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This review has been accessed times since November 9, 2006

Doll, William; Fleener, M. Jayne; Trueit, Donna; and St. Julien, John. (Eds.). (2005). Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture. New York: Peter Lang.

329 pp.
$32.95 (papercover)   ISBN 0820467804.

Reviewed by Aliya Rahman
Purdue University

November 9, 2006

The world is not predictable. Culture is complex, as is curriculum. Systems are more than the sum total of their parts.

Out of context, the central implications of Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture appear so commonsensical that their publication hardly seems warranted. But the understanding that arises from this edited collection, not explicitly stated in any single essay but gathered from the volume as a whole, is that the work of chaos and complexity theorists does not lie in proving the validity of those statements. It resides in the uncovering of those instances where researchers, guided by deeply embedded reductionist tendencies, fail to incorporate those suggestions into their theory and their practice. Such work encourages educators to examine their theoretical frameworks, to uncover those points at which the understanding of what it means to know is still controlled by the paradigms of positivist scientific logic.

This collection, edited by William Doll, M. Jayne Fleener, Donna Trueit, and John St. Julien, arrives at a time when the pulse of the chaos and complexity dialog is quickening within education research. It rests on a small but strong base of literature concerned with complex systems and postmodern science in curriculum, a foundational piece of which comes from editor Doll. A postmodern perspective on curriculum (1993) provided much of the language through which the field has come to communicate, most notably the four “Rs” of curriculum characterization: richness, recursion, relation, and rigor. Fleener, too, is responsible for a significant text, with Curriculum Dynamics: Recreating Heart (2002) suggesting complexity’s potential to resurrect meaning in a field of research that has been reduced by agents of positivist scientific logic, such as the Tyler rationale, to a process of fitting specific solutions to isolated problems. Supported by experienced scholars and offering impressive accessibility, the book will likely serve as a definitive piece in the field of chaos and complexity in education research.

This collection will allow a wide audience to explore thinking from the perspective of chaos and complexity, with this experience embedded as much in the content of the individual essays as in the editors’ organization of the volume. In this review, I discuss the technologies through which the editors illustrate the notion of the complex system in a book that is itself iterative and nonlinear, yet still accessible and relevant. I also comment on the notion that while some articles hint at the applicability of chaos and complexity theories to questions of culture and power, the text as a whole reflects chaos and complexity literature in general in that it neither foregrounds this applicability nor makes substantial reference to external literature that employs similar discussions of counter-science logics to do so. To illustrate these critiques, I briefly discuss contributions from recent literature in feminist poststructural curriculum theory as examples of work that aligns with the arguments of chaos and complexity theorists.

Accessible chaos: recursion, iteration, and conversation

Employing relatively new language and bearing roots deeply embedded in mathematics and nonequilibrium physics, any text that aims to introduce chaos and complexity theories to the general education research audience would do well to concern itself with its own accessibility. The editors of this collection undoubtedly deliver in this respect. Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture: is an aptly named volume. It reads like a conversation rather than a definitive treatise, and this is perhaps the best mode of entry into New Science, a term used by Fleener to collectively reference “the techniques and explorations of complex adaptive systems theory, the theory of dissipative structures, or chaos theory” (p. 2). Readers approaching the volume in search of clear-cut definitions or immediately applicable classroom “solutions” will be sorely disappointed, but this indicates a cultivated understanding of chaos and complexity theories by the editors. By its very nature, New Science defies definition. It rejects the direct cause-effect relationships, linearity, and hard predictability that would characterize a solution manual written from within the positivist scientific research paradigm.

This is not to imply, however, that the text is a difficult read. Quite on the contrary, its conversational nature lends great accessibility to its content, and so the book will serve as both a valuable primer for those new to chaos and complexity and a robust exploration of those theories within education research for readers with prior background in the field. Fleener's introduction provides all the technical information that novices will need to comprehend the remainder of the text, but those with a working knowledge of chaos mathematics will likely pick up on a handful of offerings to insiders that are left unexplained by the authors, such as the fractal imagery splashed onto the book’s fourteen chapter headings and the naming of its four sections as "iterations". Such variability in the depth of discourse will allow readers to enter into conversation with the text at individual levels of fluency, and this fluency will vary not only between readers but between points in a single reader's experience.

