Nursing education and complexity pedagogy: Faculty experiences with an e-learning platform

Nine nursing faculty explored the effectiveness of teaching undergraduate and graduate nursing courses using a complexity-based pedagogy with an e-learning platform. Faculty reported enhanced student-student engagement and higher quality critical thinking than experienced previously with traditional e-learning platforms.

http://jnep.sciedupress.com Journal of Nursing Education and Practice 2016, Vol. 6, No. 5
EXPERIENCE EXCHANGE
Nursing education and complexity pedagogy: Faculty
experiences with an e-learning platform
GailJoyce Mitchell∗1, BerylPilkington1, Christine M. Jonas-Simpson1,2, Isolde Daiski1, Nadine L. Cross2, Nancy
Johnston1, Caroline P. O’Grady1, Eva H. Peisachovich1, Sannie Y. Tang1
1Faculty of health, Schoolof Nursing, York University, Toronto, Canada
2York-University Health Network Academy, Toronto, Canada
Received: November 8, 2015 Accepted: January 6, 2016 Online Published: January 10, 2016
DOI: 10.5430/jnep.v6n5p60 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5430/jnep.v6n5p60
ABSTRACT
Objective: Nine nursing faculty explored the effectiveness of teaching undergraduate and graduate nursing courses using a
complexity-based pedagogy with an e-learning platform. Complexity pedagogy requires a commitment by educators to reside
within a networked community of teachers-learners where all participants contribute to an organically growing curriculum over
the course of study.
Methods: The approach is non-linear and student-centered. Faculty co-developed course outlines, resources for teaching learning,
and regularly connected over a two-year time frame to mentor each other, strategize, and share resources. Individual faculty first
wrote about their experiences of e-learning with complexity pedagogy and then collaborated to generate this descriptive report.
Results: Faculty reported enhanced student-student engagement and higher quality critical thinking than experienced previously
with traditional e-learning platforms.
Conclusions: This article suggests complexity pedagogy offers quality education and merits further exploration.
Key Words: Complexity pedagogy, e-Learning, Education, Nursing, Innovation
1. COMPLEXITY INNOVATION FOR E-
LEARNING
As a group of nurse educators we collaborated in order to
describe and discern insights about our shared experiences
of using complexity pedagogy[1] with an e-learning platform.
Our teaching with complexity pedagogy happened in under-
graduate and graduate nursing courses, and in project work
with health professionals over a two-year period. All nine
of us used an e-learning platform called Daagu that was de-
veloped by educators at York University, Canada in order to
support faculty who wanted a non-linear, networked platform
for engaged teaching-learning activities. The purpose of this
paper is to describe our experiences with complexity peda-
gogy and to offer insights about possibilities for meaningful
change in nursing education.
1.1 Education and calls for change
Reports of quality in higher education linked with specific
pedagogies is not well established.[2] One possible excep-
tion to the absence of research on outcomes is the body of
work on e-learning and constructivism. [3, 4] There is how-
ever, a gap in knowledge regarding other specific pedagogies,
such as complexity, and as noted by Wilson-Doenges & Gu-
rung,[2] research is needed in order to better understand what
learning and teaching actually benefit students. Our work
connects with and advances the call to develop an episte-
∗Correspondence: Gail Joyce Mitchell; Email: [e-mail]; Address: Faculty of health, School of Nursing, York University, Toronto, Canada.
