presented by Davis, Sumara, and
Luce-Kapler (2006).
!
! Id like to start with a completely overwhelming diagram and dive in.
Enabling Constraint
! !
! Enabling constraints may appear to be an oxymoron, however it is quite simple. By
limiting choices, you increase possibilities. It is asking for harmony when creating
activities in the classroom between possibilities that are a) too conning and prescriptive,
thus shutting down the potential for new thinking to emerge, and b) too open-ended and
can lead to frustration and lack of productivity. Davis (2006) offers a helpful example in the
following learning objectives:
a) By the end of this lesson, students will demonstrate their understanding of some
of the core elements of a poem by identifying the rhyme structure, the principal
gurative devices, and the core themes of Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
b) Students will write original poems
c) Students will explore poetry-writing process through inventing characters and
plots based on unfamiliar items and unexpected juxtapositions.
! The rst is too conning, and the learning will result in little that is new or novel.
The second is too wide open and will lead to such varied responses that their will be no
redundancy among the agents. The third has sufcient constraints, and sufcient
openness. It ensures that everybody in the collective is working on the same set of shared
commonalities, yet it is open enough that it will lead to great diversity in the variety of
interpretations that it will occasion.
Redundancy and Diversity
! Intelligent unities are simultaneously stable and innovative (Davis, 2007). If we
reject some of our closely help dichotomies that we spoke about in the previous section,
we may accept the phrase that a complex system can be both steady and unchanging and
wildly creative at the same time. In fact, these two seemingly polar opposites are actually
complementary, and completely necessary for the other to exist. Like our distinction
between individual and collective, there is no difference between the two.
! Redundancy is the part of a system that is shared among its agents and allows
them to work together. In the case of a collective of people, this is enabled by shared
language, culture, and interests. In fact, most groups have much more in common than
they do differences. This sameness allows for errors within a group to be corrected by the
other members of the group. The error is fed into the collective, and the redundancy of the
collective will correct the error. In education, this is implicit on many levels, as the kids in
our classes often tend to be from similar age brackets, live in the same geographical
locations, speak the same languages, and share common interests (even within a class
like mine where the students are from a variety of different cultures and backgrounds, they
continue to have much more in common than they do differences).
! However, if a system is too redundant, it loses an element of its intelligence. It
becomes unable to respond to new perturbations and is unable to respond to a new
stimulus. This is where diversity comes into play. The strength of a learning collective lies
in its ability to produce different ways of knowing, where the feedback loops amplify and
create new interpretations. These diverse ways of seeing the subject allow for new
understandings to emerge as the different ideas bump into each other (Davis, 2007).
! In the classroom, this happens when students are working together and they bring
their diverse understanding together to create a new idea. If a student who possesses a
high spatial sense is working with somebody who possesses a heightened number sense,
their diverse ways of seeing the mathematical problem will amplify and each one will be
able to see the problem on a much deeper level. Their combined ways of knowing will
produce a new way that is only possible through their interaction with each other.
! We have another potential dichotomy arising here, in that the collective benet is
separate from the individual benet. Yet, I see them as amplifying feedback loops, where
the collective intelligence is increased in harmony with the individual intelligence. They
support and enable each other to grow.
From the Classroom
! I asked my class one day what they saw as my role in the classroom. After we got
over the initial hump of the teacher as the center of knowledge, they began to see that I
play many roles in the collective. We made a poster and
called these Teaching Roles, and they included such
representations as guide, leader, narrator, assistant, editor,
reector, observer, consciousness, etc. (the list has been
updated since the photo was taken). Most of our meta-
cognitive practice in class is focused on the what the
students role is, and rightly so. Yet, at the same time, I am
a part of the learning collective, and maybe that explicit
understanding of what I was doing could be used to make
new insights.
! On several occasions during the following months, my students have oriented
attention to the role I was playing. They have asked me to stop being an observer and
start being a leader, or to stop being a critic and start being a listener. In each of these
cases, they are enacting the principles of redundancy and diversity. They are asking me
to stop giving new ideas and overwhelming the system with too much diversity, or to stop
contributing to the redundancy and start contributing to the diversity.
