Complexity and curriculum: for a new relationship

Abstract

This essay advocates the need to rethink curricular issues starting from the complexity theory. It explains the importance of this instrument to avoid the positivist views of curriculum, which separates disciplines, and fragments the object of knowledge, reality and life. To achieve this goal, the concepts of curriculum and complexity are developed acknowledging its various aspects that include ontological, epistemological and methodological views, as well as the importance of the relationship curriculum/complexity and some of its possible outcomes in education. It is observed that the complexity theorization of the curriculum helps to rethink it starting from cultural plurality, unity in diversity, ability to produce new things from emerging processes. Thus, the inter-subjectivity and multiple references reaffirms the importance of otherness, the struggle for the affirmation of differences, as well as the self-eco-organizatory processes as result of classroom dialogue. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge resulting from this relationship, in their roles and meaningful training, are essential to mobilize the processes of interdependence, cross-breeding and reconnection of knowledge. Thus understood, the curriculum becomes the epistemic space of solidarity, emergency and change of values, given the multiplicity and diversity of experiences that require overcoming the disciplinary fragmentation and the presence of constant dialogue. In conclusion, the author emphasizes the importance of developing, through curriculum practices, the “thinking reform” proposed by Edgar Morin, starting from the intelligence of complexity, as a precondition for overcoming the fragmentation of knowledge and finding solutions compatible to the magnitude of the problems now emerging.