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mology of learning. . . heavily influenced by the importance
of difference.[5] Complexity pedagogy leverages individual
differences and diversities in order to promote emergence
of new/different thinking and learning. Difference in the
complexity-based platform is not a difference that catego-
rizes and judges, rather, difference is the foundation of living
and learning systems. We are all different–experiences, in-
tentions, and perspectives–and our differences can generate
insight and understanding when coupled with the intention
to listen, connect, and discern.[1]
Calls for change in nursing educational approaches have been
reported since the late 1980s. Authors such as Bevis & Wat-
son,[6] Dieklemann,[7–10] Diekelmann & Schekel,[11] Giddens
& Brady,[12] Giddens et al.,[13] Ironside,[14] and Johnston[15]
lament that the content driven, didactic approaches leave
little room for critical reflection, engagement with diverse
ideas, and creative thinking. Over the past decade calls for
change intensified with appeals for creative, collaborative,
and open systems that are more inclusive, nimble, meaning-
ful, and exciting.[16] The role of educators is changing and
access to technology invites educators, especially in higher
education, to reject thinking of knowledge as content to be
delivered to students who have not been involved in defin-
ing and selecting the curriculum of study. Contemporary
theorists conceptualize knowledge, not as content, but as pro-
cess and preparation for collaborative possibilities, creativity,
and shared actions across disciplinary and geographical bor-
ders.[1, 16] Also, scholars are expanding understandings of
what it means to not only be present with each other through
reading and writing words, ideas, and feelings, but also how
writing or expressing self in an online environment can help
persons find unexpected answers and possibilities.[15, 17]
1.2 Literature review
There is evidence supporting the effectiveness of, and sat-
isfaction with, web-based learning.[18–23] Boling, Hough,
Krinsky, Saleem, and Stevens[24] affirmed that students pre-
ferred courses that are more interactive and that include
multimedia for teaching-learning. But as noted by others,
enhanced technology without a change in pedagogy does not
alter students’ experiences.[25] Price and Kirkwood[25] con-
tend there is limited evidence to demonstrate that educators
have changed their teaching practices with the introduction
of technology, and if they have, it is not known how those
changes influence the teaching-learning experience. Educa-
tors indicate that technology that helps meet students’ needs
is more compelling for change, but that insufficient time and
limited resources make changes in actual teaching practices
unlikely.[26] Further, many educators have not had opportu-
nity to study and incorporate principles from the emergent
pedagogies (e.g., constructivism, connectivism, and complex-
ity) that require student engagement and teacher facilitation
in imaginative and co-emergent inquiry.[24, 27]
1.3 Complexity pedagogy
Complexity thinking has been informing educators for more
than a decade. There are numerous complexity scholars and
educational theorists who have influenced our thinking and
teaching.[1, 28–40] Complexity thinking fosters provocative
and divergent thinking, deep understanding, and innovative
insights that co-emerge in community discussions.[35–37] Dif-
ference is valued and leveraged in complexity arenas such
that questions and different understandings come forth in
unexpected ways. Complexity teaching requires an active,
learner-centered approach where students and teachers influ-
ence each other’s emerging understandings.[27, 40]
There are numerous resources for pursuing a deeper un-
derstanding of how complexity thinking can inform edu-
cation.[28, 40] Fundamental principles from these complexity
theorists/educators that influenced our actions as educators
include the following:
• Complex systems are emergent, dynamic and self-
creating/organizing
• Complex systems cannot be controlled or managed by
outsiders
• Complex systems change in non-linear ways that in-
volve feedback loops and unexpected shifts in direc-
tion
• Humans are complex systems that relate with multiple
other complex systems in dynamic and ever-changing
ways
• Knowledge and understanding are personal, historical,
embodied, and dynamic according to the intentions,
desires, and goals of the persons involved
• Teaching-learning is a process in which all members
of a networked community contribute
Guided by these principles educators from Fine Arts, Digital
Imaging, Education, Psychology and Nursing embarked on a
three-year process to create a complexity-inspired e-learning
platform called Daagu.
2. DESCRIPTION OF TEACHING -LEARNING
WITH COMPLEXITY PEDAGOGY
2.1 The e-learning platform
Daagu is a web-based platform that supports trans-
disciplinary discussions and teaching-learning by encour-
aging the sharing of different perspectives and experiences.
The platform facilitates students to direct and create their
own learning pathways; increases student engagement; cap-
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tures crucial moments of insight; identifies areas of interest
and disinterest; and provides teachers and students with a
visual map of the activity within a set of discussions and/or
across disciplines. There is no menu or blueprint for enacting
complexity pedagogy, as one would expect with a non-linear
and emergent frame of thinking. We did however develop
guidelines to help shape the way we might connect with
students and that informed our complexity pedagogy.
2.2 Guiding complexity pedagogy
The nine educators involved in this project began by establish-
ing the liberating-constraints[30] for the courses being taught.
Liberating-constraints are the big ideas or perspectives of the
course or subject of study that establish boundaries for stu-
dent choices of pathways and connections for learning. The
liberating-constraints help students to align or situate their
contributions to the curriculum. An example of liberating-
constraints for a course on Global Health, for example, might
be creating the following four perspectives to guide discus-
sions and curriculum growth: health and poverty, health and
politics, health and social justice, and health and gender.
