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SD and critical pedagogy
Posted by Eric Stiens on 10/10/2008
In Reply To:SD and critical pedagogy Posted by Ana María Rosón on 10/9/2008
On Oct 9, 2008, at 3:32 AM, Ana María Rosón wrote:
SD is based on freedom and although we can say that we are "prisioners of the system" we ever have the chance to change our behaviour and make a new scenary, according our decissions and as free person.
Ana, Could you say more about this, because to me SD and systems thinking implies the exact opposite in fact - that all behaviors have unintended consequences, that systems/structures can produce counter-intuitive results, that complex systems can be and usually are extremely resistant to change, that there is no action that takes place in an isolated context, and that things are interdependent and mutually arising rather than linear and isolated
Freire, Braslavsky (in my country), Jackson (in the EEUU), Fenstermacher, etc, have the idea that the teacher and the pupil are prisioners of an hegelian system, which is impossible to change because the history is already write from the revolution or something like this.
From my standpoint a critical pedagogical approach in fact means something very different - it accepts that the student/pupil relationship is very often modeled on submission, but in fact can be an equal partnership and mutual exchange, that constructed knowledge very often serves the needs of those that are recipients of power/privilege but that creating liberatory knowledge is possible and will be grounded in the already existing experiences of the oppressed, and that in fact one of the prime roles of an educator is to show the connection between power and knowledge, and facilitate both the unlearning of dominant cultural myths that serve as oppressive tools, and empower people to work for collective liberation - so in this context, the educator is not concerned with what is "true" in the sense of absolute truth, but rather the role of knowledge in creating either systems of domination or socially just/equitable systems
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On Oct 9, 2008, at 9:54 AM, Dan Proctor wrote:
“nearly all the models I see being published are about these isolated problems of making supply chains work better and increasing profit margins”
How far would SD have gotten if it didn’t have the power of increasing profits? Are you familiar with its development starting 50+ years ago, and specifically how its development and propagation have been and continue to be financed? System dynamicists are in much the same predicament as economists with regard to who pays the piper and what the tune consequently sounds like.
Um yes, that's exactly my point. Who pays the piper affects the tune, therefore much "scientific inquiry" is in fact a tune that is pleasing to those who hold power. I'm not sure what you are saying here: that the master's tools will never tear down the master's house, or that SD is somehow beholden to the desires of business/management schools and corporations since that is where much of it has been developed?
regarding Marx/Smith/Mills and whatever other economists and social theorists we want to throw in the mix - I don't want to mire this list in a discussion about the merits or lack thereof of capitalism or the viability and desirability of various alternative socioeconomic systems. (Though I do agree that Adam Smith wouldn't recognize much of late/peak capitalism as the capitalism he was writing about, nor would Marx recognize the totalitarian command economies of the large Communist countries as what he was writing about)
I am simply proposing the idea that for those interested in a critical pedagogical approach to education, or those interested in addressing social problems at a root level, rather than a symptomatic level, that SD in particular is a relatively untapped resource - both as an educational tool in a different type of classroom that produces a different sort of thinker, a common language for discussing social theory, and as a way of analyzing social problems that could lead to better and more sustainable outcomes than the current dominant and limited approaches in many social science and public policy programs.
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And I still find it ironic, that from my perspective, many of the SD models that are out there are essentially "small-ball" technocratic models that have a very limited model boundary and seek to serve the profit making needs of large multinational corporations, when in fact nearly every SD model we have that attempts to model the economy as a subset of the ecological limits of the earth reaches the conclusion, in no uncertain terms, that the current dominant socioeconomic system is completely unsustainable and is in fact already well into overshoot/collapse. It is like saying - wow, this is a really powerful tool, but we're just going to ignore all this other knowledge that this tool has helped produce, and in fact continue to assert that it is irrelevant and wrong.
In my opinion we will one day see the events of the past two weeks as "the peak of the peak", and we now begin an unwinding of the last 200 years of relatively unchecked economic and population growth primarily unlocked by both the availability of nearly-free energy in the form of fossil fuels, the development of unsustainable but temporarily extraordinarily efficient forms of agriculture, and by writing a lot of checks that will never able to be cashed - I don't think we will ever see another society on earth that uses resources at the per-capita level of the early 21st Century American - the open question of course is whether we start trying to navigate that descent in whatever ways we are able and use it as an opportunity to shift into a more sustainable way of life, or whether we hold onto the unsustainable system as long as possible and ensure that we even further erode carrying capacity and find out just how unrelenting a balancing feedback loop can be when it is finally able to become dominant in a system
My hope is that a relatively soft depression caused by the evaporation of what was essentially hallucinatory money in the financial sector will spur more rapid movement towards sustainable systems, because I think we are still probably a decade away from the hard limits to growth really begin to affect global systems in a massive way
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