Hi Chris,
I hope that the silence that has greeted your well informed input
into this discussion is a highly appreciative one. But I do know that
it often happens on this list that people write a message for the
group but (mistakenly) send it only to the writer of the message.
This sometimes explains why messages get no replies: they are
(possibly) seen by just one other person. (If in doubt, hit 'reply to all'.)
I had no idea that chaos and complexity theory has been around for so
long (since the early 1990s) in psychology, healthcare and education.
You certainly make a good case for these ideas to be applied in OAE
("Groups and groupwork, in an adventurous outdoor environment, must
fall under the category of a complex system" ... . "The chaos theory
proponents suggest that in complex systems, the capacity for linear
models to predict certainty is limited,").
You quote Haigh's warnings about the improper application of
complexity theory in a metaphorical way as pseudoscience. The
improper application of linear process models is surely no better?
Maybe it is a lack of confidence that has led to the widespread
adoption of linear process models in OAE ('keep it simple and we
can't go far wrong') - even though our educational medium is a fluid
and complex mix of play, adventure, risk and uncertainty with nature,
weather, group dynamics and individual responses adding to the
uncertainty. We seem to be attracted both by the enriching complexity
of OAE and by the crude simplicity of linear process models to explain it.
So thank you Chris for showing us (me, anyway) one way out of this mismatch.
Roger
Roger Greenaway
Reviewing Skills Training
<http://reviewing.co.uk>
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