This recursive, conversational effect seems to be deliberate, as suggested by three major characteristics of the book's organization. First, to bring themselves into the conversation, editors insert their own short responses into other authors’ chapters, using text boxes that ask questions of both reader and author. Second, as I have mentioned already, the book is divided into four "iterations", a reference to chaos mathematics that serves to structure the book around the notion that repeated information might be seen as evolving rather than redundant, its meaning transformed at each encounter by the reader's changing point of engagement- or their "initial conditions", in the language of chaos. Through multiple iterations, readers will revisit discussions of the same specific topics, as illustrated by considerations of Giambattista Vico’s poetic logic in three of four pieces in the introduction and first iteration. Finally, the text itself serves as an example of a system that is recursive, iterative, nonlinear, as I will illustrate.

The introduction and first iteration, titled “Historical Streams”, establish the book’s purpose courtesy of its four editors. Fleener opens by suggesting that a challenge to the epistemologies of modern science might be found in a conversation on New Science, and from here the multiple trajectories of the nonlinear system become apparent. The introduction progresses naturally into the first article, Doll’s “The Culture of Method”, which provides a dense, Ramus-through-Dewey analysis of the history of “method” in Western academia, noting that “scientific method- a procedure/process to be followed for acquiring (new) knowledge or developing (new) skills was quite unheard of in Ramus’ day” (p. 22). But the introduction also leads just as naturally into the second essay, Trueit’s “Watercourses”, in which conversation is supported as an act that “plays with meaning and relations, transgresses, narrates and questions, and in so doing begins to recognize and then challenge the bounds of certainty” (p. 78). In turn, “Watercourses” also speaks directly to “Classroom Dynamics and Emergent Curriculum”, Stacy Reeder’s contribution to the third iteration, titled “Systems and Communications”, which, standing as the only empirical study offered in the collection, clearly highlights the synergistic nature of conversation in providing “space for students to challenge, validate, and perturb one another’s thinking and help one another weaver together different ways of approaching and understanding mathematics” (p. 259). Fleener’s intro also seems to lay a path to the second iteration, “Chaos and Complexity”, a more technical plunge into chaos and complexity theories in which much of the introduction’s terminology is revisited for the first time in one hundred pages. Furthermore, only after reading the second iteration is it possible to gain a particular breed of insight into some of Fleener’s autobiographical offerings, as not until this point does the book offer visual representations of those images that might have spoken to a teacher who felt limited by the drudgery of exploring regular polygons. Those same experiential details make the book’s third iteration seem appropriate as a follow-up to the introduction, as it focuses on instances in which dynamic systems have been used as models for social interactions.

And there are further examples of nonlinearity. St. Julien’s chapter, “Complexity: Developing a More Useful Analytic for Education”, closes the first iteration and is perhaps the most accessible piece in the book, explicitly relevant to issues of teaching and learning but also impressive in its explorations of connectionism, a cutting-edge analytic with applications for learning theory. I found myself returning to this latter discussion upon reading the fourth iteration, “Aesthetics, Culture, and Learning”, comprised of three pieces that function as connective tissue for previous iterations and serving perhaps as the best example of the book’s iterative, recursive nature. Sherrie Reynolds and Laura Jewett draw on the work of Gregory Bateson in “Patterns That Connect: A Recursive Epistemology” and “Minding Culture”, respectively, conversing with St. Julien’s thoughts on connectionism. Neither Reynolds nor Jewett references St. Julien explicitly, but I found this to be a strength, as it helped me to understand recursion as evolving rather than repetitive. Only in a second reading of St. Julien’s piece did I note the connection, and consequently found myself flipping immediately forward, though in a sense backward, to Jewett and Reynolds. The final piece of the fourth iteration, Hongyu Wang’s “Chinese Aesthetics, Fractals, and the Tao of Curriculum” addresses complexity through a conversation on Chinese gardens. Employing Fleener ‘s (2002) language, she suggests a meeting place “between Eastern and Western wisdom at the intersection of ‘curriculum dynamics’” (p.300), painting a somewhat questionable cultural dichotomy, but shining nonetheless as the collection’s most explicit discussion of the cultural implications of chaos and complexity and ending the collection with a suggestion that led me to revisit all of its previous pieces. This act of revisiting was, admittedly, the path that guided me to both of my critiques of the collection.

