noel gough towards deconstructive nonalignment: a complexivist view of curriculum, teaching and...
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1213 Unisa Press ISSN 1011-3487 SAJHE 27(5)2013 pp 12131233
Towards deconstructive nonalignment: Acomplexivist view of curriculum, teaching and
learning
N. GoughFaculty of Education
La Trobe University
Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
Complex systems are open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent. Reconceptualisingcurriculum, teaching and learning in complexivist terms foregrounds the unpredictableand generative qualities of educational processes, and invites educators to value thatwhich is unexpected and/or beyond their control. Nevertheless, concepts associated withsimple systems persist in contemporary discourses of higher education, and continue toinform practices of complexity reduction through which educators and administratorsseek predictability and control. I focus here on two specific examples of complexityreduction in higher education, namely, the widespread adoption of constructivealignment as a curriculum design principle and the similarly widespread imperativefor teaching to be an evidence-based practice modelled on Western medical science.I argue that a totally aligned curriculum risks being oppressive, but that tactics ofdeconstructive nonalignment can be deployed to mitigate this risk. I also argue thatacknowledging the complexity of higher education should dispose researchers to valuemultiple and diverse concepts of evidence rather than reduce them to understandingsprivileged by Western medical science.
Keywords: Complex systems; emergence; complexity reduction; constructive alignment;
deconstructive nonalignment; evidence-based practice.
COMPLEXITY IN THE SCIENCES AND EDUCATION
Complexity is a heterogeneous assemblage of concepts and metaphors arising
from studies of complex systems in a variety of scholarly disciplines, including
the sciences. Acknowledging the signicance of complexity has transformed many
of these disciplines but, as the following brief and partial history demonstrates,
education research may have lagged behind a number of other elds in recognising
the implications of complexity for conceptualising the objects of its inquiries.
I emphasise that this history is partial because the scholarly literature to which I
have ready access is predominantly Euro- and/or US-centric and limited to works
available in English. Readers who work in other cultural traditions, and are familiar
with relevant scholarly literature in languages other than English, must make their
own judgments about the extent to which my arguments apply to their circumstances.
South African Journal of Higher Education, 27(5) 2013
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Given that this essay, in its initial form, was explicitly addressed to a primarily
South African audience,1I have drawn attention to South African higher education
literature where appropriate.2
From Isaac Newtons era until the late nineteenth century, Western science focused
to a large extent on determining the material structures of simple systems (see, e.g.,Casti 1997), and many scientists worked in the types of laboratories that provided
the physical models for school and undergraduate teaching laboratories throughout
the twentieth century and beyond laboratories equipped with apparatus associated
with the stereotyped image of a scientist described in Margaret Mead and Rhoda
Metrauxs (1957, 386) research as a man who wears a white coat ... surrounded
by ... test tubes, Bunsen burners, asks and bottles. Subsequently and especially
since the development of integrated circuit technology and microprocessors many
scientists turned their attention to the informational structures of complex systems,
such as protein folding in cell nuclei, task switching in ant and bacteria colonies,
the nonlinear dynamics of the earths atmosphere, far-from-equilibrium chemicalreactions, and other objects of inquiry that lend themselves to investigation through
computer simulations. Although studies of complex systems were foreshadowed in
some scientic specialisations in the late nineteenth century,3the terms complexity
and science began to be linked explicitly in the 1940s, especially in elds such
as systems biology and cybernetics (see Castellani 2009; Castellani and Hafferty
2009). Because complexity is a characteristic of many networked systems, it has also
been a focus for inquiry and speculation in the social sciences, humanities and arts;
noteworthy examples include studies of complex dynamics in literature and science
(e.g., Hayles 1990; 1991; Porush 1991), syntheses of insights from computational
theory and postmodernist philosophy (e.g., Cilliers 1998; 2005), and explorations of
constructs of emergence in organisations and management (Goldstein 1999).4
As Paul Cilliers (2010, vii) points out, there is no coherent complexity theory
which will unlock the secrets of the world in any clear and nal way. Gert Biesta
and Deborah Osberg (2010) prefer to speak of complexity rather than complexity
theory, arguing that complexity is not necessarily (or exclusively) a theory, but might
also be understood as an ontology or methodology. Nigel Thrift (1999, 31) suggests
that complexity is a rhetorical hybrid that takes on new meanings as it circulates
in and through a number of actor-networks and, as it encounters new conditions,
generates new hybrid theoretical and rhetorical forms. He further suggests that
complexity signals the emergence of a new structure of feeling in Euro-American
societies, which frames the future as open and full of productivity. In this sense,complexity invites us5to understand that many of the processes and activities that
shape the worlds we inhabit are open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent. It
also invites us to be sceptical of mechanistic and reductionist explanations, which
assume that these processes and activities are linear, deterministic and/or predictable
and, therefore, that they can be controlled (at least in principle).
