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Communicating with educators
Posted by Ruth Fruland on 5/17/2005
In Reply To:Communicating with educators Posted by ROD ROCK on 5/17/2005
My dissertation study introduced 12 student teachers to systems thinking as a way to think about and organize subject matter based on a contemporary controversy, with system dynamics as a complementary modeling methodology.
The purpose, beyond introducing the preservice teachers to ST/SD, was to determine how useful these thinking and modeling tools would be perceived for teaching subject matter and interdisciplinary problem-based topics, and for supporting collaboration with other subject matter area teachers.
There were a number of interesting student teacher responses: some were positive if ST/SD was perceived to supported holistic teaching (Language Arts, Social Studies), some were negative if SD seemed too mechanistic to them (LA), some were doubtful of ST/SD's usefulness for the practical reason that they did not believe that the K-12 school system would provide inservice teachers with the time to develop interdisciplinary collaborations to teach differently.
The teacher educators and researchers, themselves, represented the problem you are trying to address because they were either:
1) not familiar with the ST/SD concepts themselves,
2) knew one tradition (e.g., Bertalanffy's general systems theory) but not others (Forrester's SD, Checkland's soft systems, Churchman's inquiring systems, Ackoff's management systems, Senge's fifth discipline, Banathy's design systems, etc.)
3) unaware that systems thinking and dynamic modeling is being used across the disciplines in academia (e.g., in economics, biology, history, earth systems science, etc.),
4) aware of systems thinking/modeling but only in terms of narrowly focused scientific or engineering applications.
Articles that address one or more of the above issues could raise awareness and bring clarity to the disparate traditions.
There are a number of entry points that would leverage attention, such as connecting ST/SD to research about
educational technology (instructional design, games and sims) models and modeling (different types, purposes, agent-based, SD, etc.)
science education (always)
teacher education
collaboration among teachers and student teachers transfer (research demonstrating this would have a huge impact)
preparation for future learning
peer interactions, social construction of knowledge
computer-supported collaborative learning among students reflective teaching practices
improved learning outcomes where ST/SD have been taught continuously longitudinal studies
developmental studies
curriculum studies
(Perhaps a systems framework could be used to organize the laundry list!)
I enjoy collaborative work, and would be game for both research and writing journal publications that would delineate the uses of ST/SD. I'll be sending a copy of my dissertation to Lee in the next week.
Dr. Ruth
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