Refurbishing learning via complexity theory: Introduction

Abstract

This Special Issue addresses a range of educational issues linked to main themes from our 2019 book The Emergence of Complexity: Rethinking Education as a Social Science. This book elaborated two major theses that raise fundamental questions for philosophy of education. First, that learning by groups is typically a distinctive kind of learning that is not reducible to learning by individuals. Second, that a degree of holism, as against a focus on individuals, is essential for achieving a convincing understanding of this distinctive type of group learning. These two theses are of direct interest to philosophy of education since they challenges the resources of received theories of learning. Yet this kind of group learning characterises the vast bulk of human learning situations that occur outside of formal education systems. In this Special Issue introductory article we, firstly, introduce some basic principles of complexity theory, and demonstrate that, together with the concept of a ‘co-present group’ (between 2 and about 12 individuals), these ideas offer develop novel understandings of the distinctive learning that occurs within such groups. Secondly, we outline and illustrate with further examples the main features of co-present groups. Thirdly, we consolidate our conceptual work by showing five ways in which our account of group learning serves to refurbish the concept of ‘learning’.

Keywords:

• Learning
• complexity
• emergence
• holism
• co-present groups
• affect

Introduction: An overdue Copernican revolution?

In late 2019 Springer published our book The Emergence of Complexity: Rethinking Education as a Social Science. This book, and a subsequent publication (Hager & Beckett 2020) have provided a detailed case for two major theses that raise fundamental questions for philosophy of education. The first major thesis is that learning by groups or teams is typically a distinctive kind of learning that is not reducible to learning by individuals. The second thesis is that a degree of holism, as against a focus on individuals, is essential for achieving a convincing understanding of this distinctive type of group or team learning. This is so because developing a satisfactory account of such learning eludes the resources of received theories of learning. Since this kind of group or team learning is characteristic of the vast bulk of human learning situations that take place outside of formal education systems, we are claiming that philosophy of education has thus far failed to deal adequately with what should be one of its absolutely central topics – human learning. In effect, our book is suggesting that philosophy of education’s Copernican revolution is long overdue.

How has the discipline of philosophy of education remained blind to this deficiency? Since its inception, formal schooling has been the dominant focus of philosophy of education. This has resulted in practices within formal education systems serving to ‘overwhelmingly convey the powerful message that learning is essentially an individual phenomenon. Teaching, assessment and certification practices almost invariably centre on learners as individuals’ (Hager & Beckett 2020: 2). Thus, compulsory formal education (that is, schooling up to mid-adolescence) ‘promotes the near-universal ‘common sense’ but unquestioned assumption that learning resides in individuals’ (Hager & Beckett 2020: 2). This assumption carries over into vocational and university education. Thus it is understandable that up to now the philosophy of education discipline, along with related disciplines such as psychology, has typically been marked by largely unquestioned assumptions that have characterised formal schooling practices. Foremost is the taken-for-granted assumption that learning by an individual is the paradigm case of learning. Equally pervasive has been the assumption that human performances are best understood by atomising them into their component parts. The influence of this latter assumption on accounts of learning has resulted in major attention being directed to the cognitive aspects of human learning, to the relative exclusion of other important factors, such as affect, know-how and the various influences of context.

Though we identify ourselves as philosophers of education, our conviction about the shortcomings of our discipline’s broad assumptions about learning have their origin in work carried out in areas largely ignored by mainstream philosophy of education. Our commitment to the two major theses, stated above, that we maintain raise fundamental questions for philosophy of education, grew out of multidisciplinary work carried out in recent decades on a set of related topics, such as workplace learning, organisational learning, professional practice, competence, capability, and expertise. Whilst we in no way doubt that learning by individuals is real and important, we believe that this substantial body of multidisciplinary work clearly demonstrates that groups frequently provide experiences that ‘stimulate distinctive and valuable learning’ that is over and above the learning by the individual group members (Hager & Beckett 2020: 2). This distinction between individual learning and learning by groups or teams is important because it suggests that the domain of learning is more heterogeneous than has been generally appreciated. Moreover, the distinctive kind of learning that has been largely overlooked is ubiquitous in typical everyday processes in which humans develop into adults, proficient workers and community-minded citizens. The overlooking of this communally vital kind of learning has been accompanied by a widely taken-for-granted assumption: that ‘whenever a group of individuals learns’, such learning is ‘nothing more than the sum of learning acquired by the particular individual members of the group’. This false assumption ‘directly hinders understanding of how group participation is a powerful means of generating, sharing and applying knowledge and understanding for the benefit of social groups and communities, indeed, for the ‘common good’’ (Hager & Beckett 2020: 2).

