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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]

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]

This paper introduces some of the debates in the field of critical thinking by highlighting differences among thinkers such as Siegel, Ennis, Paul, McPeck, and Martin, and poses some questions that arise from these debates. Does rationality transcend particular cultures, or are there different kinds of thinking, different styles of reasoning? What is the relationship between critical thinking and learning? In what ways does the moral domain overlap with these largely epistemic and pedagogical issues? The paper concludes by showing how Peters, Evers, Chan and Yan, Ryan and Louie, Luntley, Lam, Doddington, and Kwak, respond to these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of post-Apartheid South African schools as ineffective learning environments, and the question whether there are strategies for enhancing learning that are more effective and that might be more easily and successfully implemented than an outcomes-based education. Because of historical and situational constraints, an outcomes-based education has limited potential for enhancing learning there. We argue that there are other factors, notably proximal variables such as teaching strategies that focus on the setting of learning goals and the provision of feedback and reinforcement to students, and the quality of teaching itself, that could more effectively enhance learning in South African schools, and that could be more successfully implemented. The paper thus aims to recommend and justify a policy decision in South African education to limit the implementation of an outcomes-based education to only those selected aspects that have been shown to enhance learning most effectively, and to implement other effective strategies for enhancing learning that might be more successfully introduced into schools. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Examines the role of teachers with respect to knowledge, an issue that has been reopened as a consequence of the widespread interest in outcomes-based education. Proponents of an outcomes-based education; Notion of teachers as mediators of knowledge; Teachers as socio-cultural critics.