Liberal Education for the 21st Century:
Complexity Thinking as a Critical Thinking Skill
Glen David Kuecker
City Lab Coordinator
In a March 6, 2015 Inside Higher Ed article, the President of the Associated Colleges of the South, R. Owen Williams, discusses the challenging 21st century environment liberal arts colleges face.
The need for demonstrable outcomes that match exceptional life investments to earn the degree invites many to question the fundamental value of once enticing market products like study abroad or life long learning. Williams highlights that even the project of critical reasoning is in question, especially when the emphasis falls on critically examining every proposition. He maintains that the “deconstruct everything” mantra of liberal education now needs to be meet by a new emphasis on “constructive thinking,” the ability to problem solve. “The identification of problems,” Williams states, is “made possible by critical thinking is useful only if it gives rise to the problem solving of constructive thinking. The desired endgame is problem solving, not critical thinking for its own sake.”
The Williams article suggests several key challenges for DePauw University in the 21st century as it strives to keep liberal education not just relevant, but critical to the needs of a world facing multiple, substantive challenges – climate change, energy transition, food security, demographic shifts (aging, growth, and urbanization), ecological degradation, economic stress, and political instability. To educate our students in the liberal arts tradition within this environment requires embracing Williams’ notion of “constructive thinking” as a tangible outcome of a DePauw education. Rapidly, our students are entering an environment where they will engage in the re-building, re-designing, re-thinking our civilization. It’s the next generation’s homework assignment. DePauw needs to address how we will prepare them for the assignment so that they are not just prepared, but are ready to be leaders, innovators, and creators in this new world. Are we intentional about the task ahead? Or, do we rely upon the old clichés of liberal education that are rapidly becoming empty luxuries of a time past?
Core to the mission of empowering our students to be 21st century constructive thinkers is developing new approaches to critical thinking. Traditionally we understand critical thinking to be the somewhat abstract notions of intellectual curiosity, the ability to suspend our assumptions while looking at an issue, or having a life long thirst for knowledge. While these abstracts are developed in our courses, we mark them with a set of competency requirements: writing, quantitative analysis, and verbal communication. We often assume these to be critical reasoning skills as against the vehicles for being a critical thinker in the liberal arts tradition. But, we often leave unstated the idea that in all of our courses students learn how to ask questions of data, identify patterns in the data that help to answer the question, and offer an argument from the patterns that answers the question raised. Clearly, we ought not dispense with these liberal education fundamentals. But, we need to find ways to better leverage them in the mission of preparing for the 21st century.
In an 1990 commencement address, Oberlin College’s David Orr first articulated what became a famous essay, “What is Education For?” Among the arguments advanced, he told the expecting graduates that every college student needs to know the laws of thermodynamics and how they pertain to everything they do in life. We might pause to ask how many DePauw students would pass that graduation requirement? Orr’s argument points directly to complexity thinking, which is the ability to see the presence of complex adaptive systems everywhere in our lives, to understand how they work, and grasp their micro and macro significance. Orr’s argument is pertinent, because the laws of thermodynamics rest at the core of complexity thinking. In its most general form it concerns the mutually constitutive interaction between the forces of order and disorder, and invites us to develop frames of critical thinking that understand the broader implications of their interaction within the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. As with most foundational concepts, order and disorder are both simple in statement yet wildly substantive in significance to the enterprise of liberal education.
The fields of biology, ecology, information sciences, physics, mathematics, computer science, and management all contributed to the development of complexity thinking in their particular encounters with understanding the non-linear behavior of the systems they studied. Stimulated by the Club of Rome’s exploration of the implications of rapid population growth in the early 1960s, MIT’s application of early computing sciences to the problem of sustainability, Jay Forrester’s development of system dynamic analysis at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, as well as attempts to find the “theory of everything” in physics, complexity thinking considers the problem of understanding how systems operate and the implications of their operation. It seeks to understand how random interactions between parts results in patterned self-organization, and how those patterns become rule-sets for system behavior. The goal of complexity thinking is to understand the rule-set, especially how it becomes normative or hegemonic within society, politics, economics, and culture. Complexity thinking consists of basic concepts, such as the relationship between sources and sinks, the role of positive and negative feedback loops, or the implications for building open or closed systems. Of special importance to complexity thinking is how to understand the role of emergent properties within self-organization, especially how they enable innovation and creativity. Likewise, complexity thinking emphasizes the importance of resilience within a complex adaptive system, especially when a system meets with challenges to its reproduction as well as soft or hard collapse. Complexity thinkers often become resilience thinkers, which is arguably the most important critical reasoning skill to have in the 21st century. A complexity thinker can take these concepts and apply them to any give situation, and come up with substantive analysis about a current situation, anticipated future behavior, and approaches for dealing with future behavior.
Complexity thinking presents the opportunity to imagine new pedagogical and curricular approaches within liberal education. Near the top of innovations is the way it can enable us to overcome the silo thinking, turf wars, and confines of the academy’s modern approach to knowledge, namely the disciplines housed in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Complexity thinking allows for transcending these limitations and enables us to build a liberal education without walls. The goal is to overcome the existing tension between our invitation to students to engage in the liberal exploration of knowledge and the reality of highly compartmentalized containers of knowledge that exist within our structure of departments and programs. This vision does not call for abolishing departments and programs, but it does call for exploring ways to better liberate liberal education. The notion of displacing interdisciplinary studies with an integrated model has precedent at DePauw, as that’s the central recommendation of a report produced by Professor O’Bannon for the Office of the President about the status of interdisciplinary programs at DePauw.[2] It was also a guiding concept in Professor Kuecker’s rethinking of the university’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, which called for building a “program without walls” and the idea of fostering an “intellectual commons.”