William Doll (1986; 1989; 1993) was one of the rst education scholars to explore
the theoretic and practical implications of reconceiving curriculum, teaching and
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learning by reference to concepts associated with chaos and complexity theorising
in the natural sciences.6Doll drew on Ilya Prigogines work on dissipative structures
in far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems (Prigogine and Stengers 1984)
to argue that concepts such as emergence which occurs when a system of richly
connected interacting agents produces a new pattern of organisation that feeds backinto the system should encourage us to acknowledge the non-linear, unpredictable
and generative characteristics of educational processes and practices. Prigogines
research demonstrates that irreversible processes in open and far-from-equilibrium
chemical systems can give rise to increasingly higher levels of organisational
complexity. In Jaegwon Kims (1999, 3) words, such systems begin to exhibit novel
properties that ... transcend the properties of their constituent parts, and behave in
ways that cannot be predicted on the basis of the laws governing simpler systems.7
For example, until recently the science of bacteriology privileged a simple
systems model that dened bacteria as primitive eating and reproducing machines
and cultivated them in nutrient-saturated media for the purposes of laboratoryexperimentation. Bacteriologists therefore assumed that superbugs new bacterial
strains resistant to the most powerful antibiotics arose through inherited immunity
in single cells, that is, antibiotics culled colonies, leaving only the most resistant
cells to reproduce into drug-proof strains. Medical research thus concentrated on
developing more powerful antibiotics to battle this increased resistance.
More recent research suggests that superbugs form not so much from inherited
genetic immunity but through intercellular collaboration and purposeful problem
solving at the colony level. This newer approach to bacteriology addresses
intercellular relationships that view the colony as a single albeit loosely coupled
organism (see, e.g., Shapiro and Dworkin 1997). Bacteriologists now acknowledge
that hostile environments trigger individual bacteria to cooperate; when survival
is threatened the entire colony functions as a complex system in which individual
bacteria are intertwined, interrelated, mutually-reinforcing members. Using various
simple chemicals (polymers, peptides) and more complex molecules (proteins, bits
of genetic material, plasmids, viruses), bacteria build a colony-wide genomic web
through which they exchange genetic material and splice it into existing DNA to
develop genetic solutions that are rapidly shared with other colony members. That
is, the colony exhibits novel behaviours not shown by individual cells, with entire
colonies self-engineering genetic immunity in as little as 48 hours. Researchers now
try to ght bacterial infections in part by developing drugs that interrupt bacterial
communication.
EDUCATION AND THE TRAILING EDGES OF SIMPLE SYSTEMS SCIENCE
DISCOURSES
Complexity offers an alternative to modelling education on simplications of industrial
systems, such as the so-called factory model of schooling inspired by Frederick
Taylors (1911) principles of scientic management, which remained a powerful
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force in educational administration and curriculum studies, especially in the USA,
until at least the late 1960s. For example, the textbookFundamentals of Curriculum
Development(Smith, Stanley and Shores 1957) includes a chapter titled Curriculum
development as educational engineering, and George Beauchamp (1968, 108)
similarly devotes a chapter of Curriculum Theory to curriculum engineering, inwhich he characterised school superintendents, principals and curriculum directors
as the chief engineers in the curriculum system. Taylors emphasis on designing
industrial systems to achieve specied products is reproduced in the objectives-
driven curriculum models of Franklin Bobbitt (1918, 1928) and Ralph Tyler (1949),
and is presently manifested in outcomes-based approaches to higher education
curriculum, many of which are informed by John Biggs (1996) inuential principle
of constructive alignment.Examples of the valorisation of constructive alignment
in South African higher education can be found in such diverse elds as engineering
(Veldman, De Wet, Mokhele and Bouwer 2008), Geographic Information Systems
(Motala 2011), theology (Dames 2012), and translator education (Marais 2013). TheDirectorate of Teaching and Learning at the University of the Western Cape cites
constructive alignment as the principle concept we work with in their approach to
curriculum development, design and renewal.8
Bobbitt, Tyler and Biggs represent curriculum as a simple, tightly coupled system
in which it is both possible and desirable to closely align what students do in order to
learn with intended learning outcomes and how they are assessed. Chris Rust (2002,
146) characterises constructive alignment as a paradigm shift ... in the espoused
rhetoric of higher education ... in much of the English-speaking world (including
the UK, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa). I nd it puzzling that
Biggs recycling of principles that have been in circulation for nearly a century (in
the discourses of curriculum inquiry with which I am familiar) can be understood as
part of a paradigm shift.
Many curriculum theorists opposed the crude instrumentalism inspired by Taylors
principles,9but others championed an alternative version of scientic management
of curriculum by selectively appropriating concepts from the nascent science of
cybernetics the study of systems which understand both humans and machines
in terms of information processing. For example, in the 1980s, David Pratt (1980)
and Francis Hunkins (1980), among others, borrowed concepts from cybernetics to
support assertions such as: the cybernetic principle ... permits rationalization of the
total managerial activities related to maintaining the program (Hunkins 1980, 324).
