Thesis
Complexity Patterning: A Patterns-based Approach to the Teaching and Learning of Complexity Competence
Southern Cross University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2021
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25918/thesis.259
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Abstract
Relational thinking and understanding are vital capacities for engaging with the challenges of the 21st century. This project contributes to enabling such capacities, through the design and implementation of a patterns-based approach to the teaching and learning of embodied complexity thinking and understanding. The capacities and skills that are engaged and enabled are all together described as complexity competence. Called Complexity Patterning, this educational approach forms a language, process, and strategy for practical and co-generative engagement with and within complex phenomena. This includes understanding ourselves as complex and relationally emergent entities and identities, and as attractors within complex phenomena. Complexity Patterning contributes a novel, transformational identity emergence approach to learning, supporting respect for diversity, collaboration, and learning/becoming coherence. A distinctive contribution to the transformation of theory is presented in this thesis, through a diffractive patterning of Indigenous Knowledge, agential realism, and complexity. The result is a theoretical ecology that expresses the relationality of the materiality of all knowledge making practices and actions, the agency and knowledge emergence co-contribution of Country, and the usefulness of complexity as a language of concepts for dynamics and emergence. There is a focus on the primacy of Indigenous knowledge regarding pattern knowing and understanding, as a practice for mutual engagement with the complex and agentic more-than-human world. An indigenist perspective of knowledge is demonstrated in this project through enacting human/more-than-human co-generated knowledge. Initially emerging from attempts to disrupt reductive and linear educational temporality and enable engagement with time as a multitemporal and transtemporal complex phenomenon, the patterns-based design was implemented with secondary students over several years in the developmental phase. Complexity Patterning was then refined and implemented with four cohorts of undergraduate students in this project. Two undergraduate cohorts were from an American Liberal Arts Global Studies Degree Course and two cohorts from an Australian Bachelor of Science Degree, and Regenerative Agriculture Degree Course. Complexity Patterning has demonstrated generalisable efficacy in the teaching and learning of the skills of perceiving, understanding, articulating, and embodying and enacting co-generative relationality with and within the complex phenomenon of focus, through experience of pattern focused connectivity. This project is a contribution to the shift from a mechanistic paradigm to a deep complexity paradigm that expresses the relational co-generativity inherent within both Indigenous Knowledge and some of the latest views in complexity and quantum field theory.
Details
- Title
- Complexity Patterning: A Patterns-based Approach to the Teaching and Learning of Complexity Competence
- Creators
- Shae L Brown - Southern Cross University
- Contributors
- Hanabeth Luke (Supervisor) - Southern Cross UniversityShawn Wilson (Supervisor) - Southern Cross UniversityZan Hammerton (Supervisor) - Southern Cross University
- Awarding Institution
- Southern Cross University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Theses
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
- Publisher
- Southern Cross University
- Number of pages
- 369
- Identifiers
- 991013104413702368
- Copyright
- © SL Brown 2021
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Science and Engineering
- Resource Type
- Thesis