Participant: Jeff Bloom
Affiliation: College of Education, Northern Arizona University
Format: Workshop
Themes: recursion, paradigm, praxis

Education continues to remain embedded in positivist and reductionist paradigms. The assumptions of these paradigms work their way insidiously into institutional and individual practices, including those contexts that focus on complex systems in the natural and social sciences. Over the past year, I have used the film, An Ecology of Mind (Bateson, 2010), as the central artifact in a university Freshman Seminar. The course is presented in a way that is consistent with the themes explored in this film and with the more general notion of learning as involving complex and recursive systems. Relationships, from those among participants in the course (including those which characterize the classroom dynamics), to those that comprise the natural and social worlds, serve as the material that is examined. The course is recursive, personal, social, and open to possibilities (as a stochastic system).

This workshop will examine the positivist assumptions that typify educational systems and undermine learning as complex systems, then provide perspectives on how we can work in ways that support complexity. Participants will be provided with opportunities to share their own practices, suggest specific activities, and discuss how teaching—learning at all levels can be reworked as complex systems.