In the years since Norbert Wiener (1948) coined the term cybernetics, it hasdeveloped as an interdisciplinary science that interprets the interrelationships
of organisms and machines in terms of concepts such as feedback loops, signal
transmission, and goal-oriented behaviour. Cybernetics is a contested and ever-
changing conceptual territory and there is no singular cybernetic principle. Thus,
Pratts (1980, 335) attempts to apply a cybernetic perspective to the problem of
managing aptitude differences raise critical questions about which cybernetic
principles (if any)shouldapply to the scientic management of education:
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The problem of maintaining consistently high achievement from a group of learners
who differ in aptitude and other characteristics can be seen as an instance of the general
question of how a system with variable input can be designed to produce stable output.
Phrased in this way, the question lies squarely within the eld of cybernetics, the study
of self-regulation in systems.
Pratt uses temperature regulation in a building to exemplify a simple cybernetic
system, and temperature regulation in the human body as an example of a cybernetic
system found in nature. An unexamined assumption in Pratts argument is that
curriculum systems and cybernetic systems shouldbe designed to produce stable
output. His choice of examples assumes that stable output is an inevitable product
of self-regulation in nature and, therefore, that such stability is also a desirable
product of curriculum work and that modelling curriculum on cybernetic systems
can help us to achieve that stability.
However, homeostasisis just one among many key concepts that have circulated
in the discourses of cybernetics at various times. Katherine Hayles (1994, 446)
points out that during the period from (roughly) 1945 to 1960, two conceptual
constellations formed that were in competition with one another:
One of these was deeply conservative, privileging constancy over change, predictability
over complexity, equilibrium over evolution. At the center of this constellation was
the concept of homeostasis, dened as the ability of an organism to maintain itself in
a stable state. The other constellation led away from the closed circle of corrective
feedback, privileging change over constancy, evolution over equilibrium, complexity
over predictability. The central concept embedded in it was reexivity, which for our
purposes can be dened as turning a systems rules back on itself so as to cause it to
engage in more complex behavior. In broader social terms, homeostasis reected thedesire for a return to normalcy after the maelstrom of World War II. By contrast,
reexivity pointed toward the open horizon of an unpredictable and increasingly
complex postmodern world.
In Hayles (1994, 463) brief history of three waves of cybernetics since WWII (see
Figure 1), reexivity displaced homeostasis as a key concept in the period from
1960 to about 1972, after which the emphasis shifted to emergence, with interest
focused not on how systems maintain their organization intact, but rather on how
they evolve in unpredictable and often highly complex ways through emergent
processes. Hayles emphasises that concepts such as homeostasis and reexivity donot disappear altogether but linger on in various ways and may exert an inertial
weight that limits the ways in which newer concepts are deployed in Stephen Hills
(1990) words, these concepts constitute the trailing edge of conceptual change in
cybernetics.
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Figure 1: Three waves of cybernetics since World War II (adapted from Hayles 1994, 444)
In regard to Hunkins and Pratts selective borrowings of cybernetic principles, I
believe that it is reasonable to ask why such well-regarded curriculum theorists, in
1980, continued to privilege homeostatic self-regulation two decades after it had
ceased to be generative in the eld of cybernetics a concept that by then was part of
the trailing edge of developments in cybernetics. If these theorists were interested
in the implications of cybernetics for educational theory and practice, why did they
not look towards its leading edges by exploring reexivity, emergence and self-
organisation? I speculate that, unlike cyberneticists, educators faced few compelling
challenges to the deeply sedimented conceptions of natural order to which Prattalludes order as stability, predictability, and equilibrium. Such conceptions of
natural order are pervasive in many disciplines and often have persisted as very
lengthy trailing edges in their popular representations, as has been the case with what
we can quite literally call the textbook ecology received by many undergraduates in
US colleges and universities for more than 50 years.
During the post-World War II period, under the leadership of Eugene Odum, the
US version of systems ecology privileged the concept of the ecosystem as a stable and
enduring emblem of natural order, epitomised by the dominance of the balance of
nature metaphor which, as Kim Cuddington (2001, 463) argues, is shorthand for a
paradigmatic view of nature as a benecent force. Environmental historian DonaldWorster (1995, 70) argues that Odums (1953) textbook,Fundamentals of Ecology,
laid so much stress on natural order that it came close to dehistoricizing nature
altogether. Worster (1995, 72) also notes that during the 1970s and 1980s the eld
of ecology ... demolished Eugene Odums portrayal of a world of ecosystems tending
towards equilibrium. For example, the studies collected by Steward Pickett and Peter
White (1985) deliver the consistent message that the very concept of the ecosystem
has receded in usefulness and, to the extent that the word ecosystem remains in
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use, that it has lost its former implications of order and equilibrium (see also Pickett,
Kolaska and Jones 2007). Similarly, Andrew Jamison (1993, 202) points out that
systems ecology contributed very little to the solution of environmental problems
and, by the late 1970s, new evolutionary approaches had become increasingly
popular among ecologists, so that systems ecology today is only one (and not eventhe most signicant one at that) of a number of competing ecological paradigms.