! We also made a list of learning roles that the students may move between,
organizer, synthesizing, creator, editor, visualizer, criticizer, etc. It was never my attention
to have students choose a role and then enact this role in a given activity. Rather, I was
hoping that they would be mindful and reective on what roles they were playing during
what times and during what type of activities, and how they bounce between roles from
moment to moment. After activities, I occasionally ask them to reect in their journal on
what role they thought they played.
! A couple of entries have caught my eye. One student reected that we had too
many creators and not enough organizers. This student is saying that the group was too
diverse, and they could not move forward because they lacked a strong redundancy.
Another said, we worked well together because J was being an creator, K was being a
synthesizer, and E was being a organizer. This student is recognizing that the harmony in
the group is correlated to the diversity and redundancy that led them to work together
successfully, and each member of the collective beneted in a way that made them
individually satised. Reections of this sort help students to notice the harmonies of
complex adaptive systems, and to make better choices in orienting their own attentions to
the aspects of those systems that will lead to reciprocal benet of both the individual and
the collective.
Nested Systems
! A learning collective, as we have seen in the previous section, does not follow a
linear path. Learning occurs in an iterative way, folding back on itself and expanding what
is possible. Iteration can be roughly understood as the process of repeating a process
and then using the new results to frame the next process. In fractal geometry, this would
relate to the simple rule that grows into incredibly complex wholes. In the case of a
learning collective, it means that learning isnt accumulated, but rather it is revisited and
then expanded.
! Ill give an example from my practice as a primary school teacher. At the beginning
of a students journey into the concept of addition, it is a process of putting two groups
together to get a whole. I have three bananas, and she has four; together we have seven
bananas. As the student develops this concept, they are faced with challenges to how this
process works. We introduce the addition of fractions, which forces the student to rethink
how they combine two parts, since they are no longer combining wholes. Again, we see
the addition of integers to the mix, where now we are adding two numbers together that
are not necessarily accumulating into a larger whole.
! Throughout this journey, the student is asked to elaborate their understanding of
addition (for an excellent look into a similar journey with multiplication, see Is 1 a prime
number? by Davis, 2008). They are asked to revisit their previous understanding and
expand on it. The original understanding of addition is not thrown out or discarded. It is
still important to see addition as combining two wholes to get a larger sum. Rather, the
student is asked to add a new layer to their nested circles of understanding, and to keep
both understandings simultaneously. The circles are getting larger, but the original circle is
still implicit in the outer layers.
! On a collective level, we are knee-deep in nested systems. As we saw in the last
section with the ideas of Maturana and Varela, our biology is implicit within our physiology,
which is implicit in our personality, which is implicit in our interactions with fellow member
of the various collectives we inhabit. Also, we move between collectives. We have our
family lives, our professional lives, our cultural lives, our national lives, and our human
lives. Each is an elaboration and an expansion of the others. I am at the same time, a
father, a teacher, a Canadian, and a human. The distinction between these levels is
articial. They all exist and make up the grander whole that is me.
! This is also true in the classroom. As Davis (2007) says, An individual, a dyad, a
small group, a cluster of groups, and the whole class are all knowledge producing systems
(ie learners). None is privileged over the others; rather, these nested systems are mutually
supportive and intelligent, unfolding and enfolding in one another.
! One way to approach this type of collective learning in the classroom would be to
set up activities that use these principles in order to elicit a deeper understanding. When
introducing a new topic, a teacher could start with an individual reection on the question
or idea, have each person explain and share with a partner, have each set of partners nd
another set of partners, and so on and so forth until the whole class is working together
and sharing their ideas. On each level along this simple lesson progression, the
individuals perceptions and ideas are being both reinforced by the ideas of others, and
challenged by different ways of knowing. Eventually, what emerges is a collective
understanding that is far richer that where it started with the individual.
From the Classroom
! I am in the midst of a unit with the central idea of every culture is unique. In order to
structure the shape of this unit and provide a more in depth and complex understanding of
culture, I used a nested symbols metaphor. We started our journey into culture by dening
what are uniquely human attributes to culture. What makes us human? What, if any, is
the shared human culture? We did several activities to help us answer these questions,
and when the group agreed on a shared set of attributes and ideas, we shrunk the circle
and moved to the topic of national culture. We repeated this process several times (local,
family, classroom) until we were left with the smallest circle in the middle, our individual
culture.
