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In the post-Apartheid era South Africa's universities have faced serious questions about the quality of their student learning in the face of near impossible challenges. The University of Cape Town, widely seen as the country's leading higher education institution, has shown remarkable resilience, however, in the range of initiatives it has launched to support and enhance student learning. These initiatives, designed with a common purpose, are of course intended to work together so that their effects might be compounded and realized in enhanced student learning outcomes. Drawing substantially on the power of compounding (which is itself redolent of the claim made by complexity theory that relations and emergence are crucial concepts), complexity theory offers unique insights into how and why things change – and also into how and why things remain largely the same or inexorably grind towards failure. The networked initiatives undertaken by the University of Cape Town constitute a case of learning refurbishment that is also well explained and understood in terms of complexity theory. This paper draws on concepts from complexity theory both to understand how learning might be enhanced in higher education institutions in severely straitened circumstances and to offer insights for education leaders and policy-makers in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the possibility of implementing policy change in education using the complexity theory. Topics include the complexity of the decentralisation of the education systems due to the dynamic open systems, the implementation and sustainability of policy change in education governance, and the role of status quo in the resistance to change.

This article considers the challenge of sustainable change and development in education from the perspective of complexity theory. Complexity theory’s concept of emergence implies that, given a significant degree of complexity in a particular environment, new properties and behaviours emerge that are not necessarily contained in the essence of the constituent elements, or easily able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions. These concepts of emergent phenomena from a critical mass, associated with notions of lock-in, path dependence, and inertial momentum, contribute to a perspective on continuity and change that indicates what conditions might need to be in place for the emergence of sustainable, positive, system-wide change and development in education. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Following a brief introduction to complexity theory, this paper considers how various themes in the field relate to the philosophical study of education. Issues and questions introduced include the challenge of complexity theory for the philosophy of education—and, conversely, some critical challenges for complexity theory from educational philosophy; complexity theory and educational continuity and change; the importance that complexity theory places on interpretive perspectives that are transphenomenal, transdisciplinary and transdiscursive; the risks of simplifying complexity to a point that excludes its ambiguities and includes only its dominant usages; the degree of coherence between Dewey's philosophical orientation and that of complexity theory; how Foucault might be read as a complexity theorist; how educational research informed by complexity theory might ask different questions with different analytical perspectives—connectionist, holistic, non-linear, rather than input–output ‘black-box’ causal modelling, for example; and how curriculum, teaching, the epistemology of schooling, and the ‘education of consciousness’—understood as an emergent phenomenon—might be different when viewed from the perspective of complexity theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers questions of continuity and change in education from the perspective of complexity theory, introducing the field to educationists who might not be familiar with it. Given a significant degree of complexity in a particular environment (or ‘dynamical system’), new properties and behaviours, which are not necessarily contained in the essence of the constituent elements or able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions, will emerge. These concepts of emergent phenomena from a critical mass, associated with notions of lock-in, path dependence, and inertial momentum, suggest that it is in the dynamic interactions and adaptive orientation of a system that new phenomena, new properties and behaviours, emerge. The focus thus shifts from a concern with decontextualised and universalised essence to contextualised and contingent complex wholes. This is where complexity theory seeks the levers of history. The paper posits the notion of inertial momentum as the conceptual link between the principle of emergent phenomena as developed principally in the natural sciences and the notion of socio-historical change in human society. It is argued that educational and institutional change is less a consequence of effecting change in one particular factor or variable, and more a case of generating momentum in a new direction by attention to as many factors as possible. Complexity theory suggests, in other words, that what it might take to change a school's inertial momentum from an ethos of failure is massive and sustained intervention at every possible level until the phenomenon of learning excellence emerges from this new set of interactions among these new factors, and sustains itself autocatalytically. The paper concludes with a summary consideration of the conditions that contribute to the emergence of new properties and behaviours in a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]