Complexity thinking leverages different views and a diver-
sity of experiences in order to challenge assumptions and
provoke discussion of issues important to the course of study
and student interests. The idea of leveraging and highlighting
difference–different experiences, perspectives, possibilities,
thinking–is particularly appealing as a source for the co-
emergence of novel ideas and new understandings.[27, 33] In
order to deepen our understanding and practice as educators,
we developed the following guidelines based on complexity
scholars.[27–40]
• Establish the liberating-constraints–the big ideas that
contain course-relevant perspectives and ideas.
• Craft critical questions that require various views and
conceptual approaches–stretching the realm of possi-
bility for student engagement with diverging ideas.
• Establish essential understandings to invite a deeper
level of thinking and exploration of conceptual rela-
tionships.
• Encourage reflection and recursion of ideas to foster
the learner’s ability to organize, combine, and formu-
late additional questions.
• Acknowledge co-emergent learning for learner aware-
ness and growth.
• Encourage learners to recognize and reflect on their
aha moments as expressions of learning.
• Request that students express their emotions relating
to learning within community using emotive icons.
• Invite students to contribute resources and discussions
to curriculum.
• Recognize and identify patterns of thinking across
groups of students, domains, or spans of time so as to
provoke learners’ insights/thinking.
• Provoke, perturb and challenge ideas in order to ex-
pose unstated assumptions.
• Help students make connections to neighboring ideas
and/or contexts by modeling this process in the teach-
ers’ own posts.
• Help students to make explicit the application of
ideas/concepts to their embodied practices and day-to-
day life activities.
• Invite diverse perspectives, Does anyone think about
this differently? Or can anyone add another view here?
• Encourage rigor of thinking through meaningful con-
versation that is open and emergent with others.
Complexity pedagogy can be enacted in any delivery mode–
face to face, blended, or fully online. However, our expe-
rience has been that e-learning technology can facilitate or
hinder complexity pedagogy as a way of engaging and re-
lating with students. The Daagu platform, although still
being evaluated, revised, and developed, holds promise for
complexity-based education.
2.3 Participants
We are faculty colleagues teaching in undergraduate and
graduate nursing programs. The MScN program includes
core courses: a six-credit theoretical/philosophical founda-
tions of nursing, three research courses (a total of nine course
credits), and a three-credit advanced nursing practicum. Stu-
dents can complete a thesis option in addition to required
electives. In the undergraduate program, some electives (a
course on aging, and one on women’s health), are offered in
blended and on-line formats. We collaborated on this project
because we shared the concern that students lacked oppor-
tunities to engage and collaborate in a networked learning
community committed to conversing about different ideas
that challenge the assumptions of everyday practices and col-
lectively generate possibilities for moving forward. We were
dissatisfied with the notion of one teacher with authority who
selects content, sequences that content in modules or books,
and then dispenses content in predefined ways that do not
typically involve student choice or contribution. We were
also dissatisfied when students expected to give content back
to teachers, in the teacher’s preferred ways, without bringing
their own voices and views into the thinking arena. In many
of our experiences of teaching online, students analyze and
synthesize ideas from the literature with a flare of habit that
does not often get below the surface of restating others’ ideas.
Students have not typically been invited into spaces where
collective inquiry of difference generates insight and new
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learning. We want to support a more critical, thoughtful,
and meaningful way of engaging students that changes the
role of educator from truth dispenser to truth questioner in a
distributed field of teaching-learning where all participants
contribute to the curriculum in an organic and dynamic way.
We believe that complexity thinking provides direction for
creating this kind of educational space.[41]
Specific courses being taught by authors include: a founda-
tions theory and philosophy course in the MScN program,
and graduate electives on suffering, grieving, and education.
Graduate courses are capped at 15 students. Three undergrad-
uate courses with 40 students, one on Women’s Health and
two on Aging have been taught in the fully on-line platform.
