The Challenge and Promise of Complexity Theory for Teacher Education Research

Abstract

Background/Context In many countries, there are multiple studies intended to improve initial teacher education. These have generally focused on pieces of teacher education rather than wholes, and have used an underlying linear logic. It may be, however, that what is needed are new research questions and theoretical frameworks that account for wholes, not just parts, and take complex, rather than reductionist perspectives. Purpose This article examines the challenges and the promises of complexity theory as a framework for teacher education research. One purpose is to elaborate the basic tenets of complexity theory, summarize its previous uses, and identify key challenges. A second purpose is to propose a new research platform that combines complexity theory with critical realism (CT-CR) and prompts a new set of empirical questions and research methods. Research Design Drawing on scholarship from sociology and education, the underlying design—or logic—of this analytic essay is this: explanation of the basic tenets of complexity theory applied to teacher education, assessment of previous research informed by complexity theory, response to the major epistemological and methodological challenges involved in using complexity theory as a research framework, and proposal of a new set of questions and methods. Findings/Results Complexity theory is appealing to teacher education researchers who want to avoid simplistic and reductionist perspectives. However, most previous complexity research has not addressed the critiques: the proclivity of complexity theory for retrospective description; the assertion that, given its rejection of linear causality, complexity theory cannot provide causal explanations with implications for practice; and the charge that complexity-informed research cannot deal with the values and power inequalities inherent in the normative enterprise of education. Integrating complexity theory with critical realism provides a way to address these fundamental challenges. Building on this new platform, the essay proposes a new set of empirical questions about initial teacher education along with several innovative research methods to address those questions. Conclusions/Recommendations This essay concludes that the combination of complexity theory and critical realism offers a unique platform for teacher education research, which has theoretical consistency, methodological integrity, and practical significance. The essay recommends that its proposed new empirical questions and methods may have the capacity to show us where to look and what processes to trace as teacher candidates learn to enact practice that enhances the learning of all students, including those not well-served by the current system.

Magic and Monsters

“…Considering emergence, complexity theories developed in studies of biology, mathematics, and computer science offer explanations for the emergence of phenomena that cannot be predicted by their initial state (Osberg et al, 2008). Davis and Sumara (2006), who played a key role in demonstrating how these theories can be generative in education research (Cochran-Smith et al, 2014), offer complexity thinking as a set of conceptual tools for destabilizing many commonplace ideas about classroom practice. One such tool we apply analytically is an understanding of the vitality of de-centralized forms of organization that allow for group interaction to exchange information and make changes without top-down control.…”

Beyond functionality: Building critical digital teaching competence among future primary education teachers

“…The social role of educators as catalysts of change and agents of critical development has been conscientiously eroded over the last forty years, as they have been repositioned as mere operators in the service of predefined market standards (Rudd & Goodson, 2016). Teaching is too often approached as a technical skill, based solely on psychological and pedagogical procedures, but ideally devoid of aesthetic or moral dimensions and ostensibly detached from social engagement (Martínez Bonafé, 2001), as well as from familiar or community links (Cochran-Smith et al, 2014;Zeichner et al, 2016); indifferent to what Castañeda (2021) was called "the social commitment" by Castañeda et al (2021). This bare-bones technical conception of the teachers' role is clearly reflected in how the 'new' teacher's competences for the digital world have traditionally been understood.…”

Preparing Teachers for Culturally Responsive/Relevant Pedagogy (CRP): A Critical Review of Research

“…We propose that the inherently complex and interactive nature of PSTs’ learning to enact CRP in programs, practicum schools, and classrooms calls for a different lens to conceptualize research on teacher education. Cochran-Smith et al (2014), along with Strom and Martin (2017), powerfully illustrate the possibilities of conceptualizing the process of learning to teach as nonlinear, complex, and contingent causal processes with human and nonhuman factors. Furthermore, the work by Indigenous scholars, as described earlier, has always attended to complexity and is informative here (e.g., Simpson, 2017).…”