Making educational development and change sustainable: Insights from complexity theory

Education and development: Thirty years of continuity and change

“…Taken with the mix of development insiders and outsiders amongst authors and the annual flow of papers from 20 or more countries, this all serves to make IJED's account of the educationdevelopment relationship appropriately complex and fragmentary. Of course this reflects well the current temper of much of international and comparative education work (cf., Mason, 2009;Nordtveit, 2010), and is in tune with longstanding concerns in development studies regarding complex realities and non-linear progress (Long and Long, 1992;Apffel-Marglin and Marglin, 1996).…”

A Strategy to Incorporate Social Factors into Engineering Education

“…These elements or agents may include atoms, molecules, human agents, institutions, corporations, etc. (Mason 2009). Complexity theory also suggests that it is the multiple interactions among the elements that are responsible for the phenomena, patterns, properties, and behaviors that characterize a particular field.…”

“…As complexity theory also emphasizes the importance of searching for the interactions and sources of change among elements or agents that constitute a particular system (Mason 2009), we describe how modularization, a technique that has been applied to manage complexity, can be used as a framework for such searching process. Modularization consists of a process that identifies parameters, their role in the completion of a task and the degree of interdependences (Baldwin and Clark 2000).…”

Dilemmas in Development Raised by a Teacher Training Project in Cambodia

“…He argues, drawing on complexity theory that more attention needs to be paid to the environment necessary to sustain projects. One difficulty with the contribution that complexity theory can make to the debate, at least at present is that, as Mason (2009) suggests, "it makes no claim to predict what is essential and what can be marginalized". He quotes Nordtveit who argues, using the example of literacy programmes, that there are too many factors, mostly associated with poverty, to identify success.…”