Pragmatism, Post-modernism, and Complexity Theory

The "Fascinating Imaginative Realm" of William E. Doll, Jr.

Donna Trueit, Donna Trueit

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136493348
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación general

The first collection of the key works of the major curriculum studies scholar William E. Doll, Jr., this volume provides an overview of his scholarship over his fifty-year career and documents the theoretical and practical contribution he has made to the field. The book is organized in five thematic sections: Personal Reflections; Dewey, Piaget, Bruner, Whitehead: Process And Transformation; Modern/Post-Modern: Structures, Forms and Organization; Complexity Thinking; and Reflections on Teaching.

The complicated intellectual trajectory through pragmatism, postmodernism and complexity theory not only testifies to Doll's individual lifetime works but is also intimately related to the landscape of education to which he has made an important contribution. Of interest to curriculum scholars around the world, the book will hold special significance for graduate students and junior scholars who came of the age in the field Doll helped create: one crafted by postmodernism and, more recently, complexity theory.

1

INTRODUCTION

William F. Pinar

The concept of devising a developmental curriculum which is dynamic, emergent, transformative, and non-linear has … been my challenge during almost all my teaching career.¹

(William. E. Doll, Jr.)

Addressing the challenge described above constitutes the 40-year ongoing project that is the fascinating imaginative realm of William E. Doll, Jr. In the epigraph are several of the key concepts that structure that important project: developmentalism, curriculum, dynamism, emergence, and transformation. “Non-linear” communicates Doll's rejection of earlier and specifically Tylerian sequenced curriculum design. Note that it has been his experience of teaching that has provided the provocation for Bill Doll's ingenuous scholarship.²

Doll begins in pragmatism, that late 19th and early 20th century quintessentially American philosophy associating psychological development with social democracy, political reform with scientific thinking, synthesized in the work and personified in the character of John Dewey. Doll did his PhD dissertation research on Dewey's concept of change, and we gain a glimpse of that sophisticated scholarship in Chapter 6. John Dewey represents the genesis of Bill Doll's intellectual journey, a journey documented in this indispensable collection containing essays from each period.

Dewey is a vast sea, and Doll harvested much and regularly, including most recently and poignantly in the Da Xia Lecture presented in Shanghai in November 2010. Especially, Doll adopted Dewey's faith in science and its methodology of experimentation. Doll characterizes Dewey's method as one of “reflection,” a rigorous way of “experimenting with directing personal experience” “Never,” Bill adds (rebuking the behaviorism of the 1960s and 1970s), was Dewey's method “the imposition of a set form.” Because educational experience requires “reflective thinking,” it is both open and directed. It is open in that no end is pre-set, the only end is growth, an end that has no end. It is directed in that the situation directs itself towards its own fulfillment. … This process of going beyond is transformative.

For Dewey, Doll emphasizes, this reflective method is “one of transformation not transmission.” “In Piaget's terms,” Doll adds later, such transformation is marked by an “elusive process of jumping from one stage or level to the next.” As that observation indicates, John Dewey led Bill Doll to Jean Piaget. Doll was not leaving one for the other. Indeed, he integrates aspects of each thinker into his post-modern view of curriculum (Doll, 1993).

Central to what Doll found intriguing in Piaget's “genetic epistemology” was Piaget's discovery that “deep seated, genomic, lasting behavior”—especially “a change of schemas or ways of operation”—did not occur through imposition as (Bill pointed out) the Lamarckians/Skinnerians believed, thereby linking the shorttermism of the then contemporary behaviorism with an earlier and discredited genetics. Nor was such change “random,” as “the Darwinists/neo-Darwinists asserted,” criticizing in that phrase the pre-pragmatist apologists for the wealthy and powerful. Rather, such profound change occurred “via an interaction of environment and subject (animal/person),” accented by dynamic processes of “equilibrium— disequilibrium-reequilibration.” This sequence is Piaget's of course, and what it underscores is that neither transmission nor operant conditioning accounts for significant learning, as each ignores the interactive and dynamic character of the educational process. Reflecting retrospectively (and acknowledging another important intellectual influence), Bill names both his future interest and past preoccupations when he notes that, “This interactionist approach was applauded by Ilya Prigogine, an early contributor and to chaos and complexity theories, and is much appreciated by Dewey scholars who emphasize inter- (or trans-) action as the way children learn” (Chapter 10, “Piagetian thought”). Elsewhere Doll again links his beginning—pragmatism—to where he was heading, characterizing Dewey himself as “a presager” of post-modernism, as Dewey “relied on concepts of interaction and development.”

