“Much of what we can discover has not been there from the beginning but is yet to happen” (Stacey, 1996, p. 70).
Current education paradigms do little to embrace the highly complex, relational nature the totality of the interaction between leadership, organization, historical context, sociocultural capital, and social justice demands. As education leaders act, internal and external agents and groups react, fads come and go, family and community demographics and values evolve, school capacity ebbs and flows, society moves towards a more global boundary awareness. As time simply passes, education cannot continue to rely on reductionistic explanations of cause and effect when so many variables are obviously interacting to produce a very complex whole that requires holistic treatment (Noddings, 2006). Embracing all of life from single cells to humans, from ant colonies to organizations to societies, complexity science seeks to understand how learning systems self-organize, sustain, and co-adapt to and within their environment (Bloch, 2005; Davis & Simmt, 2006; Levin, 2002).
Our first question is, “Does complexity science contribute to an understanding of how leadership in high-performing, high-poverty (HP2) schools emerges?” “An increasing number of educational researchers and practitioners are becoming aware of the potential of complexity in stimulating new insights and understandings about learning and teaching” (Davis, Phelps, & Wells, 2004, p. 3). Educational leaders, foremost concerned with the success of their school, can approach local, context-specific reform by examining effective schools research through a lens of complexity. “These steps will not change the world, but…can start changing a school” (Chu Clewell & Campbell, 2007, p. 175).
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