Chaos/Complexity Theory and Education

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

Allameh Tabataba'i University

Abstract

Sciences exist to demonstrate the fundamental order underlying nature. Chaos/complexity theory is a novel and amazing field of scientific inquiry. Notions of our everyday experiences are somehow in connection to the laws of nature through chaos/complexity theory’s concerns with the relationships between simplicity and complexity, between orderliness and randomness (Retrieved from http://www.inclusional-research.org/comparisons4.php). It is interested in how disorder leads to order, of how complexity emerges in nature. There appears to be many striking and eye-catching similarities between the new science of chaos/complexity and education. An understanding of chaos/complexity theory seems almost crucial to our general understanding of education and teachers’ and students’ needs within educational systems. Chaos/complexity theory raises some very significant issues in an educational context, including responsibility, morality and planning; the significance of non-linear learning organizations; setting conditions for change by emergence and self-organization; the role of feedback in learning; changing external and internal environments (Morrison, 2006); it emphasizes on the fact that schools and learners as open, complex adaptive systems; cooperation and competition; pedagogy; and the significance of context (Larsen Freeman, 1997). This paper tries to provide an overview of this science and how it can inform education

Keywords

References

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Journal of English Language Teaching and Learning
Volume 6, Issue 13 - Serial Number 13
September 2014
Pages 43-56

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