NEW PARADIGM EDUCATION
New Paradigm Education takes into account not only learning dynamics that address knowledge acquisition and skill competencies, but also learning to be as well as learning to be together; what is also known as learning for conviviality. This inquiry covers research orientations from social and emotional learning to somatic, kinesthetic and collective learning dynamics.
SYSTEMIC AND HOLISTIC LEARNING
The area of Systemic and Holistic Learning approaches considers trends and conceptions that promote multicultural, transdisciplinary and immersive learning rather than the standard teaching of traditional materials in classroom settings. Research includes curriculum-development and the practical application of emerging conceptions in beyond-the-school real-world settings.
EVOLUTIONARY LEARNING COMMUNITIES / ECOSYSTEMS
Evolutionary Learning Communities learn how to learn in harmony with the dynamics of their evolving environment. When two or more such communities embark on a shared learning path for the joint creation of meaning, an Evolutionary Learning Ecosystem emerges. The collective intelligence harnessed in such engagements offers new horizons for individual and collective learning dynamics. Approaches and methodologies that foster the emergence of these systems of collective learning form the focus of this research area.
Current Research Projects
Complexity Patterning Curriculum for Transformational Education
Research Project
By Dr Shae L Brown
1. Guiding questions
How can Complexity Patterning based learning be made broadly available for educators and students?
Does this pattern-based curriculum help teachers and students to learn the knowledge and skills of complexity competence?
These questions encompass the curriculum design process, implementation with
educators and students, and subsequent evaluation.
2. Primary focus
This research project is focused on the educational curriculum design required for the teaching and learning of relational complexity competence. Such competence includes perceiving, thinking with, embodied knowing, and acting through an understanding of complex phenomena as co-generative and participatory.
A pattern-based design, called Complexity Patterning has been implemented successfully by the researcher with secondary and university students. This project aims to explore effective design of curriculum for broad availability and implementation with educators and students. Currently western education and teacher training is operating within the outdated mechanistic paradigm.
A Complexity Patterning curriculum will be designed within the deep complexity paradigm, which includes intertwinglement that is transcontextual as well as transtemporal, and also indeterminacy, non-linearity and co-generative emergence. The aim is to integrate learning and becoming, and attune students’ sentience to the generative and relational patterning of the world’s coming-into-being.
Complexity competence supports collective human learning, and learning with the wider world. This is educational design that aims to contribute in a practical way to transformational education for thrivable futures.
3. Research process
The process of this research includes the following steps:
- Investigate the learning frameworks for teacher education and high school student education. This step will include frameworks for alternative education such as the Living School in Australia, as well as in the government school system. Literature that defines the new paradigm education required for thrivable futures will also be explored and utilised.
- Refine the relationship of this work to the latest understanding of learning as a function of the evolution of both people and the cosmos.
- Design of curriculum for teacher training. This step will include teaching and learning materials, curation of readings and viewing material, and if possible, the generation of animated videos to support understanding.
- Design of curriculum for secondary students. This curriculum will be aimed at years 7 & 8, for students 13 and 14 years of age. It will be easily adaptable for students of different ages. As above, this will include a range of teaching and learning materials.
- Educational sites will be sought to implement the curriculum. The Living School is one possibility, and higher education providers with an interest in innovation and complexity thinking and understanding will be explored.
- Evaluation will be designed into the research process, through reflective practice and regular reporting. Students and educators will be invited to provide feedback on their experience of the curriculum, and their patterning artefacts will be recorded as visual data.
4. Potential impact and implications for further research
This project has the potential to be a trim tab for education systems, and/or provide innovative deep complexity based education for alternative education.
A complexity Patterning curriculum can contribute to the knowledge and understanding required to help young people participate in VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environments and situations of today and tomorrow that require a response to the RUPT conditions of rapid and unpredictable change, that are paradoxical and tangled. It can also provide an approach to participatory deep complexity that includes human capacities of co-generativity and agency attuned to the thriving of life.
More broadly this work has the capacity to contribute to integrated learning and becoming that supports the evolutionary emergence of future humans.
Kurdistan Region Iraq (KRI) Teacher Up-Take of Student-Centered and/or Flipped Classroom Approach
LINPR Research Project Summary
By Jessica Ashe
17 October 2022
1. Guiding questions
What types of internal barriers exist towards teachers adopting a student-centered and/or flipped classroom approach to learning?
Do our interventions help teachers to adopt a student-centered and/or flipped classroom approach to learning?
2. Primary focus
This study into the educational culture of Kurdistan will elucidate why teachers hesitate to enact this actual long-standing practice of a learner-centered classroom. We will seek to expand the flipped classroom to consider the entirety of the learning ecosystem, including the whole student, and the whole teacher as in the yogic tradition. In that context, reflecting on what empowers these people is not only an interesting concept, but one that could in fact impact change here.
The gradual approach improves upon our framework due to its inclusion of managing the community response. Indeed, the flipped classroom in and of itself is not new. The question here is why is it so slow to be adopted in developing nations, using Kurdistan as an example. A quote from a participant MD in one of my online sessions in Iraq with a medical school seems pertinent here. After I showed him all of the recent research from top-tier medical schools in the US and UK that demonstrated student-centered problem solving, this medical doctor angrily said, “The research shows that I should lecture!” The comment and tone suggest a medical doctor had nothing to learn from a doctor of education and a staunch refusal to uptake.
3. Research process
To achieve the aims of the study the following procedures will be followed:
A semi-structured interview will be prepared to interview the samples of the study.
Teachers will be interviewed prior to the treatment of training in the student-centered / flipped classroom methods to ascertain their ideas, preconceptions and biases towards these methods.
Teachers will undergo training, during which they will be observed (participant observer). The training will include face-to-face and online sessions on the concept of flipped classroom approach, the procedures, the challenges and strategies for better implementation in Kurdistan region context. They will be given assignments to prepare lesson plans and video-tape certain lessons adopting flipped classroom approach.
Teachers will be interviewed after the training to ascertain any potential changes in their understanding, previous preconceptions and biases of the student-centered / flipped classroom methods (model).
4. Potential impact and implications for further research
Despite the established knowledge of the increased efficacy of the student-centered / flipped classroom methods, schools and universities in Iraq fail to implement them. Previous research has established that the #1 hindrance to ‘take-up’ of these methods is teacher identity. We expect to learn what aspects of identity prevent teachers from using more effective methods of teaching. We also expect to have found ways to adapt teacher self-identity such that these more effective methods actually take hold in education. When previously established best-in-practice methods are used, we expect the educational system in Iraq to improve.
New Initiative
CommUnity is a project of the Laszlo Institute that utilizes a vision of educational innovation to empower learning communities.
It does this by harnessing the power of collective intelligence to provide creative solutions to common needs and opportunities in diverse learning environments.
The learning communities of CommUnity engage in co-creation and prototyping practical solutions through a process that embodies individual and collective well-being sourced from empathy and joy. It is focused on, and is being developed by, young people from around the world.
More information on the current focus of the project to gain funding and support can be found here:
www.oneyoungworld.com/lead2030/21-22/challenge-sdg4-deloitte