Since the publication of our book, in 2019, COVID-19 has dramatically focused attention on human experiences of public and private health, and national and household economies. The ‘common good’ continues into the 2020s as a daily pre-occupation; although it has become a cliché, we are ‘all in this together’. As it turned out, that is the title of a commissioned background paper for UNESCO which we co-wrote in mid-2020, and it provides a helpful ‘bridge’ into this Special Issue (Hager & Beckett 2020), which is, entirely, ‘post-pandemic’ in its focus.

The bulk of this Special Issue introductory article falls into three main sections. In outlining these, we believe that the Copernican refurbishing of ‘learning’ that philosophy of education requires is advanced if we focus on some everyday examples of how groups and teams learn. Here are four (which we elaborated upon throughout our 2019 book): the mother-baby dyad, the jury (typically of twelve), sub-sections of large comprehensive schools (within which sub-schools of up to twelve staff care for 100 students), and quartets in jazz or chamber music performances.

Each of these four groups exemplifies the ‘theses’ with which we began (that is, groups’ irreducible learnings; and groups’ distinctive holism). The following three sections set out and elaborate our arguments for the truth of these theses.

Firstly, we introduce some basic principles of complexity theory, and demonstrate that, together with the concept of a ‘co-present group’ (between 2 and about 12 individuals), this enables us to develop novel understandings of the communal becoming and learning that occurs within such groups.

Secondly, we will outline and illustrate with further examples the main features of co-present groups. This will provide a basis for our third section.

Thirdly, we draw together our conceptual work to show five ways in which it refurbishes both the concept of ‘learning’, and the actuality of learning in contexts common for everyone.

Complexity theory and co-present groups

From its origins in the natural sciences last century, complexity theory has lately been recognised as beneficial for the social sciences (cf. Hager & Beckett 2019: 155-167). Complexity theory describes the workings of complex systems. Many familiar intricate or complicated systems are actually simple rather than complex. This is because the states of such systems can be specified readily and their operations described in linear terms using Newton’s Laws. Examples of intricate or complicated systems that are, in fact, simple, are state-of-the-art submarines or modern aircraft such as a Boeing 747. What characterises complex systems is that they ‘elude understanding and description via linear mathematics and Newton’s Laws’ (Hager & Beckett 2019: 157). The crucial feature of complex systems, that underlies this vital difference from simple, or even complicated, systems, is that their ‘complexity arises from the relations between entities, rather than from the entities themselves’ (Hager & Beckett 2019: 158). Unlike simple or complicated systems, complex systems involve ‘multiple non-linear relations between the entities within the system’. It is interactions between these non-linear relations that can ‘give rise to novel structures or qualities’ (Hager & Beckett 2019: 158). Though constrained by the original relations of the system, these novel structures or qualities are not wholly predictable from them, nor are they reducible to them. This phenomenon, known as emergence, is a defining feature of complex systems.¹

Emergence and emergent properties have inspired major debate in the history of philosophy. Philosophers have often termed such properties ‘supervenient properties’. However, the notion of supervenience requires further elaboration since, in fact, there is more than one kind of emergence. In our 2019 book we discuss three distinct kinds of emergence. The first of these, nominal emergence, is relatively straightforward. It refers to instances where entities have a macro-level property that cannot be a property of the micro-constituents of the entities. For instance, liquidity is a property of water, but is not a property of an isolated water molecule. Rather, it is a property that emerges from the relations between water molecules. The second and third kinds of emergence are weak emergence and strong emergence. Our understanding of these is derived from the work of two eminent contemporary philosophers – the Australian David Chalmers (2006) and the American Mark Bedau (2002, 2010). Hager and Beckett (2019: 171-177) provides detailed discussion and elaboration of this topic. Here we will offer but a brief overview of these further kinds of emergence and their differences.

Strong emergence involves phenomena that are

…systematically determined by low-level facts without being deducible from those facts. In philosophical language, they are naturally, but not logically, supervenient on low-level facts. (Chalmers 2006:4).

Also, these strongly emergent high-level phenomena exert ‘downward causation’ on the low-level domain, whilst the impact of this high-level downward causation ‘on low-level processes is not deducible even in principle from initial conditions and low-level laws’ (Chalmers 2006: 6).

Instances of strong emergence are, at best, rare, with the emergence of consciousness being the only clear candidate. Yet it ‘is the notion of emergence that is most common in philosophical discussions of emergence’ (Chalmers 2006: 1). In general, philosophers do not welcome strong emergence, since it entails ‘brute facts’, i.e. facts that lie outside of the scope of current physical explanations. If strong emergence is a real phenomenon, it reveals ‘the physicalist picture of the world as fundamentally incomplete’ (Chalmers 2006: 3).

However, it is it is weak emergence, in conjunction with general complexity (explained later in this section) and the co-present group concept (as outlined above and elaborated in the next section) that together underpin our novel account of learning and related educational concepts. According to Bedau

….weak emergence refers to the aggregate global behaviour of certain systems. The system’s global behaviour derives just from the operation of micro-level processes, but the micro-level interactions are interwoven in such a complicated network that the global behaviour has no simple explanation. (Bedau 2002: 11-12)

Chalmers expresses it as follows:

…. a high-level phenomenon is weakly emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phenomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that phenomenon are unexpected given the principles governing the low-level domain.

