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Opening the Wondrous World of the Possible for Education: A Generative Complexity Approach

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Complex Dynamical Systems in Education

Abstract

This contribution is about the opening of a new perspective on education. This possibility is based on new thinking in complexity about the role of complexity in education. The focus is on understanding generative complexity as self-potentiating; that is, on how complexity is actually generated in the real world. Generative complexity offers the possibility of linking complexity to the concept of transition in “the transitory child.” This concept may be linked to the concept of the so-called Zone of Generativity, and be expanded to the Space of Generativity as a multidimensional, dynamic state hyperspace. The challenge is to show how these concepts may be linked to the opening and enlarging of new spaces of possibility for learning and development in education. New ways of thinking are needed to understand the generative complexity involved. This calls for rethinking the concepts of interaction, causality, and the unit of study. It is urgently needed to become explanatory about the nature of (self-) generative principles and (self-) generative mechanisms, being operative in complex generative processes of generative learning and development. Generative learning and the achievement of individual and collective generativity may be viewed as thriving on the full generative power of interaction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The former President of the European Research Council.

  2. 2.

    See the grant of 2500.000 dollar for Santa Fe Institute, 2015, at http://www.santafe.edu/news/item/JTFgrant-2015-announce-comprehensive-theory-complexity/ to promote the development of a general theory of complexity, after so many years of bright people being active in this institute.

  3. 3.

    See “Understanding Complexity,” Vienna 2015, at http://www.eventbrite.com/e/understanding-complexity-offering-solutions-to-problems-of-the-21st-century-tickets-14991336491?aff=esli.

  4. 4.

    See the general definition at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bootstrap and as adjective, at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bootstrap.

  5. 5.

    The Matthew effect describes how entities may bootstrap each other in their interaction, originally described as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” from the Bible.

  6. 6.

    The Comenius effect describes how one can learn most by teaching the other (Gartner et al., 1971); that is, by the returning effects in and through interaction, enabled by increasing the influence on the other one interacts with (Jörg& Akkaoui Hughes, 2013).

  7. 7.

    The reader may skip the next part and read the conclusions of this paragraph only.

  8. 8.

    Cf. the original mission of the International Journal of Complicity on Complexity and Education, above.

  9. 9.

    Which has as subtitle The Human Development Approach.

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  1. University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Ton Jörg

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  1. Ton Jörg
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Correspondence to Ton Jörg .

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  1. School of Education, Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York, USA

    Matthijs Koopmans

  2. Department of Philosophy and Education, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Dimitrios Stamovlasis

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Jörg, T. (2016). Opening the Wondrous World of the Possible for Education: A Generative Complexity Approach. In: Koopmans, M., Stamovlasis, D. (eds) Complex Dynamical Systems in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27577-2_5

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