Hi Lawrie, while you were speaking about the above, I was speaking about complexity. I sense a certain synergy.

“Central to complexity is the notion of the complex adaptive system, and educational systems – whether at the macro-level of national systems or at the micro-level of student-tutor interaction – exhibit many features of complex adaptive systems.

Those systems are dynamical and emergent. They’re unpredictable. They cannot be reduced to simple parts, which relate to each other in very predictable ways. And they operate in external environments that are also unpredictable and subject to sometimes rapid change.

– Such systems tend to ‘self-organise’ around changes, and small changes can have big impacts: the butterfly effect. So when we start tinkering – with the best possible motives, of course – at programme review time, with such things as module content, learning outcomes, assessment criteria etc., we may have little or no idea of the possible consequences.
-Very similar conditions can produce very dissimilar outcomes (“I don’t think I’ve taught anything different, but last year’s group were SO much better!”)
-If something works once there is no guarantee that it will work in the same way a second time (well that puts paid in one stroke to the notion of ‘best practice’!)
-Strategic regularity and conformity naturally break down to local irregularity and diversity. What my colleague Murray Saunders at Lancaster calls ‘the implementation staircase’. By the time an educational (or any) policy or strategy has worked its way down from the top of the building down to street level, it has inevitably changed, been interpreted, adapted re-interpreted, etc. Leaving those at the top level wondering why it’s not working!
– Effects are not straightforward continuous functions of causes; (there is no “line of determination” between what we teach and what our students actually learn)
– Social life, education and learning take place through the interactions of participants with their environments (however defined, e.g. interpersonal, social, intrapersonal, physical, material, intellectual, emotional) in ways which cannot be controlled in an experiment…or managed in the name of operational efficiency and effectiveness
– Outcomes are largely unpredictable and long-term prediction is impossible.

If we accept the above (and you may not) then it has some profound implications for the manner in which we might approach the design and provision of our programmes of learning. For example, if we accept that we are operating within a complex adaptive system then it becomes clear that writing things like “on completion of this module the student will be able to (a, b, c,….etc.)” is really creating a hostage to unpredictability. But as that is the form of language that is expected and accepted by the validation and regulatory frameworks that we work within, that is what we write – I’ve written them as well – that is the game we play.

Thankfully, there are instances where, often through a combination of will, confidence, serendipity, political nous and sheer bloody-mindedness an innovative, adventurous pedagogic proposal manages to break through the ‘norm’, and in so doing introduces some disequilibrium into the system, and disturbs it…which is a good thing…and I’ll try and explain why.

The evolution of a complex adaptive system is fostered by disequilibrium and feedback…or creative disruption. Equilibrium is a condition in which all acting influences are cancelled by others, resulting in a stable, balanced, or unchanging system i.e. a system in stasis. This might lead one to believe that disequilibrium is a negative attribute. However, as Margaret Wheatley points out, “the search for organizational equilibrium is a sure path to institutional death, a road to zero trafficked by fearful people”

To stay viable, open systems need to keep themselves off-balance, maintaining themselves in a state of non-equilibrium. A successful complex adaptive system frequently creates or deliberately seeks out feedback and information in the form of perturbances or disturbances that might threaten its stability and knock it off balance, thus producing the disequilibrium that is necessary for growth.

Which brings us to the edge of chaos!”