(Chalmers 2006: 1)

Both philosophers agree that weak emergence is a very common phenomenon. It is also the kind of emergence that figures both in recent scientific discussions of emergence and in complex systems theory. So, our novel account of learning fits well with current science. It is also important to emphasise the sheer diversity of the kinds of emergents that complex systems make possible. Emergents include ‘properties, objects, behaviour, phenomena, laws, whole systems’ and more (Bedau 2002: 7).

Thus, complexity theory posits systematised relations as the basic ‘stuff’ of the world. This challenges the traditional assumption that has dominated much Western thought: that the world is built up from atomised phenomena such as individuals, grains of sand, and (in languages) nouns. Against this, complexity theory maintains that ontological priority should be given to relations as these are apparent in groups. In the natural sciences, stream flows, sand dune formation, bird murmurations and clumps of cells show that relations-in-systems are the fundamental phenomena from which atomised accounts are possible. In the social sciences, our everyday experiences from birth are typical of small groups, starting with the mother-baby dyad, and extending through to families, households, communities. For our purpose in this article, work groupings (of between 2-12 members, which we call co-present groups) are taken as the fundamental meaning-making phenomena of both our working lives and of our social interactions more generally. We mentioned four examples already, but we can widen this to include any teams of up to about twelve members, engaging in shared projects, such as the ‘group practices’ of health professionals in hospitals and out in communities, the writing of comedy or drama scripts for mass media entertainment, the site-based construction of buildings and parts of them. Small groups such as these are everywhere, yet their significance for learning has been under-recognised and under-theorised. Our major claim is that complexity theory brings these small groups to ontological and ethical prominence in the social sciences, especially in education. Complexity theory explains why learnings and outcomes of activities that are ‘owned’ by the group are typically not reducible to the aggregation of the learnings by the various individuals that together comprise the group. Complexity emphasises the significance of ‘emergence’, where the whole (the new knowledge, and the ownership of the entire process and outcome) is greater than the sum of its (hitherto atomised) parts.

Thus far in this section we have provided a brief introduction to complexity theory and indicated its potential for illuminating the learning that commonly occurs within group activities. However, some of these ideas require further elaboration.

Firstly, the term ‘complexity theory’ should not be taken as denoting a single unified theory. Rather, at least two kinds of complexity are recognised in the relevant literature: restricted complexity and general complexity. (This is why, in our previously published work, we have often preferred the term ‘complexity thinking’ over ‘complexity theory’, e.g. Hager & Beckett 2019). Restricted complexity characterises complex systems that involve ‘rule-based interactions amongst simple elements’ (Byrne & Callaghan 2014: 5). The emergent possible outcomes of the rule-based interactions in such systems can be very diverse and, often, novel. The natural science examples mentioned above (stream flows, sand dune formation, etc.) are all instances of rule-based interactions amongst simple elements from which genuine novelty can emerge. Restricted complexity has also proved to be useful in understanding processes within complex systems that include humans, e.g. traffic flows, voting behaviour, or the spread of pandemics. Though genuine novelty can emerge from such systems, these outcomes generally lie within a predictable range.

However, though useful, such applications of restricted complexity require the limiting assumption that the many humans involved in these complex systems are ‘interchangeable variables’, somewhat akin to inert material objects. By contrast, common human experiences and learnings arise from distinctive individuals who are fully endowed with agency – with plans, hopes, ideals and allegiances, which shape intentionality.

So, in the social sciences such as education, it is through the agency of the humans that comprise parts of these complex systems, together with the causal powers of the social interactions occurring within these systems, that enable novel, even unpredictable, outcomes that emerge from the processes—indeed, the activities—of these complex systems. So, ‘restricted complexity’ is too restrictive for much social science theorising; it does not acknowledge the ways that human intentionality shapes our world.

Understanding of such agentic complex systems requires the second kind of complexity theory, namely general complexity. In dealing with complex systems in which the agency of the unique individual humans and the causal powers of their social interactions are crucial, general complexity goes well beyond restricted complexity’s focus on rule-based interactions between the simple components of a complex system. To reiterate, groups of people working jointly on projects of all kinds are very common examples of complex systems that feature novel, even unpredictable, outcomes that require general complexity for their explication.²

The relevance of these matters for philosophy of education is that general complexity provides a powerful conceptual lens that illuminates our key claim: the domain of human learning is wider than its traditionally individualistic and cognitivist assumptions allow. As already emphasised, we maintain that in these complex systems that fall under general complexity, two importantly different kinds of learning typically occur. Undeniably, there is the valuable learning that individual group members may experience. But also, and significantly, the group as a whole typically learns. It is this latter distinctive kind of learning that has been largely unrecognised and, therefore, under-theorised that is the main focus of this Special Issue. We claim that ‘learning’ needs refurbishing, and that ‘general complexity’ offers just this opportunity.