Having assimilated Piaget—incorporating that work into his “own, patterned ways of operation”—Doll moved toward post-modernism, a term he always hyphenated in order to emphasize its indissoluble link to modernism.³ Post-modernism was a set of ideas that only made sense in relation to modernity, and its prefix—the infamous “post”—made clear that what is to follow is not yet fully formed, that we are only in the first stages of life after modernity. Modernity—that privileging of reason, and specifically science, over religion, coupled with the advent of capitalism (and its adversaries socialism and communism)—in Doll's lexicon specifies (in its educational usages) confidence in “linear, cause-and-effect ordering and a disregard of potentialities.” For the sake of control and efficiency, as Bill's historical analysis⁴—in which he links Frederick Taylor with Ralph Tyler—makes clear, schools in America underemphasized creative potential. For a brief moment, just before the onslaught of 40 years of school “reform,” the nation noticed (see Silberman, 1970).

While school reform was undermining the intellectual quality of US school curriculum, the academic field of curriculum studies was enjoying an intellectual renaissance. Animating this renaissance was the multidisciplinary phenomenon known as post-modernism, especially prominent by the 1980s. “In that decade,” Doll recalls, “we came to realize that the universe in which we live is expanding at an accelerating rate.” Despite the discoveries of Edwin Hubble in the 1920s, Doll notes, in education an earlier metaphysics “still formed the foundation for our epistemology, including the way we taught.” Schools still sequenced curricula in “preset units,” assuming a “stable IQ,” and educators were enjoined to teach from a “centralized focus.” Indeed, educators were pressured by curriculum reform to do so, starting in 1968 with Richard Nixon's “Back to the Basics” campaign.⁵

Why did post-modernism appeal to this sophisticated scholar of Dewey and Piaget? Post-modernism, Bill tells us, provided “a frame for bringing forth my ideas on curriculum, which up to this time had been fermenting, but not coalescing” (Chapter 2). Certainly these ideas did coalesce by 1993 in the publication of his masterful A post-modern perspective of curriculum. In that synthetical view—it is also “the long view,” as he threads the needle from Dewey through Piaget, Prigogine, Bruner, and Whitehead—Bill characterized curriculum as rich, relational, recursive, and rigorous. With these soon to be famous 4R's, Doll “felt I had an alterative frame (not a model) to Tyler's Rationale.” In Understanding curriculum (Pinar et al., 1995), we acknowledged this achievement (p. 503). “In recent years,” Bill tells us, “I have seen the Rationale not so much as a model to be challenged but rather as an expression of a particular time, a modernist time, one now past.”

Post-modernism may have marked this movement from modernity and its now antiquated stability of structures,⁶ but it was complexity theory that completed the journey. It is these “new sciences” of chaos and complexity that, Doll tells us, have provided “a grounding for my beliefs.” Why? “In these new sciences,” Doll discerns “a sense of development that is both non-linear and self-organizing.” This sense of development positions complexity theory as an “alternative” to constructivism (Chapter 13), “one focusing neither exclusively nor heavily on the actions of the learner but rather on the interplay of factors or forces within a dynamic, learning situation.” In this concept of interplay the echo of Dewey is strong, as is Piaget's acknowledgement of the turbulence of assimilation.

Characterizing Doll's intellectual trajectory as moving from pragmatism and developmentalism through post-modernism to complexity theory is, I realize, too linear. Still, Bill himself invokes the image of “path”—note that he construes this path as “stumbled upon,” as such acknowledgement of “arbitrariness” is not incidental to his thinking—to denote that his has been a journey from one place to another. It was during his M.A. study at Boston University, for example, Doll realized that he had come of age associating authoritarianism with spirituality. From this New England legacy he traveled a far distance, shedding an inherited sense of hierarchy in order to experience “spirit as the breath of life, that gives force, passion, and commitment to an event.” What links these four is relationality. “We are,” Bill reminds, “part of a larger ecological and cosmological frame.”

