Teaching complex time through pattern thinking and understanding

Abstract

To move beyond its industrial era mechanistic paradigm, western education needs to include knowledges that enable students to think with and engage an increasingly complex world. The teaching and learning of complex time is one such knowledge, and pattern thinking and understanding are useful for this undertaking. As part of their teaching practice, the author developed and implemented a patterns-based design and educational strategy called spiraltime patterning with secondary school students more than a decade ago. Recently, the approach was implemented with university students as part of a doctoral inquiry project that focused on general complexity thinking and understanding. Spiraltime patterning is designed to perturb the dominance of linear temporalities and reposition them within a multitemporal patterning of complex time. The broad aim of this work is to contribute to transformational education, by facilitating temporal coherence and wellbeing for students, through embodied understanding of time as a complex phenomenon.

Complexity Patterning: A patterns‐based design and strategy for transformational education

“…After observing and talking with the students, it was concluded that the mechanistic temporal and organisational linearities of educational process were dampening their consciousness, their engagement with life all around them, and compromising their learning. Linear reductive temporal practices specifically were contributing to disengagement through a reductive and dissociative effect on the students' conscious presence (Brown, 2023). Mechanistic linear time within education standardises and commodifies all learning, resulting in alienation and disassociation from subjective temporalities and therefore the experience of existence for students (Alhadeff-Jones, 2017).…”