Response to Stanley: Expanding Complexity: A Meditation

This response offers a meditation on education’s understanding of complexity theories. It explores a way of relating education and complexity theories that is occasioned by a reading of Darren Stanley’s “Complex Responsive Processes: An Alternative Interpretation of Knowledge, Knowing, and Understanding.” In that article Stanley lays out the characteristics of “Complex Responsive Processes” (CRP) as a framework for understanding identity formation and, as such, as a useful analogy for educators interested in “human knowledge and knowing.” This response will suggest that what Dr. Stanley has begun to uncover is more powerful than analogy; it is, in fact, a back door to reconsidering a powerful and still living strand of thought on education in light of the burgeoning power of complex explanations of our shared world.