GM was the project lead for developing Daagu and NC was
on the original team of educators informing the complex-
ity pedagogy. GM also worked with ST and NC on a re-
search project evaluating the effectiveness of an educational
intervention for enhancing the compassion and critical con-
sciousness for health care professionals. Other faculty, FBP,
CJ-S, and ID have experience with complexity pedagogy
and e-learning technology, while the rest (EP, NJ, CO) had
experience with technology-enhanced education but were
novices with complexity pedagogy. Even though we were all
open to the basic ideas and approaches to teaching-learning
with complexity, some of us still experienced anxiety and
discomfort with letting go of the more traditional content-
driven and linear teaching methods that had directed our own
educational and teaching experiences.
For the report described here each of us addressed in a jour-
nalistic style several questions beginning with our overall
experience of the complexity pedagogy and the Daagu plat-
form, our likes and dislikes, the quality of the engagement
we experienced with students, and how we might improve
the platform. The lead author first compiled views of the
group into one document and then all participated in revisions
and clarifications. The following compilation represents our
collective experiences.
3. EXPERIENCES WITH COMPLEXITY E-
LEARNING USING THE DAAGU PLATFORM
At this early point, our overall experience with complex-
ity pedagogy and the e-learning platform Daagu is mostly
favourable. We see a different kind of student engagement
and participation that is, we believe, of a higher quality than
what we have witnessed in our prior courses using other
Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Moodle and
WebCT. Several notable benefits are elaborated in order to
consider the implications for our work as nursing educators.
The first thing we noticed was that because students had the
ability to initiate discussion forums based on their own cu-
riosities and beliefs, within the boundaries of the perspectives
and essential understandings (liberating-constraints) of the
course, they were highly engaged with ideas and each other.
The freedom to choose the context for their own learning
facilitated student involvement in expected and unexpected
ways. For instance, we expected that students would add to
the curriculum by initiating discussions and uploading re-
sources, but we found the amount of student-to-student con-
versing and exploring somewhat surprising. In one course,
Theoretical and Philosophical Foundations of Nursing Sci-
ence, students contributed almost half of the curriculum re-
sources (scholarly articles, TedTalks, YouTubes, artforms,
etc) generated in one 12-week term. In two undergradu-
ate courses, after the first three weeks, students regularly
contributed curricular content in order to meet learning out-
comes with the teacher facilitating, questioning, perturbing,
and highlighting connections among ideas.
As educators, we found that teaching with complexity think-
ing was liberating and challenging–at the same time. Letting
go of the more familiar teacher-driven style in order to invite
students to lead their own learning process was unfamiliar;
especially, since there was a good deal of uncertainty that we
would meet pre-defined learning outcomes. The uncertainty
highlighted our need to trust that students, when supported
as a community of teachers-learners, would not only learn,
they would exceed learning expectations. Our role as educa-
tors shifted from expounding on what we thought about the
topics under discussion to posing questions and encouraging
students to ask their own questions and to share resources
they found meaningful in their process of inquiry. While it
was a leap of faith that this would work, it was gratifying
to witness the multiple unfolding conversations and the di-
versity of perspectives being shared. It became evident that
students are very adept at exploring questions and issues that
are meaningful to them. Our challenge was to recognize op-
portune moments to interject questions or comments creating
perturbations and inviting alternative views and the closer
scrutiny of assumptions. We developed a different kind of
expertise with a much longer “shelf life”: that of learning
how to teach and learn in a networked community.
Complexity pedagogy also enabled us to make connections
and interconnections with groups of students. Student ex-
pressions emerged from a variety of contexts including nurs-
ing, psychological, spiritual, cultural and critical as they
considered intersecting ideas across different experiences.
As ideas were transferred across context and domain there
were also opportunities to see and appreciate a whole pic-
ture and a larger reality. This level gazing may be linked
with Romesin, and Verden-Zöller’s,[42] insights that there are
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both local, linear connections and holistic sensibilities in hu-
man discernment–both are required for understanding. Com-
plexity pedagogy as a methodology for engagement enables
possibilities for creating a culture of teaching and learning
that promotes dialogue while expanding inclusiveness and
diversity. Complexity offers one possibility for more collab-
orative, participatory, and transformative learning practices
within the context of higher education.
Several of us had previously been influenced by scholars
like Dewey[43] and Freire[44–46] so it was not a big stretch
to think about pedagogy from a complexity thinking stance.
