Can a ‘new learning’ school be understood as a self-organizing learning system? If so why and which are applicable enabling constraints?

Recent educational innovations in the Netherland arose from a national economical-political agenda incited by discussions on lifelong learning in the European Union and OECD; visions on education published by the Unesco has contributed to this development as well. The innovation projects were often accompanied by sharp pro and con discussions on for instance effectiveness or appropriateness and several projects don’t get enough time to mature and were frustrated. As to this, new economical and political challenges in times of crisis have put the focus on educational innovation under pressure.

I carried out an ethnographical study in a Dutch secondary school that opened its doors in 2005. It emerged in a spirit of times in which the Dutch political focus on innovation and deregulation led to many initiatives from the field of education, many of them labeled as ‘new learning’ (Simons, van der Lubbe & Duffy 2000). This political focus emerged from the European initiative formulated in the 2000 Lisboa Conference. My fieldwork in the school took place in 2011, one year after the project encountered massive difficulties leading to interventions in the innovation project. These interventions seemed quite logical from a traditional managerial standpoint, but they were rather counterproductive to the vitality of the project.  

My first point of entry for this research was a quite recent ‘turn’ towards complexity thought in social studies and its application in educational research (Cilliers, 1998; Morin, 2008; Urry, 2005). The acceptance of a complexity paradigm includes compliance of a world that encompasses disorder, chaos, and change as fundamental constitutive elements of most phenomena in the natural and social world enabling order to arise. It lets us see and understand how systems are in constant interaction with their (constraining) environment, shaping themselves while moving in-between order and disorder.

Complexity attracts the interest of educational researchers, because it allows another perspective on education – organization, learning, curriculum - related to its specific dynamics (Davis & Sumara, 2006; Mason, 2008; Osbert & Biesta, 2010). Understanding a school as a system that learns and explores “spaces of possibility” (Davis, Sumara & Kapler, 2008) would focus on its self-organization, nonlinearity, disequilibrium and interconnectedness. This system understands disorder, uncertainty and unpredictability as inherently related to change and would look for ways to create “stabilized dynamics” (Morin 2008); this approach might be essential to a culture of innovation and transition. But, a mechanistic-based approach still dominating organization practices as well as the field of economics and politics still influences education (Goldspink, 2007; Osbert & Biesta, 2010).  The latter challenges effect and relevance of a mechanistic managerial and market approach, which he identifies as common approach in OEDC and other countries involved in educational improvement. He argues that a complexity perspective “provides a theory base for a future development of policy, practice and research better suited to understand educational reform issues” (46).

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