Nevertheless, Odums ideas have endured as a trailing edge of conceptual change in
ecology, epitomised by the publication of a fth edition ofFundamentals of Ecology
(Odum and Barrett 2005) three years after his death.10
Gregory Cooper (2001, 481) observes that in areas such as population and
community ecology, the balance of nature idea ... has worked in the background,
shaping inquiry, but that it has also been argued largely on conceptual rather than
empirical grounds. In this light, it is signicant that Robert Ulanowiczs (1997;
2009) empirical work which includes network analysis of trophic exchanges in
ecosystems, the thermodynamics of living systems, causality in living systems, andmodelling subtropical wetland ecosystems emphasises that chance, disarray and
randomness are necessary conditions for creative advance, emergence and autonomy
in the natural world.
The above snippets from the history of education theorists selective borrowings
of scientic concepts and principles point to the need for two related types of
caution. Firstly, if we apply scientic understandings to educational inquiry, then we
should ensure that these understandings constitute the current leading edges of the
relevant eld or discipline, rather than recycle the abandoned or outmoded concepts
and principles that constitute their trailing edges. Secondly, we should be cognisant
of the risk that privileging scientic explanations might be interpreted as reifying
a one-way relationship between natural order and human affairs. I see no reason
to exclude the invocation of nature as a ground for judgement, but I cannot assume
that descriptions of the physical or natural world are prescriptions for social life.
I agree with Andrew Ross (1994, 15) that ideas that draw upon the authority of
nature nearly always have their origin in ideas about society. Recommendations
for educational decision and action cannot be justied by reference to Prigogines
Nobel-prize-winning studies of far-from-equilibrium chemical systems or to life-
saving studies of self-organising genetic engineering in bacteria colonies. Rather, the
value of such studies to educatorsis immanent in the new structures of feeling they
provide the new concepts, metaphors and forms of social imagination that might
emerge from their deployment in educational discourses-practices.Conceptual change in the disciplines of cybernetics and ecology invites educators
to be suspicious of a simple systems rationality in which educational policies,
directives, incentives and disincentives function as homeostatic devices, regulating
the diverse inputs of students, teachers and researchers by bringing them within
closed circuits of corrective feedback in order to maintain stability and equilibrium.
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COMPLEXITY REDUCTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Complexity invites us to understand our physical and social worlds as open, recursive,
organic, nonlinear and emergent, and to be cautious of complying with models and
trends in education that assume linear thinking, control and predictability. Rethinking
education as emergence potentially destabilises the instrumentalist rationality that,
as it were, programs educational systems (and the agents/agencies within them)
to privilege orderly and predictable processes culminating in stable output (see
Gough 2010). However, this potentiality is undermined by a politics of complexity
reduction, which is not unique to education and educational research. Most forms of
inquiry deliberately reduce the complexity of the objects of their inquiries and/or the
data they produce in one or more ways these may be prospective (e.g. limiting the
number of initial variables) or retrospective (e.g. backwards selection of particular
trajectories). But acknowledging complexity should dispose us to ask questions
about howcomplexity reduction is achieved and, perhaps more importantly, who is
reducing complexity for whom and in whose interests. If our knowledge interests arein prediction and control, as in much medical science, then reducing the complexity
of the object of inquiry might be defensible. For example, medical scientists seeking
a vaccine against malaria reduce its complexity by limiting the initial variables they
study. They deliberately and some might say defensibly limit their investigations
to those aspects of malaria that portray it as a natural entity caused by protozoan
parasites and spread among humans by mosquitoes; the variables they study are
those that they presume to be pertinent to producing a physicochemical solution to
the malaria problem.
But malaria is much more complex than this: outbreaks of malaria in particular
places and times result from numerous complex interactions among parasites,mosquitoes, humans and various social, political (often military), administrative,
economic, agricultural, ecological and technological processes. The complexity of
malaria as an object of inquiry is more apparent if we see it, as David Turnbull (1989,
287) argues, as apoliticaldisease resulting from the dominance of the Third World
by the colonial and mercantile interests of the West. Acknowledging that malaria-
as-an-object-of-political-inquiry is more complex than malaria-as-an-object-of-
immunology also has implications for education. In most Western school curricula,
malaria is mentioned only in biology courses, where it frequently is used as an example
of the roles of some organisms in carrying disease. The intended learning outcomes
are usually little more than students being able to recall a number of biological
facts such as: the protozoan parasites lifecycle; explanations for the symptoms
of mosquito bites (itchy swellings) and malaria (chills and fevers); and reasons for
Western travellers to some tropical locations to take precautions against contracting
the disease. But such a reduction of malarias complexity is not defensible from my
standpoint as a science educator committed to the ambiguous struggling through
and with colonial pasts in making different futures to quote Helen Verrans (2001,
38) characterisation of postcolonialism. I can see no worthwhile educational purpose
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for bringing Western students attention to malaria as an object of Western scientic
inquiry unless we also alert them to the massive human tragedy of millions dying
of malaria in the Wests tourist destinations and, moreover, that this is a tragedy that
Western nations have the resources (but not the political will) to ameliorate.
