Creating Spaces for Graduate Learners to Emergently Design Curriculum Inspired by Complex Systems

 

 

Lens of Time: Secrets of Schooling, Biographic, 2017

How do we come to know and understand more about ourselves as part of the emergence of the universe in becoming? Inspired by the characteristics of The Living Universe (Elgin, 2011), as part of Living Systems (Capra & Luisi, 2014), and nurtured by insights from the dynamics of complex adaptive systems and complex emergence, complexity-informed teaching and learning open up fresh perspectives and approaches.

In emergentist approaches, the process of teaching and learning itself becomes centered as a part of the curriculum. Go meta! This term, that means in an eight-week graduate course, I am designing two of the weeks of the curriculum, and also supporting the students as co-designers developing five weeks of the curriculum. We all engage in synthesis in the last week. 

There are river banks to this river of emergent curriculum. These river banks in this case are guidelines for mini-syllabus development and materials curation. Many of these students are doctoral education students, so the approach of engaging in co-designing the curriculum is particularly relevant. We have core texts and readers that students select some chapters from to weave into their particular approaches. They also innovate catalytic experiential activities to warm up the Zoom class sessions. 

 A key approach is that in order to facilitate complex emergence, rather than focusing on linear outcomes that rely on cause-effect and reductive logics, complexity and systems-informed educators CREATE CONDITIONS. How do we create conditions for transformation and growth?

Two grounded resources come to mind for those interested in this approach:

• Crowell and Reid-Marr's luscious, narrative-based descriptions in Emergent Teaching: A Path of Creativity, Significance, and Transformation (2013)
• and Marilyn Taylor's Emergent Learning for Wisdom (2011).
  

Two research-based volumes that support this kind of approach include Bill Doll & Jayne Fleener et al's Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture: A Conversation, and Mark Mason's edited collection on Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education (2009). 

The journey begins...

Superorganism - Example of Emergence

Here is a video of the structure of a massive ant colony (the way they learn about it is despicable and an example of the ravages of reductionist science)... This demonstrates how superorganisms design elegantly - patterns from nature abundantly demonstrating wise design.

Earth Creativity and Regenerativity

One thing is that I do not actually think creativity (or intelligence) is a uniquely human activity. In fact I suspect that creativity and engaging in our natural/native/inbuilt capacity for creativity brings us into more alignment with the larger earth-being and other cells/organelles/organs of the earthbodysystementityaliveness. I believe creativity activates earth-wisdom capacity inside of us, and also allows us to become more connected with other earth-beings, both those in human bodies and in other bodies (rock embodiments, peregrine falcon bodies, etc.) if you will [but somehow, while saying this, acknowledging and weighting that we are all part of one thing instead of thinking of ourselves as separate beings--more feats yet to develop with the English language to express this]. Another way I might explore thinking about this, a la John Seed/Joanna Macy in Thinking Like a Mountain and more, in their evolution walk and Council of All Beings (has anyone done these?), is to discover how creativity activates our genetic and epigenetic knowledge of all Earth beings, our deeper wisdom, which we already carry within us, in the very fiber of our beings.

Moving from this place of connection/kin-action, deeply sourced across the entire wisdom of earth's profuse creativity-creation, my consciousness moves from an entirely different place. I am able to hyperdeepenleap into deeptime, creationthought, deepresence, generativeunfoldment, ____(words yet to come)_____.

I would locate the sense of source point or "pinnacle" (hierarchical construct) for knowledge not in some futurity or even current state of prime evolutionary edge (which metacognitively represents a manifest destiny of knowledge if you will), but rather that knowledge and wisdom, sourced at the very epicenter of creation (a la the new cosmologists' great unfurling/big bang or the sense of timelessness in Macy's deep time) is embodied in everything that has matter and energy unfurling. This is very different than the we-know-more-as-we-go sense of progress of the condition of human cultures (for the past 5,000 years) and more greatly resembles earlier 35,000+ years of amicable human-group-nature matrixed living. So there is a deep sense of mystery, depth, sourcing, kinship/activation as part of larger weaves of earthlife, creativity-as-aliveness, regenerativity as a native capacity of all living things that I'd like to explore and energize/catalyze/awaken.

Design Factors for Regenerative Studies

Earth Regenerative Studies favor the following dense, proliferating, ecosystemic, complex, vibrant, living and life-generating concepts in its design:

• regenerativity
• autopoiesis and complexity
  
• ecological design and "sustainability"
• inspiration, including poetry, story, and the arts
  
• generativity, ancestral and progenic momentum
• earth processes: shit, compost, vermiculture
  
• wisdom
• darkness, fallowness, mystery
  
• symbiosis, mutualism, co-evolution, collaboration
  
• emergence and emergent properties