Complexity Thinking and PEL
To understand why we have used complexity thinking as the foundation for PEL, we have created three short videos. In this first video we highlight how key ideas from complexity thinking help us make the case for school PE becoming the ’connective catalyst’ for PEL: the ’connective catalyst’ that sets the foundation for the lifelong and life-wide PEL journeys of all children and young people.
To do this, we will present a complexity thinking framework based on four interrelated ‘commonalities’: becoming, lived time, self-organisation and boundaries. These commonalities are integrated in an overarching framework that helps us make sense of the unfolding journeys of all PEL stakeholders: children, young people, teachers, coaches and all other adults.​
The Four Interrelated Complexity ‘Commonalities’
To explain how the framework works, the second video will introduce the becoming and lived time commonalities and consider how these commonalities work together to shape the nature of everyone’s PEL journey: journeys that are usually non-linear because they are in part predictable but also in part unpredictable. Building on these first two commonalities, the third short video will introduce self-organisation and boundaries and it will discuss how the relationship between these commonalities works to influence and shape the nature of everyone’s PEL journey.
Becoming and lived time
In this second short video, we introduce and discuss the first two complexity commonalities: Becoming and Lived Time.
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Everyone’s PEL journey involves a process of becoming: a process that starts at birth and continues throughout life. Critically, these PEL journeys do not only take place in school PE lessons, but also in the other spaces of our lives. These life-wide spaces are across school, in the community and at home and are so important to our becoming PEL journeys over time because it is in these spaces that each person makes their activity choices. Choices to be active for reasons of health, recreation, performance or simply because physical activity needs to be a functional part of their daily life. Of course, as this becoming process progresses, everyone can also choose to be inactive.
Directly linked to this becoming process, lived time has a significant influence on everyone’s PEL journey. Lived time is different from the linear time that is our ‘taken for granted’ view of time. While linear time focuses on fixed quantitative units like seconds, minutes and hours, lived time is a qualitative process: a more complex process in which our past, our present and our future are constantly merging as a unity.
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash
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Let’s first consider the relationship between the past and the present before considering the influence of future. For each young person, their genetic make-up and their holistic experiences from their past all have the potential to influence their present. So, when you work with a class of children, while they will likely share some similarities, their past histories will always bring some difference to the present. For example, in the same class, one 12-year-old child may have a high level of movement competence, regularly take part in different activities and enjoy the social element of these activities, while another 12-year-old may have limited movement competence, lack confidence in physical activity situations and may choose to be inactive outside school. These differences highlight how each young person’s past histories create very different starting points in the present.
So, before we move to the other two commonalities, self-organisation and boundaries, please take a little bit of time to think about your own PEL journey and consider two things:
Reflect on the nature of your becoming PEL journey as you moved from your childhood years through your adolescence and into and through adulthood. To what extent has it been a linear or a non-linear process of becoming?
Once you have done that, think of at least two lived time experiences when events in the future resulted in quite stable and predictable progress and also think about two future events that were more unpredictable and impacted on the direction of your PEL journey.
Self organisation and boundaries
In this third short video, we introduce and discuss the final complexity commonalities: Self-Organisation and Boundaries.
First, let’s consider self-organisation.
As each PEL journey progresses through a process of becoming in lived time, our ability to self-organise plays a significant, often critical, role in the nature of each of these journeys. To understand self-organisation, and its role in PEL, it is useful to consider the difference between two types of system that are common across the human and non-human world: mechanical, sometimes called complicated, systems, and complex systems.
To begin with, mechanical and complex systems are both made up of different parts that come together to make something work: cars, phones, power systems and even people. However, the way that the parts come together is a key difference between these two types of system, particularly over a long period of time. As will become clearer, understanding the difference between these two types of system has major implications for PEL and for school PE.
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In a mechanical system, the interaction between the system parts is pre-programmed or pre-determined and the system is predictable and repeats the same actions time after time. In addition, mechanical systems have little, if any, interaction with the environment and function in their own bubble. Clocks and washing machines are good examples of non-human mechanical systems.
However, as our PEL journeys unfold over time, our ability to self-organise does not happen in an ‘anything goes’ manner but is constantly taking place within boundaries : the final complexity commonality.
Boundaries influence our PEL journeys because they are everywhere. But, how we understand boundaries and how we negotiate boundaries will be a key feature of our evolving PEL journey. Traditionally, boundaries are viewed as rigid or fixed and, as such, are restrictive, constraining and divisive. For example, fixed boundaries have long shaped the nature of the traditional multi-activity PE experience in which teachers deliver the same movement technique, the same cognitive content and expect the same social and emotional behaviours within each activity-specific ‘block’. This fixed view creates a ‘one-size-fits-all’ PE experience in which each child has limited opportunity to self-organise because they are simply expected to ‘fit in’. This traditional take on boundaries has therefore created a subject area that is often thought to be exclusive.
However, recent thinking about boundaries offers some hope. There is an acknowledgement that many boundaries are in fact flexible and malleable. For example, physical educators are increasingly recognising that school PE is not the fixed ‘one-size-fits-all’ experience we have just highlighted but that it needs to be a more dynamic, more adaptable and a more flexible experience to accommodate the differences across the children in their classes. So, while some boundaries will undoubtedly remain fixed, e.g. facilities, recognising those boundaries that are flexible will help teachers and other stakeholders be more adaptable and even creative in their teaching. By being able to manipulate and alter these flexible boundaries, teachers can create different physical and non-physical spaces that will allow children to self-organise and take more control of their own learning.
Now, while the creation of these flexible boundary spaces is a key feature of PEL and the school PE experience, we do not have time to discuss this in detail at the moment. However, if you would like to find out more about boundaries, please click on this link to watch a more detailed video we have created.
Concluding thoughts
So, to conclude this series of short videos we reiterate that we have used complexity thinking as the foundation for PEL and to help us make the case for school PE becoming the ’connective catalyst’ for PEL. To do this, we have presented a complexity thinking framework based on four interrelated ‘commonalities’: becoming, lived time, self-organisation and boundaries. These commonalities are integrated in an overarching framework that helps us make sense of the unfolding journeys of all PEL stakeholders: children, young people, teachers, coaches and all other adults.