The “teacher as midwife”[45] metaphor has affinity with some
fundaments of complexity–such as going with the students’
ways and choices and seeing the processes involved within a
much larger context of interconnections. The ideas of non-
linear learning, openness, reflection, critical thinking, and
empowerment resonated among early educational activist
thinking and complexity pedagogy. Several of us have also
been influenced by the phenomenological and hermeneutic
traditions in philosophy and nursing. We shared the belief
that learning is not predominantly about exchanging content
and synthesizing information. Complexity pedagogy sup-
ports learning as a dynamic, generative process that builds
on the learning and insights co-emerging in a community of
networked learners.[27]
Yet, some of our emerging experiences of teaching/learning
with Daagu also prompted us to challenge a seemingly hid-
den and underdeveloped aspect of complexity pedagogy, the
reality that students and teachers are political subjects embed-
ded in political structures who do not share equal power and
interests in constructing “liberating knowledge”[45, 46] about
the world, with an intent to reflect on/act upon/transform it.
In the aforementioned research study that engaged a group
of health care providers (HCP) in on-line discussion around
compassionate practice and social justice, the authors in that
study noticed that while HCP-participants readily took up ev-
eryday practice issues such as patient discharge and time con-
straints in the online discussions, other issues that are equally
relevant to providing compassionate care to a diverse popu-
lation, such as addressing racism and social injustice, were
left relatively “silent” and un-explored. This observation has
highlighted for us some important but under-examined issues
in relation to a learner-directed educational approaches such
as complexity pedagogy. We question, how could complex-
ity pedagogy take into account the social positions of the
learners, including how their race/class/gender positions may
limit their learning possibilities and pedagogical interests?
In the above study, some of us pondered if the relatively
privileged positions of most of the HCP-participants in terms
of their White, English-speaking, middle class backgrounds
may have largely protected them from being the subjects
of racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination, and
thereby limited their awareness of and interests in exploring
critical issues that may seem to have little relevance to their
lives. We remain open to better understanding our role as
critically thinking educators within a complexity pedagogy.
Our experience of likes and dislikes further clarify.
4. EXPERIENCES WITH COMPLEXITY AND
THE E -LEARNING PLATFORM
We conversed about what we liked and did not like about
complexity pedagogy in the Daagu platform. Likes revolved
around: seeing co-emergent curriculum that grew over the
course term situated on student interests, high engagement,
deep reflection and critical inquiry; the unburdening that
accompanied the move away from having to be the expert au-
thority; the freedom for students to start where they wanted
with ideas and with questions that were the most interest-
ing, perplexing, thought-provoking and/or affirming; and the
non-linear patterns of collaboration, growth, and learning.
We propose that complexity pedagogy helped students to
make more meaningful connections to practice situations
and enabled them to see the big picture with all the lay-
ers of issues and complex subtleties of real life. Students
explored and appreciated the extreme unpredictability and
nonlinearity in pathways to recovery for persons diagnosed
with mental health issues, for instance, and also the complex
and interconnected patterns of human relating in families
and communities. We liked that the learning expressed by
students was deep, original, and authentic in nature and that
it often penetrated below the surface of ideas to question
unexamined assumptions. Students freely contributed differ-
ent perspectives, and explored the implications of holding
different positions.
One example of this deep and more critical learning was
students’ explorations of the questions: What is truth? and,
What is knowledge? This led to discussions of evidence-
based practice (EBP), which has become a widely accepted
expectation of professional practice in nursing—so much so
that students were initially shocked to realize that this is a
controversial topic. Upon exploring, they discovered that
what counts as evidence has been debated over time, and
that there are vigorous critiques of the EBP movement in
the literature. As they sorted through the arguments for and
against EBP, students shared how it has been taken up in their
practice settings with little, if any, critique, and how they in-
corporate it in their own practice with little question of fit or
effectiveness. From our previous experiences, discussions
demonstrated a depth and sophistication of critical reflection
and thinking that surpassed discussions in previous sections
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of this course. Addressing the quality of engagement, one
teacher stated: “The quality of the learning expressed by stu-
dents on Daagu was high. The majority of students expressed
that they were very engaged using this platform”. Overall,
the level of interactivity we witnessed with a complexity
approach is enhanced compared with other pedagogical ap-
proaches.