! Through this structure and format, the students
were able to understand some of the various
complexities that arise from clashes of culture and how
their personalities and identities are shaped by the
collectives around them. We also saw that our own
classroom had a culture of its own, and while that
culture helped us to understand the whole diagram, it
was not the only agent implicit in our learning. Each
layer of the diagram was effecting the others, and
positioning yourself in a given circle at a given time
brought up a plethora of complications and problematic
questions.
! Another simple activity I have had success with is
something that I co-opted from a diagram in Engaging Minds. When looking at a concept
or big idea in class (in my case it was a unit on recycling) we try to brainstorm and look at
the idea from many different levels. Using the diagram on the left, we start with the basic
biological implications and move our way upwards until we reach a planetary, or
environmental impact or understanding.
Negative and Positive Feedback
! This is a tricky one and it is important to make a distinction right from the beginning.
Our society has an understanding of negative feedback as a bad thing, something that
delimits potential and stops growth; and positive feedback as something benecial to
ourselves. Bad vs. Good. Complexity science suggests a different view of these terms.
! Rather than think about it as negative and positive feedback, I will steal a term from
a teacher of mine and use the term regulating feedback (negative) and amplifying
feedback (positive).
! Amplifying feedback is a loop in the learning collective that pushes the collective
output in a certain direction. One child gets excited about a project, her excitement
spreads to another, and soon you have the whole class engaged and involved. Also, an
amplifying feedback loop could work in another manner, where a task to too difcult and
leads to decreased resilience which spreads through the collective until everybody is
feeling disengaged and frustrated. The important point to remember here is that the
output continues along this amplifying path, whether for the good or the detriment of the
group.
! Regulating feedback loops work in a different manner. They stabilize or dampen
the system by feeding their output towards a limit. If the goal of the class is to get to a
certain grade or score or certicate, then the scope of possible paths of emergence and
learning are limited to that goal. Cheating and other counterproductive measures may
break out (Meadows, 2001). However, a collective may also have a shared set of
behavioral values and rules that limit the scope of what is acceptable and allow the
collective to remain at a level of shared dynamics. If speaking out of turn is frown upon by
the group as rude and disruptive, then the feedback loop will stabilize that behavior and
create more opportunity for all voices to be heard, which will lead lead to a greater
diversity of opinions being expressed and more possibilities.
! Teachers can occasion these principles to motivate and challenge their students by
expressing greater condence in all learners or groups of learners and selecting tasks that
are challenging but do-able (Davis, 2006). This would be an example of occasioning
amplifying feedback loops. Similarly, a teacher can create a shared environment built on
respect and responsibility through class rules like a talking piece (similar to the conch in
Lord of the Flies), which creates a regulating feedback loop that opens up discussion and
leads to new ideas.!
From the Classroom
! In my grade 5 math class I had several students who were routinely nished before
their peers. As a way to keep them busy (interpret this as keep them out of hair), I allowed
them to go onto one of the class iPads and use an interactive math app to help their
conceptual understanding of fractions. What emerged however, was rather than
expanding their learning, it was giving them cause to rush through the work in order to play
the game. An amplifying feedback loop (positive feedback loop) of rushed work and
diminished effort was created which quickly spread through the class. Before I knew it,
everybody was rushing through their work and not taking the proper time to try and
understand.
! In order to right this wrong, I admitted my mistake to the class and asked them to
instead help their peers to nish their work with more focus and conscientious effort. In
essence, I asked them to correct my mistake and work towards the goal of the whole class
understanding so that everybody could use the technology together. In a sense, I used a
regulating feedback loop (the common goal of nishing our work together to a specic
standard), to correct an amplifying feedback loop which had spiraled out of control.
! It is a mistake I will never make again.
