Noel Gough Towards deconstructive nonalignment: a complexivist view of curriculum, teaching and learning

7/31/2019 Noel Gough Towards deconstructive nonalignment: a complexivist view of curriculum, teaching and learning

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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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N. Gough

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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