Our dislikes, or perhaps better stated as challenges, related
to both the Daagu platform and complexity pedagogy. As
anticipated with the new technology there were glitches that
took some attention and time to resolve. The lack of structure
for some students was threatening and they required more
guidance and direction during uncertain times. In addition,
it takes time to read and respond to student contributions–
although not necessarily more effort compared to other e-
learning platforms. Another challenge we discussed linked
with our own uncertainties of moving to a new way of teach-
ing. It felt like being pushed and pulled outside of our com-
fort zones of familiarity and tradition. We were anxious
about performing our educator responsibilities and about
meeting our own expectations for quality education. One
of us submitted, “There are some particular challenges with
the open-endedness of Daagu in my experience–times when
students feel overwhelmed with the options and possibilities
that can be pursued and with the lack of time constraints, like
a week for each discussion.”
We also compared our own experiences of teaching with vari-
ous e-learning platforms over the past decade. As a group we
are very familiar with WebCT, Moodle, and the incorporation
of other technologies to aid learning. We noted that while
students can certainly have discussions and share resources
in Moodle, it is a platform that encourages teacher-directed
progression, with the teacher organizing and presenting con-
tent either chunked in modules or in weekly “sections”. The
linear format of Moodle creates isolated silos of ideas and
discussions with limited opportunities for students to drive
the process of inquiry based on their own questions and the
directions these queries lead them. By comparison, the use of
complexity pedagogy is relatively unbounded, with students
being encouraged to pursue their own lines of inquiry related
to some core questions and course concepts. Students are
free to choose the discussions in which to participate, and
to add new discussions as interests emerge. Although this
freedom is frightening for some, the majority embraced the
freedom of learning in community.
An organic curriculum in Daagu opens up during the course
of study–like choreography it moves as the partners shift
and attend to various ideas and questions. Teachers typically
begin two or three discussions with critical questions and
rich-media resources to launch the course, and students tend
to begin contributing resources and discussion threads within
the first few weeks. The platform itself is visually appealing
and the ability to create a discussion thread using an image
provides the user the opportunity to identify the discussion
in a visual way. The function of the growing thread of dis-
cussion facilitates engaging with the collective. Given that
the Daagu platform provides users with the ability to access
any thread at any time, rather than within a delineated time
or discussion frame, reinforces the notion of complexity and
enhances the interactivity among the learners.
In summary, compared to other LMS, we think that Daagu
was more aesthetically pleasing and more expressive of
complexity thinking with its design for meaningful engage-
ment, self-organization, and organic growth. The non-
hierarchical nature of curricular growth also demonstrates
student-centeredness; once students figured out there was no
one authority figure related to their learning or thinking, and
no predefined path for achieving learning outcomes, most
embraced the complexity platform. Students bounced ideas
off each other and provided links to content that went far be-
yond what one teacher might have imagined or selected. Like
other LMSs, evaluation of student performance still happens,
but it shifts to how much students express deep exploration
and understanding, rather than regurgitating a “one right
way” of interpretation and answering. Complexity thinking
and the Daagu platform better supports, we believe, students’
critical thinking and questioning–which better promotes their
becoming reflective practitioners.
4.1 Improving complexity-based e-learning
With respect to ways to improve the experience of teaching
complexity-based pedagogy, we are considering several el-
ements linked with the Daagu technology and developing
one’s way with complexity pedagogy. Regarding the tech-
nology, group mentoring for teachers and verbal, visual, and
written orientation guides for students help. However, Daagu
is an intuitive platform that does not present major hurdles
for students or teachers. Still, having a responsive techni-
cal team to address issues or glitches is needed with any
e-learning platform.
The development team is currently working on phase two of
Daagu which will bring a new level of interactivity across dis-
ciplines and conceptual borders, and that will also improve
basic functions for visualizing data, networks, student dis-
cussion views, emotional intelligence, and contributions to
the curriculum. Several other features need to be addressed,
such as more robust administrator functionality for teachers
to be able to create groups and accept assignments in the
platform. Spaces for personal journaling for students and
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teachers and enhanced connectivity among learners and their
ideas would be helpful additions. We have different views
about how many characters to permit for student and teacher
posts–some want a limit of 1,000 characters–which forces
brevity–others want 5,000 for more depth and storytelling.