Complexity reduction in higher education is achieved by such means as thewidespread adoption of constructive alignment as a curriculum design principle,
and the similarly widespread imperative for teaching and learning to be an evidence-
based practice modelled on Western medical science. Acknowledging the complexity
of higher education should impel us to ask for whom and in whose interests these
imperatives persist.
Constructive alignment: Curriculum design as complexityreduction
A curriculum plan that aligns all of its design elements to the production of intended
learning outcomes exemplies the cause/effect relationships found in simple systems.As Deborah Osberg (2009, 2010) points out, such normative curriculum designs
(which aim to produce outcomes valued by their designers) are potentially oppressive
because a relatively small selection of valued outcomes is all that can be planned for
at any given time. This creates difculties in culturally diverse democratic societies
because, as Osberg (2009, 1) observes:
different cultures often have rather different ethical values and beliefs so there are
different views about what education should be trying to achieve. Furthermore, there
is no way of adjudicating between different norms between different understandings
of good or right actions without falling back on a particular moral or ethical
tradition, some subset of norms from which we evaluate what is good or right. Thereisnt a value-free position from which we can determine which values or norms are
the best.
All normative curricula risk becoming sites of irresolvable ideological clashes over
which or whose values should be advanced, and in which oppressive and exclusionary
power relations ourish. However, complexity offers ways to think about educational
inputs and outcomes that do not assume that causal relationships between them are,
or should only be, instrumental. Complexity suggests that at least some educational
processes ought to be characterised by gaps between inputs and outputs. In
Biestas (2004) terms, these are not gaps to be lled but sites of emergence. As
Goldstein (1999, 49) writes, emergence refers to the arising of novel and coherent
structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex
systems. In other words, many outcomes, products and effects of teaching and
learning knowledges, understandings, individual subjectivities, etc. emerge in
and through educational processes in unique and unpredictable ways. As Biesta
(2009, 40) argues, education contributes not only to qualication (the transmission
of knowledge and skills) and socialisation (the insertion of individuals into existing
social, cultural and political orders), but also to processes of subjectication of
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becoming a subject or what he previously referred to as the coming into presence
of unique individuals (Biesta 2006, 49).
Complex systems exemplify different understandings of causality from those
enacted in simple systems.11Simple systems offer us the deterministic understandings
of causality characterised by Newtonian physics. They are closed mechanisms with asingle linear trajectory from past to future and no freedom or play. If we understand
how these systems work then we can calculate their past states and predict their future
states accurately.12This view of causality underlies the design of curricula conceived
as instruments for controlling the production of intended learning outcomes.
Complex systems present us with nonlinear and emergent understandings of
causality, such as we nd in open systems that are growing, maintaining and evolving
in selective ways and actively positioning themselves in relation to other systems.
This selective positioning suggests that we can understand the material universe as
possessing agential qualities rather than considering it to be inanimate, senseless,
mechanical andpredictablydeterministic. As Stacy Alaimo (2010, 143) writes:
the evacuation of agency from nature underwrites the transformation of the world
into a passive repository of resources for human use. Alternative conceptions which
accentuate the lively, active, emergent, agential aspects of nature foster ethical/
epistemological stances that generate concern, care, wonder, respect, caution (or
precaution), epistemological humility, kinship, difference, and deviance.13
Osberg (2009, 57) summarises the implications of such understandings of causality
for normative decision-making:
In positioning themselves relative to other systems, these [open] systems are always
faced with more possibilities than can be actualised and the work of Prigogine shows
that at those points in its trajectory where the system has to make a choice between
several possible options, there is nothing in the macroscopic equations that justies
or determines the preference ... it is not possible to know in advance which of the
possibilities the system will take.
... Such processes therefore cannot be understood to be causal in an ordinary
deterministic sense. In retrospect they can be understood as deterministic because
once a system has freely chosen a particular path, it is possible to put reasons to
this choice but we cannot do so prospectively. Prospectively they must instead be
understood to be causal in a constitutive sense, because its rules of operation change
or evolve, as it advances into the future. Because they are deterministic in retrospectand constitutive prospectively, such processes can be considered to be irreversible.
This irreversibility of the system, with rules changing as the system constitutes itself,
has implications for our understanding of normative action.
Because the rules evolve in emergent systems the rules of the past are neversufcient
to guide the system into the future. New rules must be created whenever the system is
faced with an unprecedented situation, a situation in which it must make afreechoice.
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Indeed it could be argued that it is these very situations where the rules of the past are
insufcient for the new situation, where the system must make a free choice, one not
guided by deterministic law, that the notion of ethics and responsibility or at least
the call to act ethically and responsibly arises or comes into play. This is because it
is only at such times that the question of what might be best can arise.
In other words, if there is no choice there is no reason to deliberate on what is the
right thing to do: ethics can be understood as a concept that only makes sense if
there are choices to be made.