Students of Doll's oeuvre know already this key concept of relationality. It is one of the famous four R's—recall that the others are rich, recursive, rigor—that were soon supplemented by the 5 C's of curriculum: currere, complexity, cosmology, conversation, and community. These partly playful lists enable “our looking at curriculum from multiple perspectives,” Bill notes, here emphasizing “the interplay of the individual with the communal.” Such “interplay,” he reminds, “has guided much of my own teaching where the atmosphere I encourage is one not only of honoring our own thoughts and those of others, but also of bringing these ideas into experiential interactions of varied types” (Chapter 3). In this domain of ongoing pedagogical experimentalism we encounter the “fascinating imaginative realm” of William E. Doll, Jr.

Interaction—what for both Bill and for me becomes specified in the concept of conversation—is a key category indeed. Through dialogical encounter learning occurs, provided—in complexity theory terms—that such encounter is sufficiently complex to become dynamic, stimulating transformation. In Thinking complexly written in collaboration with Donna Trueit (Chapter 20), they explain, “Complexity as used in the complexity sciences deals with interactive, dynamic systems that under specific and limited conditions are able to transform themselves.” Note that there is no automaticity here; the teacher's reasoned and imaginative intervention is the sine qua non of classroom learning. Given how crucial the role teachers play is, what do Trueit and Doll advise? “Shifting one's attitude from ‘reducing’ complexity to ‘embracing’ what is always already present in relations and interactions,” they suggest, may lead to thinking complexly. Such thinking characterizes learning.

Describing “thinking complexly,” as a discursive practice that for themselves is “still developing … slowly being articulated … [thinking complexly] encourages us to begin to move beyond the telescopic, objective seeing of modernism. We begin to see differently,” as we focus on “relations and interactions, being recursive, playing with and exploring differences, attending to intuition, abiding with mystery and ambiguity, happily relinquishing certainty.” Thinking complexly enables understanding.

Understanding—also a key category for me—is, Doll explains, not “passed on” via “teaching-as-telling, but rather emerges from, is created through, interactions.” Significantly, not only speech is emphasized in such an educational encounter; so is listening. “To honor interaction,” Doll writes, requires “listening to both students and situations.” Through such listening the teacher is able to “utilize difference,” by which he means “seeing it as a positive for learning,” as there is, Bill emphasizes, “no sense of self without an understanding of other.” What is key, Doll concludes, is “to recognize that relationships” are profoundly (but not only) human. Indeed, “the mysterium tremendum” may well be, Doll suggests at one point, “the natural and innate tendency of nature to create in ever increasing complexity” (Chapter 4). Bill Doll embraces complexity, which signifies a

dynamical self-organizing process within which we are embedded, embodied, emboldened. … We take this fluidity/flow to characterize, as well, a way of thinking/speaking that no longer relies on foundations and facts as the static building blocks of past intellectual thought; rather, drawing on principles derived from complexity science, we are encouraged to think of emergence as the ongoing flow of our awareness and appreciation of being-in-relation to others, the environment, the cosmos. We see these relations as systemic, networked, and patterned.

(Trueit and Doll, Chapter 20)

In this passage are not only the 4 R's and 5 C's, there are the 3 P's—Play, Precision, Patterns (or Principles)—accenting “the actual integration of determinism with randomness, randomness with determinism.” In such “creative tensionality” (that phrase is not Bill's but Ted Aoki's (2005a [1986/1991], pp. 161–164), whose work he regularly cites and whose achievement he has honored⁷) pragmatism, post-modernism, and complexity theory are interactively embedded and interrelated, thereby emerging as transformed and unpredicted events. The past, however, does not disappear into the dynamism of the present.

Historical Consciousness

Ramus has left us a legacy to overcome, Dewey a challenge to meet.

(William E. Doll, Jr.)

Doll emphasizes conversation as “essential” in devising a curriculum oriented “not toward testing but toward developing creative thought.” To explain this insight, Doll works historically, one indispensable way of discerning “patterns” and “emergences.” Demonstrating his powerful historical sense—historicity is one of the defining features of Doll's oeuvre—Bill returns 100 years to the genesis of pragmatism in the United States. He recalls Frederick Winslow Taylor's scheme for industrial efficiency that rationalized the subjugation of the individual to the factory system in the specification of tasks. Transferring his schemes for efficiency to education, Taylor's practice of so-called “scientific management” meant placing much greater emphasis upon planning, the “assembling of detail [that] takes place prior to the activity.” Not only does the planning precede educational activity, but teaching and learning (Doll notes) also become “limited to the plan.” Taylor's imprinting position in still continuing efforts to reorganize education as more efficient—in contrast to reconstructing the curriculum in intellectual terms for the sake of students' growth as individuals and citizens— does not rem...