While students are reporting favourable experiences with the
complexity pedagogy in the Daagu platform, as one educator
stated, “I do not need Daagu to teach in this way.” Educa-
tors can transform their pedagogy and engagement patterns
with students in any format. If, however, educators want an
e-learning platform that supports a complexity-inspired ped-
agogy, Daagu may be helpful. We have student comments
and quotes to support that their learning is more meaning-
ful, deep, and engaged than experiences with other online
platforms. Daagu may not be appealing for students who
want to be specifically directed in their learning. Students’
experiences will be described in another publication due to
the focus and length of this paper.
Regarding the pedagogy, there are limited resources about
e-learning approaches with complexity pedagogy. Our group
found that a mentoring process among faculty is helpful.
The first courses were taught by three of us (GM, FBP, ID)
who shared experiences and course materials–in order to
be supportive and to learn in community. It is also helpful
for faculty to shift their expectations about how the course
might unfold. As there are typically only a few required
readings to begin, students are encouraged to explore within
the liberating constraints, to move from where they are to
where they want to go in light of learning outcomes. Faculty
are building banks of resources for various courses that will
be available to students and teachers who want to question,
perturb, consider, and provoke different views. Resources
include case studies, videos, literature, and art forms to both
animate discussion and enable a wide range of emerging
themes to be pursued in more depth.
We do have some unanswered questions and perturbations
that invite additional conversation. For instance, complexity
has been questioned for its lack of apriori ethical guidelines
and for its moral puzzlements.[35] Certainly values and ethi-
cal relating are priority foci for a nursing program committed
to relationships, inclusiveness, and social justice. We do not
embrace the idea of apriori ethical standards but we also
know that in professional nursing some ways of thinking
and acting are more desirable than others. We do want to
instill certain values and ways of relating that are critical,
compassionate, and collaborative. How do we engage in the
very real issues of social justice including the discomforts
of having one’s privileges challenged? How do we address
the resistances to critical thinking on race, class, and gender
differences? And how, in an e-learning platform, are issues
of power and race, class, and gender differences brought
to light? Complexity pedagogy creates inclusive spaces for
conversing with the belief that difference and diversity are
generative, necessary, and valued. We propose that thought-
ful reflections and dialogues actually help students to make
better ethical decisions because as understanding expands
about issues of power, discrimination, and exclusion, mindful
deliberations and discernments surface in conversations.
Osberg[39] reminds us that our work as educators is to invite
and inspire students to change in particular ways. Com-
plexity thinking does not, we believe, change this intention.
Woermann and Cilliers[47] help us to see that: “ethics should
be understood as something that constitutes both our knowl-
edge and us, rather than as a normative system that dictates
action” (p. 448). This inherent presence means, according to
these authors, that we must hold a critical and open attitude
toward the limits of knowledge. Ethics is always present
in our ways of thinking and acting, and we bear the burden
of the uncertainty that we cannot know ahead of time how
to act–we can only live the commitment to an ethical con-
science and to the awareness of how choices happen in the
here and now and we can never know all the complexities
of the situations we encounter. Further, ethics are always
present in our represented forms of knowledge, our theories
and how they come to be constructed, by whom, in what po-
sitions of power and privilege. Thus, when educators guided
by complexity engage with students about complex ethical
issues, we can commit to being inclusive, to being open to
different views and consequences, and also to promoting
an ethic of trust, vigilance, social justice, transparency, and
inclusion when choosing how to think and act.
5. CONCLUSIONS
Collectively, our experiences support complexity pedagogy
as one way to achieve transformations in higher education
where teachers and learners are comfortable and skilled with
embracing difference, creativity, and authentic relating and
learning in collectives or networked spaces. We do not all
agree on some aspects of the pedagogy and the Daagu plat-
form, but at this point in time we are working together to
see what possibilities might come about that support student
engagement, creativity, and critical exploration and learning.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Funding for the creation of the e-Learning platform Daagu
was received from: the Academic Innovation Fund at York
University and the Ontario Centres of Excellence.
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http://jnep.sciedupress.com Journal of Nursing Education and Practice 2016, Vol. 6, No. 5
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST DISCLOSURE
Two of the authors, Gail J. Mitchell and Nadine Cross were
members of the team that created the e-learning platform. It
is possible that the platform will move forward on a com-
mercialization track. If the platform developed commercial
value, these two authors and the sponsoring University may
benefit financially.
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