Resisting complexity reduction: Towards deconstructivenonalignment
A curriculum planned by reference to constructive alignment will also, if understood
as an isolated simple system, be understood instrumentally. It will function as a tool
for perpetuating established norms and rules, a plan or path that leads, pushes orcoaxes learners in one particular direction with no choice. It usually implies that
achieving specied intended learning outcomes (often couched in terms of acquiring
some ideal representational knowledge) will produce an ideal kind of person who
can contribute to an ideal kind of society and will usually produce ideological
clashes over whose ideas of a good society are best.
But even if a curriculum isplannedto function as a simple system we can choose
to interpret it as an element of a complex system as part of a living agential space
rather than a dead mechanical space. If we assume that we have no choices then we
will, in effect, be complicit in maintaining a potentially oppressive curriculum. But
if we acknowledge that the plan is interconnected with other elements of a complex
living system, then we are likely to nd points at which we can no longer follow theplans norms and must choose how to position ourselves ethically and invent other
ways to proceed. For example, recent draft specications for Australias national
science curriculum (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority
2010, 4) do not mention complexity as a key scientic concept, and the word
complex in relation to systems (which is one of the science curriculums unifying
ideas) appears only once: The world is complex but can be understood by focusing
on its smaller components. As a science educator who has kept abreast of recent
developments in philosophical and cultural studies of science, I could not in good
conscience encourage any learners to accept this proposition. From my standpoint, this
is not a defensible position for any contemporary science educator to adopt, althoughI suspect that it represents the views of a majority of teachers who were inducted into
reductionist understandings of scientic knowledge and scientic method in their
high school and undergraduate years. Such a focus on smaller components is more
likely to lead to misunderstanding of many of the systems on which scientic inquiry
focuses, including at least three of the ve examples of systems provided in an earlier
version of the science curriculum: a pond, a network, a particular machine, a school,
the solar system (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority 2009,
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8). Thus it produces (for me) a point on the preconceived trajectory of an aligned
curriculum at which I can no longer follow its rules. Ethically speaking, I must do
something different and I also must persuade others to do something different. I
(or we) must invent other ways to proceed as we reposition ourselves after we have
realised the need to disturb the cultural norms that those in privileged positions ofauthority have taken for granted.
An instrumental (simplistic) curriculum prescribes the kinds of knowledge learners
shouldhave, the kinds of people learners shouldbecome, and the kind of society
learners (and the rest of us)shouldbe participating in, but an emergent (complexivist)
curriculum is open to knowledge that interrupts and challenges our ideals, and
challenges us to think differently about who we (individually and collectively) think
we are becoming. How then can we provide opportunities for unpredictable, complex,
and unstable outputs to emerge from a normative curriculum? My own response to
this question has been to privilege two key concepts that have informed and guided my
practice as a curriculum scholar, educational research methodologist, and universityteacher, namely, understanding curriculum as storyand understanding curriculum
as text.These ideas are not new: Madeleine Grumets (1981, 115) characterisation
of curriculum as the collective story we tell our children about our past, our present
and our future is well-known, although I prefer to think of curriculum as a collective
and selective story and that understanding any curriculum requires us to ask: which
collective and whoseselections does it privilege?
Understanding curriculum as text involves what some call the textual turn in
social inquiry (see, e.g., Green 1994), which involves a poststructuralist disposition
to read pragmatically (Cherryholmes 1993, 1999) and deconstructively. From this
standpoint readers (rather than writers) determine whether or not a curriculum text
is understood as a transmitter of essential meanings. A curriculum text, much like
Umberto Ecos (1984, 2) description of the novel, is a machine for generating
interpretations. Understanding curriculum as text disposes us to ask questions about
what a curriculum document disregards or marginalises as it reproduces dominant
cultural myths and narratives, and also to consider how we might make a curriculum
text behave in unpredictable and complex ways.
These dispositions lead me to suggest that ethical responses to any curriculum
plan should include what I call deconstructive nonalignment a move that refuses to
interpret a curriculum document as a fundamentalist text, or a prescription, or an end
in itself, or a list of propositions to master, or rules to follow, or norms to comply
with. Rather, we should be disposed to interpret (and encourage learners to interpret)its contents as foci for speculation and/or hypotheses to be tested to assume that it
maps points of departure rather than ports of arrival.
Resisting complexity reduction: Proliferating concepts of evidence
One effect of the resurgent emphasis on outcomes-based curriculum design
(epitomised by Biggs constructive alignment) is the increasing emphasis on making
education an evidence-based practice by seeking causal and quantiable links
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between specied educational inputs (policy, curriculum, pedagogy) and learning
outcomes. Advocates of evidence-based education, such as Robert Slavin (2002,
16), argue that educational inquiry should be modelled on the types of scientic
research procedures, exemplied by large-scale experimental randomised controlled
eld trials, that have produced the progressive, systematic improvement over timethat has characterized successful parts of our economy and society throughout the
20th century, in elds such as medicine, agriculture, transportation, and technology.
The idea that education should be or become an evidence-based practice is now
a widespread and uncritically taken-for-granted assumption in many countries.