Our pressing task now is to demonstrate how key concepts from within general complexity, in combination with the concept of a co-present group, lead us to a convincing account of this distinctive group learning. To achieve this, the next section of this introductory article discusses the main features of co-present groups.

Finally, in the third section of this article, we demonstrate the explanatory power of our proposed account of group learning by using it to illuminate novel, satisfactory outcomes that emerge in and through co-present groups.

Features of co-present groups

As previously noted, for us the term ‘co-present group’ denotes a group of persons (typically somewhere from 2 to 12 members) engaged in advancing a shared project or practice. On the traditional view of learning, it is assumed that individual persons are the appropriate units of analysis for understanding such situations. The output of such groups is regarded as being the mere aggregation of the various individual’s contributions to the group. Against this approach we maintain that the group’s outputs are primarily relational, i.e. the social interactions within the group processes give rise to outputs that are best thought of as distributed across the group. This means that apart from any learning that individual group members gain from their participation in the group’s activities, commonly there is also significant learning that is distributed across the group. This is why co-present groups can create learning and achieve outcomes that are beyond any individual acting alone. For reasons that will become clearer as our discussion proceeds, this also means that no single individual group member is able to fully comprehend everything, including all of the learning, which emerges from the group’s interactive processes.

As noted above, our 2019 book employed four distinctively different examples of co-present groups to illustrate progressively the development of our key arguments. The four assorted co-present groups were: the mother-baby dyad, sub-schools of staff within a comprehensive school, a jury, and a string or jazz quartet. Each of these four co-present groups centres on a shared process towards a common goal. They all display characteristic features of any co-present group, which we now elaborate . As we outline these characteristic features, we will also explain how the COVID-19 pandemic has served to amplify our understanding of them.

One characteristic feature that each of these assorted co-present groups has in common is that the output of each group is constituted by the interactive relationships between its members. This output is a singular, holistic, relational achievement, not an aggregate of individual members’ achievements. Whilst for analytical purposes we can, to some extent, differentiate aspects of the contributions of individual group members to the whole, this process on its own inevitably overlooks the distinctively relational character of the seamless whole that is the group’s output.

A second characteristic feature of each of these assorted co-present groups is that their processes and outputs are marked by the full gamut of human experiences involved in their functioning. Human attributes, or experiences, that are crucially involved in producing a co-present group’s output include the cognitive (thinking), the affective (feeling), the conative (willing) and the sociomaterial (embodied). All of these contribute to the complex unity of the output that emerges from a co-present group’s interactive processes, which are often also trans-active, in the Dewey-Bentley (1949/1989) sense. The key point about a trans-active relation is that

….both the relation, and the parties to it, are influenced by, or created by, their participation in it. The parties to the relation, and the relation itself, cannot be separated from one other without some loss of meaning. All elements are changed by their participation. Nor is the relation itself static, but rather it evolves through the process of engagement. (Hager & Beckett 2019: 170)

For a fuller discussion of the Dewey-Bentley account of kinds of relations see Hager and Beckett (2019: 168–171).

Again, for analytical purposes we can, to some extent, differentiate aspects of the influence of these various attributes, and, traditionally, educators often do this, giving primacy to the cognitive. But, again, in doing so this necessarily reduces the distinctively relational character of the seamless whole that is the group’s output. This seamless whole is more than just the sum of its cognitive, affective, conative, etc. experiences, or attributes. This is our holistic claim.

Our endorsement of holism requires further elaboration since complexity theory also maintains that some degree of reduction is unavoidable as human understanding grapples to comprehend the markedly complex world in which it finds itself. Reduction of complexity comes in many forms. For instance, we now know that human biology features complexity-reducing sensory and cognitive structures (for more detail see Hager & Beckett 2019: 155–156). We are pre-programmed to deal significantly with William James’ ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ (1890/1950: Chap 13). Many other instances of complexity reduction reflect human choices about what works most effectively within the constraints of particular circumstances. For example, a co-present group set up to examine a pressing problem and to recommend a feasible solution, will typically produce a written report on its findings together with recommendations for dealing with the problem. The report will be a carefully chosen selection of what transpired during the group’s activities, i.e. the report will be a reduction from the totality that emerged from of the group’s functioning processes. Likewise there will be further reduction of complexity in preparing an ‘executive summary’ of the report. As was suggested earlier, no individual member of a co-present group can fully comprehend the totality of what emerges from a group’s functioning processes. Little wonder then that a report prepared for a wider audience will be but a selection from what emerged from the group’s activities. (For a range of familiar examples of this kind of ‘pragmatic’ reduction, covering the diverse spectrum of human endeavours, including reduction within science itself, see Hager & Beckett 2019: 159-160).

