Webs of development: Professional networks as spaces for learning

The concept of the inter-related structure of social reality, made famous over 50 years ago by Martin Luther King (1967), and scientifically articulated by the likes of Capra (1996), focuses on the complexity of life, the underlying connectedness, the systemic nature of our existence. Conventional linear thought and mechanistic reductionism necessarily yield to ideas of complexity, viewing the world as a systemic organism. Rather than studying parts to understand the whole, understanding of the whole is attempted through analysis of the relationships and connections making up the whole. Yet, the way in which we approach life is so often to deny this complexity. For instance, there is a tendency to split life into compartments or boxes, give them labels, and even give those who work in them labels, and then proceed to operate within those boxes, often ignoring and thereby negating the relationships and connections between them (Katz & Earl, 2010). The discipline-fragmented curriculum in most educational institutions is evidence of this. As Breen points out in his article on dilemmas of change, we ‘zoom’ in, ‘fixing’ one part, negating the ‘complexity of the phenomenon’. We deal with ‘the complicated rather than the complex and so only a part and never the whole’ (Breen, 2005).