UNIVERSIDAD DEL ATLANTICO RUDECOLOMBIA

DOCTORADO EN CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACION

PEDAGOGÍA, CURRÍCULO Y DIDÁCTICA EN EL CONTEXTO DE

LA CALIDAD DE LA EDUCACIÓN

Currículo y Didáctica Alternativa desde la perspectiva

de la Complejidad

Dr. Juan Miguel González Velasco Ph.D.

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Making sense of Complexity or complexities in Education
NAYIBE ROSADO MENDINUETA

Making sense of Complexity or complexities in Education 1

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your
heart tells you . . . Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think
necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question . . . Does this path have a heart? If it does,
the path is good; if it doesn’t it is of no use.
Carfos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don juan in the Tao of Physics ( Capra, 2007)

In walking the path of Educational research, educators are constantly making

decisions about how to approach best the multiplicity of dimensions at play in any
educational situation. I am now aware that, we, educators dwell in complexities in our
daily lives and manage complexity principles in most of our professional decisions. We
talk about these complexities in ordinary language and by doing this we are excluding
ourselves from the ongoing academic discussion about complexity in the world. As
Heisenberg (1963) recognized for physicists in his own time, we educators are facing
serious problems of language. We wish to speak in some way about complexity in
education, but we cannot speak about it in ordinary language. My intention in this paper
is to present my first approximation to complexity discourse in an attempt to make
sense and own this discourse to help close the gap between mainstream academics and
researchers and educational ones.

When looking for a definition of complexity Wikipedia (Wikipedia) offers the

following: the quality of being intricate and compounded. This definition makes
reference to the psychological perception of complexity the layperson commonly
associates with confusion and disorder and our inability to intellectually comprehend an
object of study. This is one layer that makes up the meaning of complexity. So to situate
ourselves in this discourse we need to see the other layers.

Juan Carlos Moreno (2002) a founder member of the Colombian Association for
Complex Thinking states that complexity as a noun does not have a definition; what

1
Tittle inspired in Marco Raul Mejia’s book named Educación( es) en la Globalización( es) I. entre el pensamiento único y la
nueva crítica. Ediciones Desdeabajo. 2006.

Nayibe Rosado Mendinueta, 2011

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Making sense of Complexity or complexities in Education
there exists, he suggests, is the word complex as an adjective. Complex comes from the
Latin com-plexus, meaning "braided together" (co- + plexus) therefore, when qualifying
a phenomenon, situation, behavior, and process as complex we need to specify what we
mean since the complex quality changes in each case. Morin ( 1994:22) had expressed
this difficulty in grasping the meaning of the word by saying: “ 2La complejidad es una
palabra problema y no una palabra solución.”

Complexity then is a “ non positivist notion by excellence” (Solana Jose, 2001-

my translation). It is a polysemic notion that addreses different levels of meaning. In
the epistemological sense it refers to a way of percieving, of thinking , of understanding
braided relationships and connections in our surrounding reality or realitites. It is from
this understanding of complexity where we appreciate how different sciences have
poured their developments and findings to create a way of thinking that links apparently
disconneted dimensions such as order~disorder, universal~local, being~becoming.We
could extend Gleick,3 ( 1987) understanding of Chaos to represent this new way of
approaching reality when he says that it is a new concern with- process rather than
state, with becoming rather than with being- that has helped us make to sense of
phenomena, situations, behaviors, and processes that had gone unnoticed or that could
not be perceived, understood or explained in the previous dominant paradigm.

Morin and many other authors4 who have embraced the task of putting together
complexity theory epistemology have traced the notion back to predecessors in ancient
oriental cultures ( XII and XI centuries B.C) as well as in authors from Western cultures
such as Heraclitus and Protagoras, and more recently, Hegel. Complexity pioneering
ideas, in accordance with the very nature of complexity, are multiple and diffuse. Some
pioneering ideas can be found in the work of Niels Bohr and Max Planck when
discussing the ambiguity of the manifestations of matter and giving surrounding
circumstances as much importance as to the manifestations itself.