In general, humans reduce complexity in order ‘to facilitate ease of thought or action’ (Hager & Beckett 2019: 160). Complexity reduction involves abstracting from the whole. One way of achieving this is to focus merely on the individual components that comprise the whole, whilst ignoring the relations between them. Very often, this strategy is erroneously reductive, as we have been arguing is the case for traditional accounts of learning. The guiding principle for complexity reduction should be that the degrees of holism and of reduction involved need to be in a mutual balance that best serves the given purpose. The holism component of this principle entails that relations that are particularly relevant to the given purpose should not be overlooked.

Because complexity theory maintains that some degree of reduction is unavoidable as humans seek to understand our inherently complex world, this suggests that all theorising is necessarily incomplete (see, e.g. Cilliers 2001, 2013). It follows that this incompleteness applies to complexity theory itself. Thus, rather than being a replacement for other theories, complexity theory offers but one perspective, one that is a very helpful adjunct to our theorisations of social phenomena.

A third characteristic feature of each of these four assorted co-present groups, arising from the two previous features, is that they are constitutively social. They are each ‘producing dynamic patterns of relations in co-dependence with one another. …… Each is, socially, work-in-progress’ (Hager & Beckett 2019: 133). Their group dynamism constitutes the very existence of the group. Our general complexity approach is thus both an epistemological claim and an ontological claim. The co-present group’s learning is social, and the very being of the group is social too.

Fourthly, because the co-present group is ‘constitutively social’, we stress the significance of affective and embodied experiences (as humans we ‘feel a sense of place’) We understand these expansively, and yet intensively.

Why ‘expansively’? Obviously, across 2020-2021, the pandemic has separated humans from each other, all around the world. This is no less true of co-present groups. Whereas in our 2019 book (pp. 146-7) we were keen to articulate the ‘stretched’ or distributed quality of work-based groups such as researchers who were virtually linked (in tele-conferences), now we see the entire re-framing of knowledge work (in expansive corporate contexts around the globe). Working From Home (WFH) has become a core aspect of the newly-normal ‘hybrid’ workplace, where participation in many co-present groups requires different norms of participation, deliberation (or practical judgements) and accountability. Hybridity has opened up new challenges for the affective and the embodied nature of groups’ learning: how do groups ‘feel’ and express the ‘tacit’ when the virtual meeting on Zoom only shows a head-and-shoulders image of an identity?

But there is an equally challenging context. Front-line workers are at the battlefront of the pandemic. By this we refer to public and private health workers (nurses, doctors, etc.) and retail, hospitality and transport workers (drivers, sales and restaurants staff). Working anywhere outside the home where the pandemic has brought compliance and health risks now comes with personal consequences. These front-liners are, for example, tasked with testing and vaccinating the public, or running a café. This is socially, and affectively, quite intense, at the best of times. Under pandemic conditions, it becomes risky work, and there is no ‘WFH’ version available. Any complexity-driven approach to better recognition of such learning must acknowledge its precarious nature.

The post-pandemic prospects of how a ‘sense of place’ (both in the office and on the front line) may emerge are highly relational. Virtual and yet highly tacit engagements with each other (if WFH) and with the public (if making a coffee) confront traditional assumptions of learning and of being. We claim, post-pandemically, that co-present groups can establish a sense of belonging, and a shared purpose (albeit mediated by virtual technology for some whom can WFH), by tighter attention to the affective experiences we now more fully value in our sociality as we collectively emerge from lockdowns (Beckett 2020).

Given the ambit of these claims, at this point the reader might well be wondering why we assert that co-present groups typically comprise somewhere from 2 to 12 members. Our rationale is that forming a group significantly larger than this

….increases the relationships exponentially and unrealistically complicates expectations of shared experiences from which shared understandings and new knowledge can readily emerge. The affective and the tacit would be two early casualties of a large group trying to act ‘co-presently’: these central features of human life are simply less authentically visible once a crowd (of over twelve) gathers—and energy has to be given by (or to) a crowd by way of formal management. (Hager & Beckett 2019: 136-137)

Experience supports this claim. In practice, larger groups engaged in a common purpose typically form into sub-groups (of 2 to about 12). Each sub-group is focused on particular tasks that serve to help achieving the common purpose. Ultimately, the contributions of each sub-group need to be coordinated seamlessly into the overall functioning of the larger group, in order to maximise achievement of the common purpose. Examples of specialist sub-groups coordinating seamlessly to produce a professional large group performance abound. These large group performances also exemplify the three common features of co-present groups outlined above.

