ABSTRACT
Scholars have been attempting to understand the complexity of education and physical education curricula within diverse school environments for many years (Cziko, 1989; Ennis, 1992; Swada & Caley, 1985). As our thinking has evolved from behavioural reductionist to constructivist dynamical, we have gained both clarity and cloudiness (Radford, 2008) in our view of school interactions. We have greater clarity and can attend with greater sensitivity to the social and cultural milieu that influences every aspect of curricular design and implementation (Doll, 2008). Nevertheless, these novel curricular approaches that conceptualize student learning and schools as self-organizing, interactive, open systems jolt our reality, clouding our ability to implement, observe and assess implementations of novel curricula (Mason, 2008; McMurtry, 2008). Complex complexity and supercomplexity (Barnett, 2004; Block & Estes, 2011) are apt terms to describe our evolving understandings of school phenomena. These theories hold great promise to reconceptualize our approaches to large-scale curricular interventions and our attempts to assess outcomes in a manner that is meaningful and that elaborates, rather than reduces, complexity.
