Grinding New Lenses

This proposal is about empowering students to view the world as a complex system. Viewing everyday situations from a systems-based perspective is an important aspect of literacy for students and teachers living in an increasingly digital society. The promise of understanding how systems work is that it creates a new and more effective lens for seeing, engaging, and changing the world (Jacobson & Wilensky, 2006). However, despite the ubiquity of systems in our everyday experience, systems thinking is rarely the subject of instruction in and out of schools, this is in part because it is difficult for students to transfer their knowledge about one system to thinking about systems in a variety of contexts (Goldstone, 2006). Most prior work on understanding complex systems has been in the context of the biological, physical, and social sciences (Jacobson & Wilensky, 2006; Wilensky & Reisman, 1999; Hmelo-Silver & Pfeffer, 2004). This body of research has found that computational models, such as NetLogo and StarLogo, are particularly amenable to the developing understanding of systems (Resnick, 1994; Tisue & Wilensky, 2004). While the promise of this work is to develop a general dispositional lens of seeing systems at work in the world, there is a great deal of difficulty in teaching kids to see systems beyond the tools in which they work to develop this understanding.
In a digital era, systems thinking takes on a new and increasing importance. This is because complex systems are important to our understanding and design of web-based communities, gaming environments, social networks, virtual economies, and most of our everyday online activities. Teaching and learning about the everyday systems (as opposed to simplistic models of unidirectional cause and effect) we encounter as well as developing a general disposition to support a systems view of the world is important to citizenry and scholarship in the 21st Century. Dispositions are about how students approach and interpret new situations in such a way that recognizing elements of systems enable them to act on these situations effectively. As Thomas and Brown (2007) note, dispositions involve “attitudes or comportment toward the world, generated through a set of practices which can be seen to be interconnected in a general way” (p.156).

In order to better understand how to support students to develop a lens towards seeing and interpreting the world in terms of the systems that organize it, this proposal is to create a modular curriculum framework for and examine how to foster and assess dispositions towards systems thinking. The goal of these designs is to help students understand how systems work, and look across contexts in order to recognize systems in multiple instantiations. We believe that systems thinking is a crucial form of digital literacy, and an important understanding for educators and students to develop as a means of effectively engaging our increasingly complex world. A core focus of this grant is to understand how to sequence particular learning activities such that a disposition is fostered and that students, when confronted with a new situation in any disciplinary context, will attempt to interpret that situation in terms of the system that is organizing it. In this way, we hope to better understand how learning trajectories can be designed that prepare and motivate students for deeper learning in digital media through project-based curriculum and future engagement across traditional curriculum contexts.

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