Our 2019 book (pp. 208-214) provides detailed discussion of diverse instances of large group performances. Professional sports teams provide examples that are interesting in several respects. At several Olympic Games in the modern era the usually unbeatable, star-studded USA men’s basketball team has been defeated in the Gold Medal game by a team supposedly composed of mostly less talented individual players. These upset results were down to the less favoured team producing teamwork that was superior to that of their more favoured rivals. From the co-present group functioning of the underdogs emerged a novel performance that more than matched the less well-coordinated functioning of the team of outstanding individual players. This illustrates the grain of truth behind the traditional adage that ‘a champion team will defeat a team of individual champions’ A basketball team is a co-present group in our sense, since it is limited to twelve players with only five allowed on the court at any one time.

In cases of sports in which the number of team members exceeds our co-present group size, these ideas still remain broadly applicable. A common feature of larger sporting teams is that they include a variety of different specialist roles, such as ‘backs’, ‘halves’ and ‘forwards’. This means that key parts of their coaching and training routines involve the larger team splitting into specialist sub-groups, i.e. co-present groups. Equally important though will be other coaching and training sessions in which the whole team practises as a single unit. This arrangement can be thought of as a co-present group of co-present groups. From the smooth coordinated efforts of the various sub-groups hopefully a novel, winning performance will emerge.

Complexity thinking and the co-present group concept are also applicable to understanding professional sports that feature individual competitors, since typically their performances are emergent from their dedicated work with a co-present group of coaches, trainers, physiotherapists, motivators and so on.

Orchestras provide a further clear-cut example of an often very large group engaged in a common purpose, namely the harmonious performance of musical works. To achieve their common purpose, an orchestra is divided into co-present sub-groups, each of which needs to produce their own distinctive outputs that simultaneously blend seamlessly into the whole that is the musical performance. A typical symphony orchestra consists of various nested sub-groups. Firstly, there are the broad sub-groups: strings, wind instruments, brass, and percussion. These in turn divided into yet further sub-groupings, e.g. first violins, second violins, violas, cellos, double basses, and trumpets, trombones, tuba. Commonly, the instruments within these further sub-groupings play together as a unit, though some works call for yet more division within these further sub-groupings. Clearly then, an orchestra can be conceptualised as a co-present group of co-present groups. In addition, each musician in turn comprises a complex system of several sub-systems: physical, biological and psychological. Thus an orchestra is actually a complex system of complex systems of complex systems.

As was the case for sporting teams, an orchestra’s rehearsals for a performance will involve practise as several levels. Individually musicians will rehearse and practise their parts of the score. Then the various sub-groups will rehearse so as to achieve polished ensemble playing of their parts. Then the orchestra as a whole will rehearse parts of the score to produce the desired harmonious balance across and between the various sections of the orchestra. Other factors such as the size of the orchestra and the particular acoustics of the concert venue will influence details of how the actual performance evolves. Thus, the performance of a symphonic work emerges from complex interactions not just between the orchestral players and the conductor, but also with the environment in which the performance takes place.

Both the sporting teams and orchestra examples illustrate well our overall summary of the underpinning concepts that led us to adopt the co-present group concept.

Two further features need to be emphasised. Firstly, although all members of a co-present group may well make significant contributions to the group’s functioning and outcomes, co-present groups are generally not fully egalitarian. For instance, the members of a jury are equal in that each represents one vote. But inevitably, as a jury deliberates so as to reach its decision, some members will make more persuasive contributions to the proceedings than others. In musical performances, some musical instruments figure more prominently than others depending on the works being performed. Small co-present groups, such as mentor-mentee or mother-baby, inevitably involve some hierarchy based on the responsibility and experience of one member of the dyad.

Secondly, the overall role of affect in a co-present group’s outcomes varies with the type and purpose of the group. In a mother-baby co-present group the interactions are highly affective and tacit. The main desired outcome is to integrate the baby’s internal emotional and bodily experiences with external social interactive experiences in a coherent, developmental process. Likewise affect is very much to the fore in the many non-verbal and tacit aspects that underpin professional musical performances. Though a jury’s deliberative processes will likely include significant affective dimensions, this is overlaid by the need to reach a sober, just verdict. Likewise, a co-present group of staff responsible for a sub-school (e.g. science) in a comprehensive school may well have affective differences that influence their overall functioning as a group. But ideally this will not detract significantly from achieving their major purpose, which is to enhance and nurture quality student learning.

All these features of co-present groups underpin our basic claim that ‘co-present groups are to be found in the sharing of relationally holistic and social activities, particularly affective functioning, in distinctive places’ (Hager & Beckett 2019: 140).

