ABSTRACT
This chapter represents something of a personal journey as I reflect upon the changes that have occurred in my thinking about professional development projects spanning a period of 20 years. But while there have been clear changes in my thinking over these years, one position that has continued to anchor my views on such projects is that teachers play a crucial role in enacting any curricular or pedagogical reform in science education, including those reform initiatives relevant to the scientific literacies being addressed in this book. My primary claim in this chapter is that the theoretical stance on learning which is used to interpret activities associated with professional development projects and to design new projects is important and can make a significant difference in the creation and in the evidence that we use to assess the success of these projects. In this respect, a framework incorporating ideas from complexity studies provides a promising direction for professional development research. The chapter unfolds as follows. After a brief discussion of its origins at the conference in Uppsala described in the introductory chapter of this book, I talk about the relevance of framing professional development in terms of learning communities and claim that we need to situate these communities in a larger set of interdependent learning systems, drawing upon the literature from complexity studies. After reviewing some of the underlying qualities of learning systems I examine a science teacher education project developed some 25 years ago and compare our description and findings of the project at that time with a contemporary project which was designed using some of the principles of learning emerging from a complexity thinking frame. I conclude with some reflections upon why professional development programs are best conceived in terms of interdependent learning systems and what would change the common pursuit in educational research and development programs from predetermined outcomes to more open-ended spaces of possibility.