This assumption appeals to many education researchers because they are often
concerned with exploring what works to achieve desired purposes. For example,
one of my current doctoral students is conducting an actor-network theory analysis
of a community water education program in southern Thailand, and she is quite
rightly seeking evidence of (among many other things) its effectiveness in informing
community members about water availability and management, and hence improvingwater quality. However, there are other instances of education research where seeking
evidence of what works reduces the complexity of the issue under investigation
in ways that produce simplistic and thus almost meaningless conclusions. For
example, a number of environmental education researchers have sought to determine
the inuence of signicant life experiences on the development of environmental
awareness.14 Thomas Tanner (1998b, 365) characterises this research as studies
which aim to identify formative inuences in the lives of adults committed to
environmental quality. Elsewhere Tanner (1998a, 399) writes:
The rationale for such research is simple: if we nd that certain kinds of early
experience were important in shaping such adults, perhaps environmental educatorscan, to the degree feasible, replicate those experiences in the education of the young.
A number of critiques of signicant life experiences research draw attention to the
naivety of assuming that what worked for us environmentally responsible adults
could or should be replicated for our and other peoples children (see, e.g., Dillon,
Kelsey and Duque-Aristizbal 1999; Annette Gough 1999; Noel Gough 1999).
However, my point is that this type of research exemplies a particularly obvious
form of complexity reduction, namely, the attempt to produce evidence of causal
relationships between a particular category of inputs (formative inuences in the
early years) and outcomes (adults committed to environmental quality).In the UK the push for evidence-based education arose partly in the wake of David
Hargreaves (1996) Teacher Training Agency lecture and subsequent publications
(e.g., Hargreaves 1997, 410) in which he draws an analogy between teaching and
medicine, claiming that the knowledge-base of teachers is less rich than that of
doctors.15Other UK educational researchers were quick to point out why evidence
of what works is an inadequate basis for educational thought and action. For
example, Elizabeth Atkinson (2000, 317) explores the ways in which theories, rather
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than evidence, provide an essential infrastructure to teachers day-to-day thinking
and practice, and compares the restrictive effect of a focus on what works with
the opportunities offered by postmodernism for broadening the scope, purpose and
interpretation of the research of the future.
More recently, Biestas (2007) criticisms of the idea of evidence-based practice,and the ways it has been promoted, focus on the tension between scientic and
democratic control of educational practice and research. Biesta examines a number
of assumptions underlying evidence-based education, including the extent to which
education can be compared to medicine and the role of knowledge in professional
actions. Biesta (2009) further notes that many of those who champion evidence-
based education argue that the only acceptable evidence is that which can be
produced by large-scale experimental studies (such as randomised controlled eld
trials) and careful measurement of the correlation between input and outcomes.
He also emphasises the restrictions that evidence-based approaches place on the role
of research in educational practice and the ways it distracts us from more importantdeliberations on the purposes, functions and directions of educational processes and
practices.
As Gary Thomas (2010, 15) points out, the mere use of the word evidence is
often taken to be enough to clinch an argument. Thomas afrms that we all use
evidence of many kinds and forms and the more of it we have, the more condent we
can be, but he also asserts that we should be cautious about claiming that we have
better evidence than someone else. He provides two very clear examples of the abuse
of evidence-based claims in reporting both educational and medical research.16In
each case, researchers selectively adduced meagre evidence and transmuted it into
unequivocal evidence that supported their predetermined theoretical positions.
Thomas (2010, 1415) also considers how evidence is understood in another
practice-based profession when he recounts happening upon the law section as he is
strolling through a large academic bookshop:
In one of those delightful moments of serendipity my eye is caught by a bank of
shelves containing books on evidence. Not one shelf, but a whole bank of them, and
each one on aspects of evidence ... It became humblingly clear to me that lawyers
approach the notion of evidence with more nesse, deliberation and care than I have
ever done ... They have caressed it, nurtured it, problematised it, taxonomised it. They
raise issues about its nature: whether it is direct evidence, circumstantial evidence,
documentary evidence, collateral evidence, confession evidence, witness evidence
(including the denition of witnesses; the oppression or competence of witnesses).They muse about silence, hearsay, testimony, afrming evidence, character evidence,
expert evidence. They ponder over standards of proof, reverse burdens of proof,
standards within standards, presumptions of fact, persuasive presumptions. They
worry about bias, corroboration, privilege and interest, admissibility, cogency,
prejudice, relevance. So for lawyers, evidence is a fragile thing. It is not a boulder to
be thrown into debate.
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Rather than accepting the proposition that educational researchers should follow
the example of evidence-based medicine or, rather, Western medicine we
should perhaps also consider the implications of adopting other understandings of
evidence. As Thomas indicates, we might usefully consider conceiving evidence
in terms of legal studies, but we could also consider other disciplines and culturalreferents, such as traditional Chinese or African medicine, divinity, game studies,
journalism, irenology, Islamic economic jurisprudence, media studies, silviculture,
risk management, psychophysics, or even disciplines that only exist in science
ction, such as therolinguistics (Le Guin 1984).17What counts as evidence in these
discourses-practices? What else informs decision-making in them? What might be
their analogues in education? How would educational research informed by these
analogues differ from current orthodoxies?