Questioning scientific logic: addressing the cultural implications of chaos and complexity

Wang’s essay stands alone in the collection as the only piece to truly foreground the possibility that alternatives to scientific logic might disrupt the Western, male, and academic ways of knowing that unfortunately and frequently come across as Eurocentric, patriarchal, and elitist. Other pieces do, however, offer hints at this idea. Trueit sees “principles of chaos and complexity theory providing the basis of a new logic, one that liberates modern Western cultures from the grip of certainty that logic has provided for centuries” (p. 78). St. Julien describes positivist scientific paradigms, characterized by a logic of reduction, as “the analytic- the habits of inquiry- that have become characteristic of Western and especially academic culture” (p. 104). Jewett’s “Minding Culture” briefly highlights the strength of popular culture, in the form of speculative fiction, in encouraging postmodern views of reality. Doll, too, has before agreed with this last notion (William Doll and Noel Gough, 2002), but does not revisit it in this volume. Noting their obvious awareness of the cultural dimensions of logics and analytics, I find it difficult to understand why the editors have not highlighted the potential of chaos and complexity in troubling cultural dominance as a central concern of the book.

It is, however, important to note that this collection certainly does not stand as a culturally-blind exception within its field. Within the body of education research literature that uses the language of "chaos" or "complexity", rare is the text that grants a central role to questions of culture and power. A notable exception is Joe Kincheloe's 2004 text, Rigour and Complexity in Educational Research, which suggests that researchers apply a "bricolage" approach to questions of curriculum, bringing complexity to their work through expanding their bases of literature and methodology, and thereby opening their ears to voices that have thus far remained unheard. "Here," writes Kincheloe, "rests the magic of the bricolage; as researchers come to understand the multiple influences shaping their daunting task, they bring previously excluded people and categories of people into the process" (p. 47). I find that Kincheloe’s point best articulates my own thoughts on a beneficial direction that might be taken by counter-scientific logics, and his urgings towards bricolage speak to a second, closely related concern that surfaced in my reading of this collection.

In exploring theoretical and historical applications of particular aspects of chaos and complexity theories in the social sciences, the second iteration of Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture aligns with Doll’s chapter in that it shows those theories to be markedly based in Western academia and overwhelmingly male in their shared canon. However, if Wang’s piece implies that the underlying notions of chaos and complexity are not unique to Western academia, why are their histories repeatedly painted as such? It seems that little attempt has been made to open the channels of communication connecting chaos and complexity to other discussions of counter-science logic. In the first piece of the second iteration, Brent Davis’ “Interrupting Frameworks: Interrupting Geometries of Epistemology and Curriculum” employs a class of mathematical images, fractal geometry, to both “trouble the priority given to mathematics in academia” and “[pull] together and otherwise [note] some of the common ground of various perspectives represented in current curriculum theorizing” (p. 120). However, while I certainly find his arguments regarding the former point to be well-constructed, his efforts to pull together various perspectives reflect a general lack of interdisciplinary focus in this collection. Of Davis’ eleven references, only Michel Foucault (1990), Madeleine Grumet (1988), and Roget’s international thesaurus (Robert L. Chapman, 1977) appear to be obviously outside the literature that deals explicitly with complexity, dynamic systems, or fractal geometry. The next piece, Darren Stanley’s “Paradigmatic Complexity”, provides an engaging exploration of the reductionist tendency to “frame the world as ‘out there’, separate and separated from us through our bodies” (p. 134). However, this chronicling makes no reference to an extensive body of poststructuralist and feminist literature that takes up this issue and effectively situates it within questions of culture and power, nor does it take up these questions itself.

My goal in offering these critiques is not to discredit the scholarship in this collection based on a tally of omissions, but to highlight the book’s reflection of a general trend in chaos and complexity literature that I find problematic on a theoretical level. In failing to relate its ideas to other bodies of work that are perhaps more deliberately concerned with issues of culture and power, the collection risks reinscribing some of the negative aspects of positivist scientific logic that it seeks to displace. A counter-example may provide further explanation.