This vision aims to deploy two best practices that are strongly promoted by American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) as keys to 21st century higher education. The first is integrated learning, a curricular structure and pedagogy that aims to transcend disciplinary boundaries by bringing the disciplines into substantive conversations about the 21st century challenges. In an article written for AACU, Miami University’s William Newell explains, “Integrative learning is not just about making connections, however; in themselves, connections do not empower students. The challenge of integrative learning is to make sense of the contrasting or conflicting insights by integrating them into a more comprehensive understanding of the situation in its full complexity.” This vision places complexity thinking as the core critical reasoning skill for enabling our students to be integrative thinkers, which is a key skill becoming 21st century constructive thinkers.
Second, this vision embraces the project of global learning as identified by AACU as one key outcome for liberal education. A global learning rubric includes student understanding of the interconnectedness of the global community, the challenges of understanding and addressing global problems that emerge from interconnectedness, the possibilities and implications of our interventions in global scale issues, the opportunities and limitations with transcultural encounters, as well as the great issues of social justice and moral/ethical grounding that occupy the minds of global learners. Complexity thinking provides students the ability to understand global systems, their functioning, paths, and potential outcomes, and it allows them to bring integrative learning approaches to the study of global issues. The Complexity Thinking approach to global learning has the added benefit of articulating with the university’s curricular commitment to multicultural learning.
Through complexity thinking, students will become integrative and global learners. This goal will happen by placing complexity thinking as a hub for DePauw University interdisciplinary and honor programs, a step that will transcend the silo characteristic of the existing programs. Complexity thinking will integrate with interdisciplinary programs like Environmental Fellows, Public Health, Management Fellows, Media Fellows, Posse Scholars, Conflict Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Asian Studies, Africana Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The goal is to facilitate a learning commons for students in each program to have the opportunity for a more inclusive and expansive learning experience through intentional interactions with students in other programs, to develop a way of thinking that generates a common language for the learning commons, and provides analytical tools that can be introduced to their learning within their home department or program. Complexity thinking provides the content and method for generating the learning commons.
The vision extends the curricular learning commons in complexity thinking to extra-curricular, experiential learning, and extended studies university programs. Courses in complexity thinking will intentionally generate integrated conversations between students participating in the Compton Center, Prindle Institute, Hartman House. Boner Scholars, Sustainability Office, Semester Study Abroad, Summer Institutes as well as independent learning opportunities provided by Howes Grants and the Asher Fund.
Extra-curricular integration will also involve working with student organizations, which often exist as untapped learning commons.
An advantage of the integrated studies learning commons is that it brings together the university’s strengths in global studies, both in the course offerings but also in the university’s extra-curricular programs. It also leverages strengths in our existing interdisciplinary and honors programs.
The complexity thinking for the 21st century vision includes bringing a set of teaching innovations into our curriculum that are designed to enhance 21st century liberal arts pedagogy. At the core of the approach is student-faculty research pedagogy that aims to teach course material through hands-on research projects. Along with making research the vehicle for student learning, the vision will deploy a flipped classroom approach, where class sessions become laboratories for exploring out of class student learning. Complimenting the turning of class time into workshops is the plan to have what Chung and Hsu (2006) call a “course center” outside of the time-bank, which is an informal space where students can do their “homework” with the professor present. The course center will largely displace the traditional office hour, except for confidential meetings.
Advanced students will have the opportunity to participate in the professor’s research through special collaborative projects. These will be modeled after the New Songdo City Research Project Kuecker did with two seniors during Spring 2013, as well as my current work with two seniors on resilient cities. The goal is to prepare students for independent research projects during the summer or winter term using Howes Grants or the Asher Fund, which can become the foundation for senior year capstone projects.
Facing the challenges of the 21st century, the project of liberal education remains as relevant as ever. As complexity thinkers our graduates will be prepared for the great opportunities that comes with the constructive thinker’s embrace of new ways of thinking, being, and acting. The large-scale and interconnected challenges of climate change, energy transition, feeding 9-10 billion people, caring for the global aging population, building resilient cities for two-thirds of humanity, combating emergent diseases, avoiding the 6th great extinction of the planetary ecosystem, navigating economic stress, and contending with political instabilities all demand high levels of innovation and creativity. Complexity thinkers can meet this demand by embracing liberal education’s emphasis on life long learning, leadership empowerment, and the quest for transformative careers.
The complexity thinking vision aims to provide critical thinking skills for our students that inform their particular area of program and disciplinary study. A key component of this vision is anticipating the great zones of opportunity fostered by challenges of the 21st century. Complexity thinking invites us to empower students to be innovators and creators in key sectors, including: public health, business, conflict resolution, urban design and planning, human development, government, education, and the non-profit sector. Leadership translates as having the critical thinking skills to leverage complex adaptive systems to create institutional and societal change that generates critically important innovation and creativity. Transformative careers means that our alumni will be agents of change in the 21st century through their work life. Leadership and transformative careers through complexity thinking enable our students to translate Williams’ “constructive thinking” after graduation toward the project of re-thinking, re-building, and re-designing our civilization. It will be their life work.
Chung, C., & Hsu, L. (2006). “Encouraging students to seek help: Supplementing office hours with a course center.” College Teaching, 54(3), 253–258.