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

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
Gail Joyce Mitchell ∗1, Beryl Pilkington1, 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, School of 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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http://jnep.sciedupress.com Journal of Nursing Education and Practice 2016, Vol. 6, No. 5
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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http://jnep.sciedupress.com Journal of Nursing Education and Practice 2016, Vol. 6, No. 5
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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