A reiteration of Anh Linh's shapes

The wonderful case of Anh Linh showed the complexity of an unexpected reality in education. The question was, and still is, how all of this could happen. One may describe the case in terms of a ‘problem’, similar to what Daniel Dennett described in his book on “Freedom Evolves” as the problem of the bumblebee (Dennett, 2003, p. 199). One could say that the results of the case of Anh Linh could ‘simply’ not happen according to our models in use of learning and education. The conclusion should be that these models are wrong! We need different models, recognizing the complexity of reality, models which may explain such kind of unexpected reality of education. To find an answer to the ‘problem of Anh Linh’ and become explanatory of the results we may need a different kind of thinking: a new thinking in complexity (Mainzer, 2004). I think we need an integrated perspective on learning, teaching and schooling. My thinking on this is inspired by Tharp and Gallimore’s book on “Rousing minds to Life” (Tharp and Gallimore, 1988). Their thinking is very much in line with Bruner’s (Bruner, 1996). Bruner uses the wonderful metaphor of ‘bootstrapping’ for learning in a (small) community, speaking about “learners who ‘bootstrap each other” (Bruner, 1996, p. 21). It is a metaphor which is quite prominent in work of others as well (see Buckley, 1967; Burbules, 1993; Kaufman, 1995; Frawley, 1997; Van Geert, 1991; Bogdan, 2000; Davis, 2004). However, this metaphor does not get really explanatory of the nature of the processes involved. This is the challenge for my presentation on the processes taking place in the classroom of the case of Anh Linh. The process of bootstrapping in the case of Anh Linh is viewed as essentially an emergent, tremendous complex, potentially non-linear process. The effects of bootstrapping are emergent as well. The underlying dynamics is to be taken as causal dynamics (see Vygotsky, 1978, p. 62). The modelling needed for this process and their effects is, therefore, the modelling of the causal dynamics underlying them. The bootstrapping implies that whole persons, and their minds, are involved in the process of communicative human interaction. In my view the process should entail generative mechanisms to explain the complexity of bootstrapping; mechanisms which may be regarded as hitherto unknown (Bhaskar, 1986). We may need a different view of how complexity ‘works’ in reality (Bak, 1997). This may imply a rethinking of interaction as a concept. We should have the courage to go beyond the orthodoxy of physicalism, of a Newtonian view of action and reaction (Robins, 1999; Starobinski, 2003). The causal framework of LISREL, developed by Jöreskog & Sörbom in the sixties and seventies of the last century is a good candidate for this (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 1986, 1993). They describe the causal dynamics in terms of a “mechanism that generate the observable variables” (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 1986, p. I.1). This causal framework lends itself to modelling the interaction in terms of causal loops with reciprocal influences between the variables with processes of enhancement of the causal effects ‘produced’ by these influences (Buckley, 1967; see also the work of Hayduk, 1986, 1996). The regular effects of these are linear when influences of variables on each other are weak, but the effects can be non-linear when conditions are met of stronger influences. Based on this kind of modelling one may describe teaching as the art of bringing about those effects of stronger influences between persons during their reciprocal communicative interaction. The causal model of learners, bootstrapping each other in small (sub) communities, enables the possibility to speak about the emergent patterns of causal interaction between the variables which may be involved in the tremendous complexity of mind-to-mind causation (Buller, 2005, p. 452). The modelling of bootstrapping shows why it can be true, in a real sense, that “two minds are better than one.” (Frawley, 1997, p. 89; Jörg, 2005) This description of bootstrapping each other in interaction is very much in line with the paradox mentioned by Stacey (2003) in his book on complexity and group processes: "the paradox of individual minds forming and being formed by the social at the same time” (Stacey, 2003, p. 327), as well as with the description of the nature of the processes of knowing and learning, given by Barab and Kirshner (2002), pointing to the dynamic generativity of knowing and learning, which they see as basic for engendering what they call “explosive possibilities” for that learning. Such generativity may be viewed as being both the cause and effect of individualization of each of the learners in time (Sassone, 1996). This very generativity, causal in nature, might be the key building stone for the foundation of a complex, fully integrated interactive, communicative, relational, generative pedagogy (see Jörg, 2005). A complex generative pedagogy (CGP) which integrates the notion of ‘interactive pedagogy’ of Bruner (1996), the ‘communicative pedagogy’ of Biesta (1995), and the ‘relational pedagogy’ of Sidorkin (2002). It will be possible, then, to use this integrated complex generative pedagogy for building a community of learners, or community of practice, in their practice of learning in ensembles of persons, with their dynamically evolving relationships, and the network of relationships between the ensembles (Granott, 1998; Sidorkin, 2002). A network which can be characterized as consisting of weavers, all of them being “both the weaver and the pattern it weaves” (Rose, 1997). The building of such a community may be regarded not only a community of learners but, and even more so, of building identities through the network of reciprocal relationships and their processes of reciprocal influences and the forces exerted on each other in time (Buckley, 1967; Wenger, 1998). One may call this process, therefore, as well a process of bootstrapping each other’s mind and identity.