Neighbor Interactions and Decentralized Control
! In Walter Isaacsons biography of Steve Jobs (2012), he tells a very interesting
story. In the early days of the founding of Pixar animation studios, the plans for the HQ
were brought to Jobs for approval. Originally, there were three buildings in the complex;
animation, marketing and technical. Jobs stated empathically that this was a grave
mistake, and pushed the decision makers at Pixar to make one large center, rather than
three separate structures. He wanted the
ofces and desks mixed up so that all three
different groups would see and interact with
one another. Also, he pushed for another
strange request, rather than having many
bathrooms spread throughout the complex,
he wanted one very large bathroom at the
centre of the complex to drive foot trafc in
and out of a central place. Obviously, a
building the size of that has more than one
bathroom, but according to Isaacson if you
spend any amount of time in the building,
you will notice that the central restrooms are
a hub of conversation and activity.
! Jobs vision was a decentralized network, where agents could come together and
interact with each other. Google has used this principle to their advantage in the design of
their ofces and common rooms (see photo). These places are designed as fun places
where employees can rest, play and socialize with fellow workers. Most importantly, the
common rooms are not individual to each department, but are shared among many
departments. The employes have a voice into the design, purpose and functionality of the
rooms.
! The purpose for this is obvious. It is the sharing and exchanging of ideas across a
diverse range of disciplines that leads to innovations in other areas. The structure is in
place for ideas to stumble across each other and bump into each other (Davis, 2007). It is
through these interactions of agents that new interpretations arise. In both of these
examples, there is no central body in charge, telling the agents to go and share ideas (it is
decentralized). Similar to the wikipedia model from the rst section, this is a participatory
way of being, where agents are given autonomous choice, and the environment is
purposefully set up for them to interact in a way that is meaningful, social, and benecial
for the individual members of the collective, as well as the collective as a whole.
From the Classroom
! I recently tried to reduce the amount of coffee I drink in a day. To help, I decided to
attempt to drink more tea. I brought an electric kettle from home, a plastic tray, and an
assortment of different teas that I bought from the local supermarket. I set up a little tea
station in the corner of the class.
! A couple of days after this change was made a student asked me why I was
drinking tea. I honestly replied that too much coffee is not good for you and I am trying to
cut back. He agreed with me and said that he also loves to drink tea, as it reminds him of
his time with his grandfather. I suggested that he bring in his own cup and bags of tea and
we could have a cup together during morning break.
! Within a week, the entire class had brought in their own cups and bags. They did
not ask, I did not have to give permission, they just did it on their own. My morning cup of
tea had transformed into a social activity. More than that though, this time was more that
just drinking a cup of tea. The students would talk about their interests, be it video games
or drawing, and give each other advice and pointers. They would also use this opportunity
to create new games that they could play at recess, talk about projects that we were
working on in class, share projects that they were undertaking at home, and set up play-
dates after school and activities for the weekend. New ideas emerged because there was
a structure in place for them to do so.
! Not every child participated everyday, but they would come in and out of the tea
collective as they wished or when they wanted to have a chat about something. The break
time was theirs to do as they pleased, and some students continued to prefer to jump into
their iPhones or books. Yet, they had this place to come to if they wanted to talk, and
when they wanted to use it, it was there for them.
! I had inadvertently set up a decentralized system
around the tea station, one which has proved to be a
valuable source of ideas and inspiration, not just for
their school work, but also for their play.
! It has also led to my favorite line that a student
has ever uttered in my classroom, Ahhhh, graphing is
so much more enjoyable when you have a cup of tea.
! (On a side note, I have switched back to coffee)
! Another example of neighbor interactions and
decentralized control would be an activity that I have
done on several occasions involving GoogleDocs. The basic premise is this; you set a
group of students to a task on a joint document and have then share and create an artifact
that is greater than the sum of its parts. While in the document, students are focused on
their individual task, yet at the same time they are aware that there are many other
students working on the same task in the same document. Since the goal is collaboration,
each student expands and amplies their classmates ideas. This is a constant process,
and although it is a challenge on their attentional systems, the end result is usually
surprising and invigorating. Ideas create new ideas, which spawn new thoughts, which
lead to new insights. Through a hive like production of thoughts, the collective is elevated
and the individual understanding is strengthened through the diversity of thought and
opinion. The agents are interacting with each other, not is a physical sense with their
bodies, but mentally with their ideas. This invariably leads to a decentralized system, as
each student is free to connect with the thoughts they choose to connect with, and free to
expand on the areas that interest them. Since the activity is largely anonymous, social
cliques and groups that exist in every collective are discarded, and the collective functions
more as a whole than it would while in the physical world of face to face contact.