Recent work in poststructuralist feminist scholarship has discussed “scientism” and “scientificity” (Patti Lather, 2005, 2006) in ways that foreground two points of concern addressed only subtly in chaos and complexity literature. First, the possibility of disrupting positivist power dynamics is central in their discussions of counter-science logics. Second, they have made explicit attempts to understand the possibility of working with and against, rather than simply against, a category (Judith Butler, 2004; Lather, 2005, 2006; Elizabeth Wilson, 1998) in this case, scientific logic. Lather argues that “while it may be true that no field of inquiry is unable to benefit from the methods of the natural science, it is quite another thing to hold up as the ‘gold standard’ a very narrow idea of scientific methodology” (2005, pp. 2-3). Such an attempt troubles the possibility and usefulness of chaos and complexity theorists’ calls for “discarding the lenses of modernism and finding suitable replacement lenses” (Fleener, 2002). The question of whether it is possible to “discard” a lens, rather than working “with and against it” is certainly relevant in discussions of science and counter-science, as a philosophically impossible task stands little chance of being philosophically effective.

However, in this discussion it should be acknowledged that the field of chaos and complexity is not unique in its tendencies towards disciplinary isolation. If, for example, chaos and complexity literature is not found cited alongside feminist poststructural literature, then exclusion has occurred on the parts of both fields, and efforts towards interdisciplinary understandings thus become a mutual effort.

Concluding thoughts: complexity and interdisciplinary rigor

In describing an appropriate analytic for learning theory, St. Julien references Doyne Farmer’s “Rosetta Stone for Connectionism” (1991), an early attempt to develop a common language for that analytic. “By showing how a similar mathematical structure manifests itself in quite different contexts,” writes Farmer, “I hope that I have conveyed the broad applicability of connectionism” (p. 182). Farmer’s statement is worth considering, as well, in the collective context of Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture, chaos and complexity theories in general, and other scholarship that provide counter-scientific arguments. Critiques of positivist scientific logic are abundant in education research, particularly within the field of curriculum studies, but appear limited in their “broad applicability”, their ability to converge on similar projects and questions, by a lack or rejection of common language. This concern must be addressed by scholars, not only in chaos and complexity but in a wide range of intellectual traditions, if Kincheloe’s (2004) redefining of “rigour” as a characteristic of interdisciplinary and cultural richness is to be regarded seriously.

But while the underlying notions of chaos and complexity may not be unique, the strengths of Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture as a text are undoubtedly so. The book is a continuously evolving conversational, accessible and relevant to various contexts and levels of understanding, potentially for the same reader. It illustrates its concepts by embodying them, functioning itself as an example of an iterative, recursive, nonlinear system that will undoubtedly provide a dynamic introduction to complex analytics for a wide audience of educational researchers.

References

Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.

Chapman, R. L. (Ed.). (1977). Roget’s international thesaurus, 4th ed. Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside.

Doll, W. (1993). A post-modern perspective on curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press.

Doll, W., Fleener, M.J., Trueit, D., & St. Julien, J. (Eds). (2005). Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum, and Culture: a conversation. New York: Peter Lang.

Doll. W. and Gough, N. (2002). Problematic, Posthuman Sprituality. In W. Doll and N. Gough (Eds.) Curriculum Visions. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 284-286.

Farmer, J. D. (1991). A Rosetta Stone for Connectionism. In Emergent Computation: Self-organizing, collective, and cooperative phenomena in natural and artifical computing networks, 1350187. S. Forrest and Center for Nonlinear Studies (Los Alamos National Laboratory) (Eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fleener, M. J. (2003). Curriculum Dynamics: Recreating Heart. New York: Peter Lang.

Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction. New York: Vintage.

Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Lather, P. (2005). Scientism and Scientificity in the Rage for Accountability: a Feminist Deconstruction. Paper Presented at the American Educational Research Association annual convention. April 11-15, 2005, Montreal.

Lather, P. (2006). Post(Feminist) Methodology: Getting Lost. Paper Presented at the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. May 4-6, 2006, Champaign.

Kincheloe, J. (2004). Rigour and complexity in educational research. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.

Wilson, E. (1998). Neural Geographies: Feminism and the microstructure of cognition. New York: Routledge.

Aliya Rahman

About the Reviewer

Aliya Rahman is a graduate student in Curriculum Studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN. Her research interests include postmodern understandings of science within education research and the cultural construction of science in internationalized and globalized contexts.

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