Web 2.0 adherents often talk about the need for conversation, sometimes as if simply participating in the conversation is sufficient to promote learning. What is less often seen is the notion of intention. Philosopher Alicia Juarrero's book Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System tackles the problem of intention in action.

In her book, Juarrero asks, “What is the difference between a wink and a blink?” The wink, of course, is intentional, and the blink is not. And this is what her book is about, a contribution to action theory, which is a branch of philosophy that investigates the difference between action and non-action, intentional and unintentional behavior. Such distinctions are crucial in courts of law and have import in interpreting everyday encounters. Juarrero asserts that modern action theories are grounded in an inadequate understanding of cause and explanation. To remedy this defect, she proposes that action theories take a dynamical approach and consider intentional behavior as a complex system.

Juarrero's focus is on action. As conversations are a form of action, I wonder what role intention might play in education? What relationships exist between intention and focused attention as studied in second language acquisition? Juarrero herself wonders “whether and to what extent we can teach children to focus and channel their internal dynamics” (p. 251).

In addition to intention, Juarrero's take on stories attracted my attention. Juarrero looks at stories, or narrative, primarily as a hermeneutic tool, which can be applied to education. Stories aren't a new notion in education, but putting their usefulness in complexity terms explains how they might work in learning. Stories have the potential “to promote flexibility and resilience” (p. 253), to push one’s conceptual landscapes far from equilibrium, in children and in adults. Not all stories. Most simply reproduce social expectations and indoctrination. For stories to develop flexibility and resilience in children, they need to provide some element of surprise via juxtaposing concepts in unexpected ways. For an example, consider The Farmer’s Wife (Shah, 1998).

In this children’s story, a farmer’s wife drops her apple, which rolls into a hole. Unable to get it out, she asks a series of animals and objects (bird, cat, dog, bee, beekeeper, rope, fire, water, and cow) to help her. However, each one in turn refuses and is called “naughty.” Finally, she asks the bird to peck the cow, which sets off a cascade of actions in reverse order of animals and objects, returning to the bird again, building up to the point at which it is expected that the last (and first) animal, the bird, will retrieve the apple. However, instead, at the last second, a wind blows the apple out of the hole, “And everyone lived happily ever after.” This short story juxtaposes (1) asking according to one’s own interest with asking according to the recipient’s interest (or nature), (2) allegedly naughty beings (and the good farmer’s wife) with living happily ever after, and (3) an expected outcome from a linear cascade of causes with unexpected chance.

There are other concepts with educational and research implications presented in Juarrero’s text: interlevel causality, interdependencies, enabling constraints, and so on. Juarrero’s book is pregnant with concepts and questions for re-examining old lines of educational research and opening up new ones.

Dynamics in Action is dense. To understand its philosophical underpinnings requires careful re-readings. It is also speculative. Juarrero is using, as she says, complex adaptive systems as a theory-constitutive metaphor. However, it is insightful speculation, and it is a story worth re-reading.

Reference:

Shah, I. 1998. The Farmer’s Wife. Cambridge, MA: Hoopoe Books.

Note: Most of this post is excerpted from my review of Juarrero's book in the journal Complicity.