NN40, May 2008
Education for Sustainable Development? Or The Sustainability of Education Investment? A Special Issue
Making Educational Development and Change Sustainable:Insights from Complexity Theory
By Mark Mason, University of Hong Kong
Email: mmason@hku.hkKeywords
Complexity theory, Educational Development, Sustainable Change
Summary
This article considers problems of development and change in education from the perspective of complexity theory. In doing so it introduces conceptual issues in complexity theory to educationalists who might be unfamiliar with the field.
In a recent issue of the International Journal of Educational Research, Lockheed and Cueto (2006: 97) make the point that ?evidence emerging from developing and transition countries underscores the relationship between education quality and education equity?. They draw on studies that show that the poor quality of education for the children of the poor, minorities or those living in remote communities is often responsible for their lower school participation (Lewis & Lockheed, 2006; Winkler & Cueto, 2004). Yet, as they indicate, research on how best to improve these schools is sadly lacking. This paper offers some insights from complexity theory into how educational development and change might be made more sustainable. The argument is thus theoretical: while it is not an empirical paper reporting lessons from one or more case studies, perhaps the conceptualization of change in complexity theory might provide insights into what manner of interventions stands the most chance of being sustained.
Both educational quality and equity are increasingly cited as critical for international educational development. UNESCO, for example, has titled a recent Education For All Global Monitoring Report, The Quality Imperative (UNESCO, 2005). Inequalities in educational development in any society lie primarily, of course, in inequities that can probably be traced back to the big four: socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, gender, and space/region (the urban/rural divide, for example). Theories of change have thus sought the levers of history in economic structures, in human agency, and in combinations of these and other factors that include or exclude either or both. Complexity theory offers a theory of change that might be said to encompass all of these and more, and that might offer the most helpful insight yet into how educational development and change might be rendered sustainable.
Complexity theory?s notion of emergence implies that, given a significant degree, or critical mass, of complexity in a particular environment, new properties and behaviours emerge that are not contained in the essence of the constituent elements, or able to be predicted from knowledge of initial conditions. These concepts of emergent phenomena from a critical mass, associated with notions of lock-in, path dependence, and inertial momentum, contribute to an understanding of continuity and change that sheds light on educational, institutional and system-wide change. In the complexity of the educational environment, the plethora of relevant constituent elements ? agents and structures ? includes teachers, students, parents and other community leaders, the state and its education departments, economic structures and business organisations, NGOs, agencies, and so on. Complexity theory suggests that intervention to differing but sufficient extents in each of these areas is what would probably be necessary to shift a prevailing ethos in education. In other words, change and sustainable development in education, at whatever level, are not so much a consequence of effecting change in one particular factor or variable, no matter how powerful the influence of that factor. It is more a case of generating momentum in a new direction by attention to as many factors as possible. Complexity theory thus indicates that what it might take to change a system?s inertial momentum from an ethos of failure to one of sustained development is massive and sustained intervention at every possible level until the desired change emerges from this new set of interactions among these new factors and sustains itself autocatalytically. And despite complexity theory?s relative inability to predict the direction or nature of change, we are, by implementing, at each constituent level, changes whose outcome we can predict with reasonable confidence, at least influencing change in the appropriate direction and thus stand a better chance of effecting the desired changes across the complex system as a whole.
References
Lewis, M.A. and Lockheed, M.E. (2006) Inexcusable Absence: Why 60 million girls still aren?t in school and what to do about it. Washington, DC: Centre for Global Development.
Lockheed, M.E. and Cueto, S. (2006) Research on Education Equity and Quality in Developing and Transition Countries, International Journal of Educational Research, 45 (3), 97-101.
UNESCO (2005) Education for all: The quality imperative. Paris: UNESCO.
Winkler, D. and Cueto, S. (Eds) (2004) Etnicidad, raza, genero y educación en América Latina. Washington, DC: Inter-American Dialogue, Partnership for Educational Revitalization in the Americas.
Further Resources
Mason, M. (Ed.) (2008) Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education: Special Issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40 (1), 1-245.
Mason, M. (2008) What is Complexity Theory and What Are Its Implications for Educational Change? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40 (1), 35-49.
Hershock, P., Mason, M. & Hawkins, J. (Eds) (2007) Changing Education: Leadership, Innovation and Development in a Globalizing Asia Pacific (1-348). Hong Kong and Dordrecht: CERC & Springer.
Todd, A. & Mason, M. (2005) Enhancing Learning in South African Schools: Strategies beyond Outcomes-Based Education. International Journal of Educational Development, 25 (3), 221-35.
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