Refurbishing learning through taking account of the distinctive learning that emerges from co-present groups’ under-recognised activities

Such learning is distributed across the group

This means that no individual group member is able to fully comprehend everything that emerges from the group’s interactive processes. We have emphasised ‘affective functioning’ as the core experiential activity of a co-present group. Without wishing (or needing) to impose a gratuitous harmony as a pre-condition of group dynamics, we do nonetheless claim that most small groups are unified not only by their very sociality (that is, they are constituted as a group with a set or agreed purpose), but more fundamentally by their ‘buy-in’ to an ethos. Our four examples each shape up around the normative: the love a mother has for her baby, and which is learned reciprocally; the educative ideals of a large school within which a sub-school offers a closer pastoral relationship; the pursuit of the truth, as a jury grapples with evidence and proof of innocence or guilt; and the focus of a quartet or orchestra on achieving musicianly performances that are aesthetically significant and rewarding for all involved (including the audience). How these norms are eventually understood varies across the individual members of the co-present groups. There is no single ‘learning’.

Such learning emerges from the group’s activities themselves

It is not ‘applied’ from outside. Whilst no-one disagrees that sound parenting, educative outcomes, judicial decision-making, and musicianly performances are each subject to public norms and accountabilities, the emergence of particular instances of such learnings is context-specific, not imposed from, say, a wider organizational or communitarian context.

This emergent learning cannot be specified in advance

This group learning is often genuinely novel, creative and innovative. It is also inclusive, contextualised, and participatory. The heart of the co-present group is, as we have emphasised, normative: it is ‘heart-felt’. Various skills, values, and expectations are inevitably, and desirably, brought to each of our four examples. No-one goes ‘in’ cold or ignorant; everyone in the group has contributions even if these cannot be readily articulated. What occurs within the dynamism of a co-present group is a wide-ranging non-linear, holistic engagement with the shared intention to ‘get it right’. Even a baby, impulsively, and a mother, intuitively, are united in the search for growth and gratifications. Yet neither knows how their life-affirming relationship will evolve. Similarly for our other examples, albeit less dramatically. Emergent learning is a product of a form of Aristotelian phronesis, or ‘practical reasoning’ which (unlike the traditional logic of deductive or inductive reasoning) assumes a normative outcome and then explores how to get there: this is ‘abductive’ logic, which has come into prominence lately (Paavola 2021, drawing upon Peirce et al.).

Such learning is typically beyond any individual’s learning

So groups can achieve learning that is beyond any individual acting alone. Based upon the foregoing points, we claim that such learning is genuinely owned and achieved by the co-present group, first and foremost, and that individuals’ own learning (skills, ideals, expectations) feed into this, and ‘cascades’ down from it, but that the activities of the co-present group have established novel knowledge. This is the fundamental epistemological claim of complexity theory for educators. The co-present group, we claim, is agentive with respect to knowledge.

Nor is such emergent learning restricted to just a particular group

This is so because interactions between groups, and also between individual members of particular groups participating in yet other, often overlapping, groups, are both very powerful mechanisms by which further creative and innovative learning can and does emerge. Following from our main claim, we also stress that co-present group memberships are multiple and diverse. Mothers and babies have other family relationships; sub-school teams have other institutional allegiances of ‘co-present’ size (say, sport or arts expertise across the wider school, and beyond); juries are temporary, and being one of the ‘twelve’ does not remove wider ‘co-presences’; quartets usually comprise musicians with very many other performance commitments. And this point goes much further: co-present groups can and indeed should ‘escalate’ their novel knowledge into wider organizational, communitarian or socio-cultural contexts. New or improved medical or legal practices can filter up to professional bodies charged with legitimizing knowledge and professionals’ formation. Ripples up and away from the particular co-present group are inevitable and can contribute to knowledge production subject to the usual canons of critique and review. We do not regard co-present groups as secretive or precious in their creation of novel knowledge. Quite the contrary: the best co-present groups will interact with other persons and groups.

Conclusion

The Copernican revolution for how learning is conceptualised by philosophers of education, which we urged at the outset, should acknowledge that humans are fundamentally social creatures, for whom small groups provide common and powerful sense-making right from birth.

Our notion of the ‘co-present group’, established in this article, possesses the main features of humans’ learning experiences – from each other, in relations that bend and flow in and around our daily lives. Complexity theory puts these relations first. Individuals’ identities ‘hang off’ these co-present engagements, as do individuals’ learning. Yet traditionally philosophers of education (as part of the overall education sector, encompassing early childhood provision, most schools, vocational colleges, and universities) assume that learning accrues first and foremost to individuals. Traditionally, in the West, ontological and epistemological priority is given to the presumption of an ideal of ‘self-directed learning’, and within that, privileging cognition as the human attribute most worthily demonstrated. The Cartesian ‘cogito’ embodied in the individual has been the educative assumption in the West for over 350 years. This has colonized learning throughout that time.