NOT A CONCLUSION BUT ...
I share Susanne Kappelers (1986, 212) antipathy to the conventional ways of
concluding an academic essay:
I do not really wish to conclude and sum up, rounding off the argument so as to dump
it in a nutshell on the reader. A lot more could be said about any of the topics I have
touched upon ... I have meant to ask the questions, to break the frame ... The point is
not a set of answers, but making possible a different practice.
So I end with a question rather than a conclusion: how might understanding our
worlds and selves as open, recursive, organic, nonlinear and emergent make different
practices possible for curriculum design, and research on teaching and learning, inhigher education institutions?
NOTES
1. This essay is a revised version of an invited keynote address to Postgraduate Teaching
and Learning, African Scholarship and Curriculum Innovation in Higher Education,
the 5th Annual University Teaching and Learning Conference, University of Kwazulu-
Natal, Durban, South Africa, 2628 September 2011. It is dedicated to the memory of an
outstanding South African scholar, Paul Cilliers (19562011), Professor of Philosophy
and joint project leader of the Centre for Studies in Complexity at Stellenbosch
University, who died suddenly on 31 July 2011, as I was preparing to participate in the
UKZN conference.
2. I also have some rst-hand experience of South African higher education, having
collaborated with colleagues on a number of research and development projects in
South Africa since 1998 (see, for example, Gough 2001; 2004a; 2004b; 2012; Gough
and Price 2009).
3. These include Willard Gibbs pioneering research on multiphase chemical
thermodynamics in the late 1870s (see Weaver 1948) and George H. Lewes (1875)
philosophical writing on emergence in the context of Charles Darwins evolutionary
theory.
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N. Gough
4. For a recent overview of complexity studies in the social sciences see David Byrne and
Gillian Callaghan (2014).
5. I do not intend my use of terms such as us, our or we to imply that I am speaking for
others. The us and we to whom I occasionally refer are those with whom I imagine
I am having the conversation to which this essay contributes. They are likely to bereaders with whom I share both an identity and responsibilities as a higher education
worker, with particular reference to our interdependence in a common global political
economy and our shared occupancy of an increasingly global public space of discourse
and representation in which we deliberate together to decide our common futures (see
Fraser 1993).
6. Other education scholars who explored chaos and complexity in the 1980s and early
1990s include Daiyo Sawada and Michael Caley (1985), Catherine Ennis (1992), Bill
Green and Chris Bigum (1993) and me (Gough 1991). Some of these early studies
focus almost exclusively on chaos theory, which explains one cause of apparently
complex behaviour in a dynamical system, namely, the sensitivity of some systems to
variations in initial conditions. Although chaotic systems are deterministic, they are
not predictable, because small differences in initial conditions (such as those resulting
from rounding errors in numerical computation) can produce widely divergent
outcomes. Complex systems are not predictable because they are not deterministic;
self-organisation emerges from a multiplicity of interactions.
7. George H. Lewes (1875, 412) foreshadowed this understanding of emergence: The
emergent is unlike its components in so far as these are incommensurable, and it cannot
be reduced either to their sum or their difference.
8. http://www.uwc.ac.za/TandL/Pages/Curriculum-Design.aspx (accessed 6 October
2013).
9. Prominent critics of mechanistic curriculum models include the deliberative
curriculum scholars inuenced by Joseph Schwabs (1969; 1971; 1973) germinal
essays on the practical, together with the authors (and their afliates) represented inWilliam Pinars (1975) edited collection, Curriculum Theorizing: the Reconceptualists.
10. The second edition (coauthored with Howard T. Odum) was published in 1959 and
a third edition (sole-authored) in 1971. According to Odums biographer, Betty Jean
Craige (2001, 191), his textbook, Basic Ecology (1983), was actually the fourth
edition ofFundamentals of Ecology.
11. For a more detailed and sophisticated comparison of causality in simple and complex
systems see Osberg (2009; 2010).
12. The logic of closed systems works equally well both forwards and backwards in time,
so these processes can be described as reversible.
13. Alaimo notes that the scientic meaning of deviance refers to the generative force of
evolutionary differentiation.14. See, for example, the various contributions toEnvironmental Education Research, 4(4),
1999, a special issue on signicant life experiences guest edited by Thomas Tanner.
15. In the USA the reauthorization in 2001 of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act (commonly known as the No Child Left Behind Act) has explicitly promoted
randomised research designs and implicitly promoted clinical trials as the only
legitimate educational science. In so doing, the law seeks to remodel education
research in a medical mode.
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16. Matthew Weinstein (2004) offers an insightful critique of randomised experimental
designs by drawing on the narrative of a human subject participating in a medical
randomised experiment to raise questions about the extent to which such designs
secure the goals that the No Child Left Behind legislation claims they will, namely,
validity, rigour, and replicability.17. In Le Guins (1984) short story, therolinguistics is the study of animal languages.
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