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GLOSSARY INQUIRY: EDUCATION
Complexivists view education in terms of the dynamic, adaptive and self-organizing (i.e. learning) processes that are always emerging within and among individuals and collectives.
Complex views of education take their cue from the Latin word “Educare”, which means to elicit, draw forth, bring about, or give rise to. This organic understanding of education involves both developing potentials and opening up novel possibilities for knowledge/action (and thereby changing the world). Formal education inevitably involves not only explicit curricular goals but also (and perhaps more crucially) the unpredictable interactions and emergent relations among students, teachers and the wider ecologies (biological, social and cultural) of which they form a part. Biologically speaking, for example, humans are natural teachers; anyone who has witnessed the complex (and largely unconscious) choreography of supportive, subtle and extremely attentive pedagogical interactions between a parent and child can attest to this fact.
For complexivists, learning and knowledge emerge in a simultaneous and intertwining (or nested) manner at multiple levels, not only at the level of the individual. For teachers, who often have 30 or more students in a class, the level of the classroom collective is arguably the most important cognitive level to focus on. The question for educators thus becomes, how to ensure the conditions necessary for emergence of collective learning/knowledge.
See related terms: Adaptation, Self-Organization, Emergence, Ecological, Knowledge, Learning, Nestedness, Classroom, Curriculum, Conditions for Emergence.
