CCK08: Complexity 101

In which I catch some air and put boots on the ground.

Student and "guide," paragliding through complexity

 

Every once in a while, I’m invited to work with groups or classes on history projects as a “real live historian.” (Insert your own joke here.) Several years ago, I parachuted into a group of students who were putting together a self-selected, relatively “open” history project for the first time.

This is a typical story for anyone in education, but here it is anyway: As the students launched into their research, one showed me an email she was about to send to the head of a national repository, asking for information… information that I knew was provided in resources readily available on that institution’s website… where she’d gone to find the address in the first place. In addition, the email note was (in my view) casual past the point of rudeness. And it reflected an ideological stance that was likely to be offensive to the recipient. Yet this was clearly a topic in which she had a personal interest.

I have this otherworldly vision of that moment in the classroom, the student and I, standing in a foggy space. Visible and invisible variables whoosh around us like asteroids: narrow misses, changing trajectories, inevitable collisions, shock waves reverberating beyond our fields of vision.

Did the student have a disability that prevented her from reading the online information well? Was the website designed in a way that a novice learner would miss significant information? Was my role to address the content of the letter, or the style, or the biases reflected there? Was the learner intentional or unaware in her word choices? How much of this was a clash of generational communication styles? How big was my assigned silo as a “history research expert?” Was this about accepting diversity in personal values and learning styles or an important “teachable moment?” If I approached this wrongly, would it discourage her from pursuing this interest? What about the other learners in the room with questions, and the ten minutes remaining in my visit? Did the age of the student make a difference? And what if she did send the cringe-worthy email? There’d be learning in that, too.

Many variables impacting on each other, many potential outcomes, both immediate and long-term.

If connective knowledge is fostered through open learning environments, and/or if open learning is fostered through connective knowledge (and assuming these states are deemed desirable), I suspect there will be more encounters like this.

Experts/leaders/facilitators/curators, learners, and maybe even other learner advocates (parents, mentors) connect in relation to a concept or project or performance (or maybe something like a boundary object). Many will have limited understandings of each other’s backgrounds or contexts. Approaches previously used to reduce or eliminate complexity will no longer apply. For example, just-in-time learning skills are assumed, rather than calling for prerequisite content knowledge. Assessments and accreditation are optional or not necessarily used as “power tools” to evaluate or require explicit understandings of expert views.

Sounds like a class I know.

My experience with the history project was nothing “new.” It simply confirms that efforts at open and connected learning create complex interactions between and among many things, including academic and less formal understandings (i.e. of terminology); personal initiative and the desire to and for support; perceived “rightness” and “wrongness;” and any number of worldviews. In these cases (and even in more “regulated” learning environments), a rigid insistence on standardized outcomes seems like an act of hubris.

Then again, there’s a lot of that going around lately.

Denouement: In the end, I settled my “expertness” hat more firmly on my head and showed the student where information could be found on several websites. I also noted for her that historians address each other differently, and offered some alternative language suggestions for her email… knowing full well that neither the student, the classroom teacher, nor the system in which they were operating were really positioned to address the just-in-time learning options here.

It might be possible to view this encounter as a referendum on the student, the teacher, or open or project learning. Instead, however, I read it as a sign of the fundamental changes in the learning conversations and conceptualization of learning that are needed in an era when knowledge can (and should) no longer be defined by a textbook.

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