! A very interesting activity that I am eager to try again and analyze further.
!
Consciousness of the Collective
! Individuals brains have co-evolved with their environment to learn and remember.
Yes, there are ways that we can improve the remembering process and weaken the
forgetting process, but for the most part, our brains know what they are doing. Culture
also plays a major role, as we have seen in the previous section with the work of Merlin
Donald and the evolution of human consciousness.
! Collectives memories on the other hand, need more specic orienting strategies.
One of the roles of the teacher in this view of teaching is, as stated with the title of this
section, teaching as orienting occasions for emergence. In this view of teaching, two of
the most important roles of the teacher are orienting and preserving.
! Preserving what is known by the collective so it can be recalled later is part of a
classroom and a learning system. The teacher plays an important role in this task, and is
able to create a narrative that keeps the
students grounded in the present
sense with a rm grip on their shared
history. There are many ways that
this is done in a typical classroom;
wikis, photos, work on the walls,
posters, etc.
! Within this context of
preserving is an element of selecting.
The teacher may select which
interpretations are going to be
remember by the class, and what
aspects of the collective will be
allowed to ourish and grow. This
can be problematic and powerful,
when attention is directed to one
place, shadows are cast on another. The main point however is that during this process
we have the idea of directing the groups attention.
! Orienting has to do with the communal cognition of the group and the direction of
attention to what is salient, new, emerging, etc. As Davis says, teacher as the
consciousness of the collective is a suggestion that the teacher is responsible for
prompting differential attention, selecting among and emphasizing the options for action
and interpretation that arise in the collective. He continues with teaching cannot be
about zeroing in on predetermined conclusions. It must be something beyond the
replication and perpetuation of the existing possible. Rather, teaching seems to be more
about expanding the space of the possible and creating conditions for the emergence of
the as-yet un-imagined. The emphasis is not on what-is, but what might be brought
forward.
! This is a powerful metaphor for teaching and schooling. I have it printed off and
glued above my desk. But, philosophy aside, how practical is this in a classroom and
larger educational settings? I realize that this is an incredibly problematic question to
answer and that it has no prescriptive formula to follow. The larger system must be
understood and taken into account. Yet, I have some observations to make and a couple
of examples that I have noticed from my own practice.
From the Classroom
Unicorns
! On the rst day of school I was joking around with my new class and telling them a
story of a friend of mine. This friend is a unicorn. He loves to learn and is very curious.
The kids immediately tried to prove to me that this unicorn was fake and that I was lying.
Yet, no matter what they said, I had an answer to the question that proved the existence of
unicorns. They loved the activity and towards the end they had a better understanding of
my style of teaching. I was telling through my story that I was interested in the way they
think. Creativity, curiosity, story telling, asking good questions, and having fun was what
they were being asked to bring to my classroom. However, something else emerged that I
do not anticipate.
Whose class is it?
In Japanese HS and JHS, teachers do not have
their own classroom. They rotate through different
classrooms. The room belongs to the group of
students that inhabit it. They spend their whole
year in the same room, learning each subject in an
environment that belongs to them. Over the
course of a year, the classroom transforms from an
empty room with bare walls, to a living fossil record
of the tear behind them. At the end of the year, it
all comes down, they move to a new room, and the
cycle repeats itself.
! The kids began to refer to themselves as unicorns, and the idea
of a unicorn had soon become our class symbol. Kids brought in
unicorn pictures and dolls, and started writing stories about their own
unicorns. The unicorn became a powerful metaphor for being creative
and thinking about new ideas, and the children and I routinely evoked
that metaphor during class. When we created a wiki for our class, we
named it after unicorns. It has become a tool in our communal toolbox
that is used to orient attention to or from what we are trying to
accomplish. The unicorn is a consciousness of our collective. This
emerged as a metaphor in a decentralized manner without any direct
plan or action on my part (aside from telling a goofy story). Yet, there are ways that we
can occasion the possibility for this type of emergence.
