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Complexity Science and Education: Reconceptualizing the Teacher’s Role in Learning

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Abstract

This writing is structured around the question, "What is teaching?" Drawing on complexity science, we first seek to demonstrate the tremendously conflicted character of contemporary discussions of teaching. Then we offer two examples of teaching that we use to illustrate the assertion that what teaching is can never be reduced to or understood in terms of what the teacher does or intends. Rather, teaching must be understood in terms of its complex contributions to new, as-yet-unimaginable collective possibilities.

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Correspondence to Brent Davis.

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Davis, B., Sumara, D. Complexity Science and Education: Reconceptualizing the Teacher’s Role in Learning. Interchange 38, 53–67 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-007-9012-5

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