Subject: SD and critical pedagogy

Posted by Eric Stiens on 10/17/2008
In Reply To:SD and critical pedagogy Posted by John Sterman on 10/12/2008

Message:

I appreciate Professor Sterman's thoughts, though I think this conversation has drifted a bit.

My original intention was to spark a discussion about how SD modeling could be used as a tool for educators already working within a critical framework, this is still a discussion I would like to see continue. I think SD lends itself quite well to a non-hierarchical educator-student relationship where the educator becomes a facilitator of modeling rather than an all-knowing seer. I also think that in terms of analyzing social problems, environmental issues, social justice issues etc SD offers both a language and a method for talking about these things in both a more radical way than they are often presented, and in providing some rigor to analyzing leverage points within a social system, rather than simply talking about generic "systemic/structural change"

The second issue seems to be one around whether knowledge produced through SD models is positivist, post-positivist, or constructionist - which I don't think we will resolve here, has been talked about quite a bit within the SD journal (along with the related question of whether SD is an academic discipline or a methodology) - though I do find it interesting that for some SD implies an increased freedom in terms of being able to understand and possibly change structures and systems we take for granted, while others find that any systemic approach to the world implies the opposite in terms of not only the possibility of rational choices being made within irrational constraints or having outcomes far separated in space and time from the original action, but also in postmodern notions of social/political structures giving rise to the actual "selves" doing the decision-making -- Roberto Unger has written eloquently about this in his social theory

The third issue is a critique of the current state of SD knowledge -- While I will defer to Professor Sterman on the broadness of models being produced, I would like to offer a few thoughts. The fact that many (all) leading SD educators have pushed for broader model boundaries, many specifically critiquing economic models that consider the environment to be an infinite source/sink, that doesn't necessarily mean it is happening on the level it needs to - either in the models being produced or those models being disseminated/understood by the public and by policy makers.

Also, while it is true that one of the strengths of SD is that insights gained into how structure influences behavior often transfer across models/disciplines - that fact alone doesn't excuse models that have strongly limitied boundaries. Lastly, there can be no question that if SD models were being produced by academics in a wider variety of disciplines, rather than concentrated in management schools, as well as SD models being used in community organizing and in non-academic settings rather than primarily consulting with firms about business problems, that we would have many more useful models at our disposal with many different priorities.

Especially for those of us relatively new to SD and coming to SD from outside of one of the traditional routes into the discipline/methodology the high concentration of models being produced within management/business schools as opposed to public policy programs, social work programs, education programs, sociology and political science programs, etc is fairly glaring.

Best,
Eric