Milestones, Touchstones and Just Plain Stones

Abstract

I spent a wonderful time this past summer in the western part of Ireland. One distinguishing feature of that land is the ubiquitous stone wall. These walls have been built from the stones percolating to the surface of the stony and rocky land; the percolation began thousands of years ago and continues to this day. I learned little about these walls from the residents inside those walls; those who were old enough to remember their construction spoke a language that was largely impenetrable to me; it may have been English, or it may have been Gaelic, or almost anything else, so different was the accent from my own. And while I have many pictures with stones in them, I have no real understanding of the stones or the people of those stones. So perhaps stones were on my mind as I sat down to work on this editorial. As I start to write this, it is still 2013, which is 20 years after the publishing of Bill Doll’s A Post‐modern Perspective on Curriculum, which, as much as any other event, ushered complexity as a field of study into education. Furthermore, it was 10 years ago that the first Complexity Science and Educational Research conference was held and, as an outgrowth of that conference, that Complicity was begun. 20 years and 10 years seem like important milestones in the complexity‐studies‐in‐education world. But what does it mean to pass a milestone? I did not need to consult my Oxford English Dictionary to figure that “mile stone” was a marker of sorts along a path. (However, as I have learned to be most skeptical of the things that seem common‐ sensical to me, I did check: yes, my common‐sense thought is really the meaning of “milestone”.) Three things seem to me to be wrong about considering this year’s anniversaries as milestones, however.