The Class Brain, or The Narrative of Us
! My classroom, as a colleague has so eloquently put it, is an absolute mess. I put
everything up on the walls. Every last poster, piece of paper, or pamphlet from a eld trip
we went on is stuck to the wall. At the moment of writing this, I am sitting in my class. As I
scan the room I see the following items; about 20 apple juice cans lining the inside of a
bookshelf, towels hanging from the ceiling, a cardboard box cut into the shape of eagle
wings with a plastic tiger taped to the underneath,
a Fujica 8mm video camera, paint brushes drying
on the window sill, a tire, a tangle of wire coat
hangers, three 2-gallon tubs of playdoh, and a
picture of Harry Potter glued to a ruler and stuck
to the whiteboard. To an outsider, it appears to
be a chaotic and messy. To the unicorns of
grade 5 and 6, it all makes complete sense.
! Our history is embodied and engraved in
the room. When we speak about a concept in
our unit on culture, we can jump and look at an
artifact that reminds us of that from our unit an
ancient civilizations. When a child is having
trouble with a math problem, I can suggest that
they look at a similar math problem that was done previously in the year for inspiration or
ideas. I do not know what they will use the environment for, but by making it rich with past
experiences that were meaningful, I am occasioning the possibility to interact with it. In
this case, the classroom environment is the consciousness of the collective.
! Going back to my list of items that I spotted around the class, I would like orient
your attention to the tangle of wire coat hangers. We used them for a creative thinking
activity earlier in the yearand then my kids tangled them up and
hung them from the window of the classroom. They have been
there ever since. Since December, on threeseparateoccasions I
have heard the question, can I use a coat hanger? If we remember
the layers of evolutionary consciousness from Merlin Donald and
section one, the rst layer was episodic consciousness, in which
the eyes scan the environment for a tool to solve the problem.
! First, it was a math problem. A student was trying to gure out
how nd the area of a circle and needed a circle template to move
from place to place. She made a circle out of the coat hanger (not
an easy task in and of itself!). Second, making a model airplane out
of cardboard. The coat hanger was substituted as a
bone,similarto a bat wing. Third, a student was trying to think of a way to make a model
of a planet with a moon. She used the coat hanger to hold up the planet, and a paper clip
to hold up the moon. A colleague asked me, why do you keep that big tangle of coat
hangers around? I responded with; you never know when you are going to need a coat
hanger. Steven Johnson (2008) said it best in an RSA animation; environments that are
unusually innovative create a space where ideas can mingle, swap, and create new
forms.
Cave Paintings
! In the previous section I talked about Lascaux in France. In my class, we made our
own version of the famous cave paintings. At critical points during our investigation into
ancient civilizations, I asked the students to stop and reect on an idea we had just
encountered (for reference we were creating our own civilization at the time). I asked
them to create a story that would represent
this concept to a future generation, and then I
asked them to write that story using only
pictures, such as the pictures done at
Lascaux. Through-out our unit and the
building of our civilization, these pictures
served as a reminder of the hurdles we had
overcome and the lessons we learned.
! It is important to note, that in this
situation, the teacher was the one driving the
reection asking the collective to remember
and make meaning. In other words, I was
orienting their attention to the point of
learning that I wished them to focus on. This
would be an example of teacher as consciousness of the collective.
Webs of Complexity
! At the end of every unit of study, we gather as a group and examine all the artifacts
from our learning and create a narrative of the unit that just passed. We swap stories,
laugh, talk about our success and our failures, and what we could do differently next time.
One of the biggest aspects of this process is Big Ideas. As a group, we focus on the large
concepts that we studied, or the big concepts we
understood.
! This has been an emergent process. At the
beginning of the year, it was me who would
produce most of the ideas, and I would orient
their minds to aspects of the grander narrative
that I thought were important. Yet, as the year
goes on, the students have learned from my
modeling and are beginning to notice the ideas
themselves.
! After we make a list of these Big Ideas, we
stick them on the wall outside our classroom
and use string to connect them together. Every
time the students see a link between concepts
or ideas, they are encouraged to explain their reasoning to the group, and if everybody
agrees, we connect the ideas. This visual artifact has served as a source of many writing
activities, and is like a narrative of the year gone by.