However, there have been other authors whose contributions have been much
more recognized as building stones for the emergence of a complexity epistemology
2
Complexity is a problem construct rather than a solution provider.
3
“Chaos is the science of process rather than state. Of becoming rather than being. Now that Science is looking, chaos seems to be
everywhere. A rising column of cigarette smoke breaks into wild swirls. A flag snaps back and forth in the wind. A dripping faucet
goes from a steady pattern to a random one... (Gleick 1987)
4
For a detailed account read Moreno, J ( 2003) , Maldonado , C ( 2005), Raiza, A et al ( 2002)

Nayibe Rosado Mendinueta, 2011

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Making sense of Complexity or complexities in Education
and for human knowledge in general. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, founder of the General
Systems Theory and Systems Biology; Norbert Wiener responsible for introducing the
concept of Cybernetics to the scientific language; in the same lines, we find Janos von
Neumann, one of the founders of artificial intelligence and who introduced the idea of
self-organization further developed by Illya Prigogine and who continued working on
dissipative structures and timelines; Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver who
developed the Mathematics systems theory; Heinz von Foerster who helped to develop
Second Order cybernetics with his ideas of order~disorder. Herni Atlan developed the
Organizing Chaos Theory using the dialogic relation between
order~disorder~organization; Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela who proposed
concepts such as “autopoiesis” and “structural coupling”, in their explanation of
biological self organization.

From the variety of contributions and authors who have not been exhausted in
this brief account, one can detect three big domains: Systems theory, Cybernetics and
Artificial Intelligence (See appendix 1 for a graphical representation). It is from the
evolving and somewhat unexpected connections of these three domains that we have
come to our current understanding, realization and conviction that the dominant
positivist paradigm has fallen short in helping us make sense of our multi-layered,
intertwining educational realities.

Morin in his book Introduction a la Pensée Complexe (1999) suggests three

principles to help us to understand complex realities. The dialogical principle, which is
to say that two items of study always exist in a dynamic tension; the recursive principle
which means that dialogical processes are circular, and feed back upon themselves and
the holographic principle, that states that the part/whole distinction, is present in every
system, in such a way that, the part is in the whole, but the whole is, holographically,
also in the part. In addition to these three we find the self-eco-organization principle in
which Morin highlights the role of context, or ecology, in the self-organizing dynamics
of any system. He maintains that an organism is never really self-organizing, but rather,
builds itself up out of an already existing environment. And the emergence principle
that states that in organized realities (sets, systems) there emerge new qualities and
characteristics or emergencies that cannot be reduced to the initial characteristics of the
parts. Finally, we find the fussiness principle which has to do with uncertainty. This

Nayibe Rosado Mendinueta, 2011

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Making sense of Complexity or complexities in Education
principle allows the mind to reason with uncertain and indescribable statements and
concepts.

I claim that in our own work as educational researchers we should start

articulating and elaborating on these principles to make sense of them in a self- eco
organized way building up from our existing realities. As Davis, Sumara, & Luce-
Kapler,( 2008) suggest complexity research can be a useful framework in the study “of
learning and learning systems—a notion that encompasses individuals, social groupings,
bodies of knowledge, cultures, and species as well as the contexts that are implied when
such agents are specified” ( ibid 2008:36).

Making sense of complexity in its many layers and starting the process of
recognizing what we already do in education to name it in this new metadiscourse that
integrates and links apparently disconnected dimensions of the reality is a step forward
into constructing transdisciplinary knowledge and will help bridge the the gap between
mainstream academics and researchers and educational ones. This is my first small step
into that direction.

Nayibe Rosado Mendinueta, 2011

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Making sense of Complexity or complexities in Education

References

Capra, Frifjof. (1975). The Tao of Physics. An Exploration of the Parallels

Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Shambhala. Boulder.
Complexity-map_castellani.jpg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Complexity-
map_castellani.jpg accessed March 17, 2011.
Davis, Brent and Sumara, Dennis (2008) Complexity as a theory of education.
Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 5 (2) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci
access march 17, 2011
Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking.
Heisenberg, W. (1963). Physics and Philosophy. London: Allen and Unwin
Edition.
Maldonado, Carlos Eduardo. (2005). Ciencias de la complejidad: Ciencias de los
cambios súbitos.Odeon.
Mejia , Marco.(2006) Educación( es) en la Globalización( es) I. entre el
pensamiento único y la nueva crítica. Bogotá. Ediciones Desdeabajo
Moreno, J. C. (2002). Fuentes Autores y Corrientes que trabajan la Complejidad.
In C. INTERNACIONAL, Manual de Iniciación pedagógica al pensamiento complejo
(p. 254). ICFES, UNESCO.
Morin, E. (1994). Introducción al Pensamiento Complejo. Barcelona, España:
Gedisa.
Raiza, A. E., Pereira, L., Torres, A., Pachano, E., & Pachano, E. (2002). El
Paradigma de lo Complejo. Cinta de Moebio,
Wikipedia. (s.f.). Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Recuperado el 18 de March
de 2011, de http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity

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Making sense of Complexity or complexities in Education

Appendix 1.

Complexity-map_castellani.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Complexity-map_castellani.jpg

Nayibe Rosado Mendinueta, 2011