Mapping complexity perspectives on PE pedagogy: Developing a post-behaviourist paradigm

The turn to complexity within social sciences, and the debates around the idea of a complexity theory, has generated a range of theoretical frameworks for modeling and analyzing complex systems within a variety of domains.... [ view full abstract ]

The turn to complexity within social sciences, and the debates around the idea of a complexity theory, has generated a range of theoretical frameworks for modeling and analyzing complex systems within a variety of domains. Complexity has proven to be a fundamental feature to our world that is not easily accessed in education through reductionist methods of modern science commonly associated with behaviourist and cognitivist approaches to human learning. In this symposium we study the pedagogy of PE as forming a complex learning system with students and their teachers as agents of that system. The series of papers in this symposium apply complexity thinking to consider how the relationship between the agents of a system give rise to the collective behaviour of the system, and how that system interacts, shapes and forms relationships with its environment. In this symposium we will share individual insights on a set of core commonalities that over the past few decades have come to be recognized as a generic framework for studying complex systems.  We will present the following composite of four main areas that encompasses the different major perspective on complex systems and how we have interpreted them in PE,

• Self-organization and emergence
• Nonlinear systems and chaos theory 
• Connections and relationality and the struggle to be relevant, and
• Complex adaptive systems with many parts acting and reacting to each others behaviour based adaption 

In these papers we discuss how theories of complexity have allowed us to engage with the idea of human learning in ways that extend beyond the limitations imposed by traditional, more predetermined, linear theories of learning associated with behaviourism. In a post-behaviourist view of human learning we focus on the environmental affordances, social connections, co-evolving inter-actions and poised instability of dynamic systems as precursors to natural, sustaining and meaningful human learning.