Mindful Awareness
Getting lost in the branches of the fractal tree
! If knowing and learning are dynamic processes, then teaching should be too.
Complexity science, Chaos theory and Emergence all have very powerful metaphors and
implications for education. However, it is NOT a prescriptive method of teaching, and it is
NOT a way to teach. Rather, it is about a mindful awareness of the environments that we
inhabit, whether they be biological, cultural, or environmental. An understanding of how
the characteristics of a complex collectives learning system operates would help teachers
to create occasions to allow the emergent nature of these activities to come to life. And in
the end, that is what learning and teaching is all about to me, life.
! Scanning the literature of complexity science across a broad spectrum of domains
and disciplines, it is apparent that their is no simple denition of what a collective is, or
what a complex adaptive system is. There is no clear guide to complexity or emergence.
It is an elusive thing to dene, partly because it is not a thing, and partly because we are
so embedded in it that is makes seeing it troublesome. Like Maturana and Varela (1988)
said, a sh does not understand water because it spends it whole life in it. If a book
arrives on your doorstep that claims to show you how to teach a collective, or how to
control a complex system, I would be wary and skeptical of such a claim. It is about
seeing, understanding, and being aware. It is NOT a standardized formula.
! Even within the discipline of education and complexity, there is no clear consensus
on what it means. If a joint denition of complexity in education emerged, I feel it would
dampen the diversity of the system and take away from the robustness of education. My
own ideas about this topic are formed by my own research and understanding. A different
person who considers themselves to be a complexivist (I use this word not because I like
it, but rather because I cannot think of a more appropriate noun) will have a different
approach and denition. And, those approaches and denitions will change. They will
evolve, and they will grow. I have attempted to share how I interpret and embody these
characteristics in the classroom, but I am NOT suggesting that they be copied. Some of
the ideas presented in this paper may be transferable to other collectives, while others are
completely unique to my classroom collective and my life.
! So, what would be the common thread that exists between these activities, and
what would be the similarities between other complexivist teachers? I believe this has to
do with a mindful awareness of complex learnings environments. An acceptance of the
adage, life is complex. It is a tuning in to the life of the classroom, and a desire to continue
to hone and practice the ability to skillfully regulate and amplify that environment. Also,
there is a shared understanding in the role of education as more than learning facts and
skills, by helping kids to be aware on a conscious level of how the nested circles of co-
implicated learning systems affect and inuence their lives. This, to me, is one of the
central aims of education; to be aware of the stories and narratives of life.
! Complexity science is a lens for living in the world. All collectives are complex, and
all classrooms are adaptive systems. Having a sense of where you are in the system, and
what is happening around you is a skill that I will continue to practice mindfully throughout
I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to
provide the conditions in which they can learn
(Albert Einstein)
my teaching career. My denition of teaching; Teaching as orienting occasions for
emergence, is one that will continue to evolve and change. I hope to continue to travel
along the branches of the fractal tree and see what new possibilities arise and emerge.
Most importantly, I hope that this self-reection and attention to my environments
translates into greater learning possibilities for my students, and expands the space of
what is possible.
! At this point, I do not wish to summarize and round off my thoughts into a straight
forward one-line sound-bite. The point of this whole journey has not been to arrive at a
predetermined place, but rather to arrive at different interpretive possibilities. Education
has too long been focused on the predetermined place, and not on the multitude of
possibilities.
! A nal thought from Briggs and Peat (2000):
The sad fact is that our organizations isolate and and keep
each of apart as much as they hold us together. We have
assumed that because individuals are essentially separate
particles, collective action must be coordinated through these
imposed external structures. But what if we dropped that
assumption and allowed for self-organization to create our
communities? What is we intentionally forged our social
solutions in the res of creative chaos?
References
Davis, B. and Simmt, E. (2003). Understanding learning systems: Mathematics
education and complexity science. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education,
34(2):137-167.
Maturana, H.R. and Varela, F.J. (1992). Tree of Knowledge. Shambhala.
Johnson, S. (2001). Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software.
Scribner.
Capra, F. (1997). The Web of Life: A New Scientic Understanding of Living Systems.
Davis, B., Sumara, D., and Luce-Kapler, R. (2007). Engaging Minds. Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, Mahwah, NJ, USA.
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