Yet, even in the seventeenth century, Descartes’ dualism of ‘mind and body’ was cogently attacked—most notably by Spinoza (1949), in his 1675 rebuttal of dualism. Instead of a quest to establish ‘states’ of the mind and of the body (which Spinoza argued was the wrong ontology to start with), it is more feasible to enquire into what humans actually want and do. Our ‘actualising’ our wants, needs and desires (broadly, the ‘affect’, or will-power) displays our reason-able capacity. Spinoza regards our affective and cognitive capacities as a single holistic phenomenon: ‘wilful rationality’, explaining that:

…it is plain, therefore, that we neither strive for, wish, seek, nor desire anything because we think it to be good, but, on the contrary, we adjudge a thing to be good because we strive for, wish, seek or desire it. (Spinoza 1675/1948: 136-137, cited in Hager & Beckett 2019: 234).

Our co-present groups are agentive: they have purposes, goals, desires, feelings (‘wilfulness’) which they intend to actualize. Their rationality is expressed in their judgement-making activities. Their group agency is itself a novel and under-recognised concept, given that, in the West, traditionally, sole individuals are primarily regarded as agentive; hence the persistent educative mantra, ‘You can become whatever you want to become’.

Co-present groups are therefore constituted in thoroughly normative activities. As we have argued, their ‘social glue’ consists in heartful ‘affective functioning’ (or as we can now state, following Spinoza, ‘wilful rationality). Our 2019 book provides this definition of group agency:

A group is agentive to the extent that it maintains the holistic nature of experience (the socio-material, affective and cognitive all apparent), in the co-construction of practical judgements, which emerge within wilful (that is, desirably normative) activities’ (2019: 230).

Practical judgements emerge as co-present groups grapple with making sense of human experience, on a daily, common basis as our four examples have shown. This sense-making always occurs with an ‘end-in-view’ (or a telos, to use the ancient Greek term), but sense-making activities such as judgements, or deliberations can themselves modify the end-in-view. There is no rigid (that is, linear) application of ‘means’ determined by ‘ends’. Consistent with the Dewey-Bentley trans-actional analysis we maintain relations between ends and means are reflexive. Deliberations over means may well modify those ends, once better means are immediately identified, as in this judgement: ‘Now that we see this is effective, we can get to a slightly different outcome’. Conversely, it is just as likely that an end-in-view remains intact once ‘Let’s try this…’ as a means, proves effective. Many of these sense-making decisional activities go beyond what is already known through experiences, which is why relationality and emergence of new learning go together. In this Deweyan reflexivity of ends and means, what to try next, whether it is better to see something from a different perspective, how (or if) proceeding in such ways can be accountable, or replicable, all exemplify common deliberative points on judgement pathways. Overall, co-present groups’ activities are centred on ‘How to go on’. We believe that ‘abductive reasoning’ is a promising structure for this form of practical judgement: it invites normative questions of a co-present group such as: ‘We know broadly where we want to go, so how will we establish how to get there?’ (cf. Paavola 2021). Abductive reasoning seeks to develop the understanding of a situation so that it can be improved or remediated, rather than merely achieving explanations or hypothesis-confirmations. But importantly that ‘understanding’ is normative, not inert. It should be towards ‘finding grounds, means or anticipations for transformative practices’ (Paavola 2021: 45).

Practical abduction, or ‘deliberation’, is, then, at the centre of co-present group activities. It shapes how sense-making can occur in situations of the messiness of practice such as clinical life in a hospital, or across our four examples discussed throughout this article. If sense-making is successful, ‘transformative practices’ are more likely. That is how the emergence described by complexity theory is apparent.

Learning is manifest in the ‘wilfully rational’ processes of deliberation over ‘how we will get to where we want to go?’. In this article, we have shown that one main contribution of complexity theory is therefore to be found in the epistemological significance of these learnings, accruing first and foremost to the co-present group (as our third section above has specified), and cascading down to individuals. Western philosophy of education starts from the opposite, and now very limited, assumption.

However, the Copernican clout of complexity theory goes further. Rather than stay with the traditional assumption (in the West) that ‘I am the author of Me’, we suggest that it is ‘Us-ness’ that mainly makes me, Me. This, blatantly, is an onto-epistemological challenge to traditional philosophy of education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Hager

Paul Hager, is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. His major scholarly interest in the philosophy of adult and vocational education centres on such topics as informal workplace learning, professional practice, skills and competence, and group learning. His most recent book is P. Hager & D. Beckett, (2019) The Emergence of Complexity: Rethinking Education as a Social Science (pub. Springer Nature).

David Beckett

David Beckett, retired in 2017 from The University of Melbourne where he was a Professor of Education and Deputy Dean of the faculty. As well as the 2019 book on complexity (co-author Paul Hager), he co-authored a textbook for doctoral and masters’ students, Educational Research: Creative Thinking and Doing (co-author John O’Toole, pub. Oxford UP 2010, second ed. 2013).

Notes

1 The ideas presented in this paragraph are further elaborated in Hager and Beckett (2019: 157–158).

2 These two paragraphs draw upon Hager and Beckett (2020). For more detail on general complexity see Hager and Beckett (2019: 164–166).