Context Changes Everything - A Conversation with Dr. Alicia Juarrero

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

I think the kids are very much aware of ecological issues and the interdependence that is the hallmark of ecological issues is exactly the reason why you have to bring context back in.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me again. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. As you will have heard from previous episodes with Nora Bateson, Dave Snowden, Keith Davids, Mete Boll, Helen Street, and others, the importance of context comes up a lot. The rich and constantly changing reality of what, where, when, how, and with whom we learn are all part of the complexity that great educators work with every day. One of the things I'm I'm really interested in is how would teaching and learning shift if we really took context seriously? Alicia Huareiro has spent her life researching how we understand the complex contexts that we live in. In her most recent book, Context Changes Everything, Alicia offers a language of constraints to help us move beyond narrow Cartesian-Newtonian descriptions of the world. Alicia is the co-founder and president of Vector Analytica. She's also visiting scholar at the University of Miami and professor emeritus of philosophy at Prince George's Community College. You can find links to her other work and previous books in the show notes.

Hey, Alicia. Good morning.

How are you?

Good morning.

I'm good.

How are you?

Good, good, good.

Beautiful. All right. Thank you, Alicia. It's amazing to be able to chat to you. I am only a little daunted to speak to someone of your stature, but I think there is such an important conversation that needs to be had here about context and it's kind of, it keeps coming up and in a lot of my conversations, the importance of taking context seriously. You know, I've had previous conversations on the podcast with Dave Snowden. I know he's a friend of yours and Nora Bateson and Helen Street about contextual wellbeing and lots of conversations about context, but it's quite an easy word to throw around, right? But it's not, people are not always clear on what exactly we mean when we're talking about context. So, and your book, Context Changes Everything. I think says it all, right? It really does.

It feels that way sometimes. You sort of can't unsee it after you've seen it.

Right.

Seems that way.

Amazing. Yeah, I'm sure. So your book is incredible. I mean, there's a lot of it that is challenging for a lay reader, let's say, but it's, as you say, it's kind of opening up a whole world of understanding about what context might mean. So maybe, you know, if we can kind of go through some of that today, I would love that in just kind of small steps, perhaps for a kind of an educator audience would be so interesting. 'Cause I think, as I say, I think it's an important conversation.

Thank you.

Perhaps what we'll do first is just frame it out in terms of the what of education and of teaching young people, helping young people to be able to understand the world, right? And themselves better. But we say that, but then we've got a quite a particular version of the world and the way the world works that we often teach based on Newtonian Cartesian ideas, right? And so that's where I'd love to start if we can, just in terms of why have we been so reluctant to take context seriously in some of that kind of modern Eurocentric science and philosophy in the way that we've, we've framed out the world in the textbooks and in the decontextualized bits of knowledge that we share.

I think Context was taken seriously in the ancient world. You see that in Aristotle's notion of the distinction between theory and practice. And there were some fields like medicine and ethics and law that Aristotle did not think would be amenable to sciencia teoria precisely because of context. You fast forward that film and you get to Galileo. And Galileo says, oh, you know, you can ignore friction. Look, this works. If you ignore friction, then the feather falls as quickly as the stone, correct? And when Newton then formulated his laws of motion and they worked so beautifully universally, we could predict eclipses for eons in the future. Although Newton knew that if you brought in a third body to his equations, you get what is known as the three-body problem. And that is all the orbits of the planets get messed up when you bring in a third. Newton knew that, but it worked so well at this scale locally that it's hard to argue against the successes of Newtonian mechanics. And I think that once that happens, almost every single science tried to emulate, uh, Newtonian science to the point that if you read Kant's The Metaphysics of Morals, for example. And Kant writes in the 1700s. He dies in 1804. So late 1700s. That's 100 years after Newton or more. And Kant is very interested in making sure that when we talk about the metaphysics of morals, we don't bring in circumstances that make people behave certain ways. So he doesn't use the word sociology. That word hadn't been invented. But basically saying that's sociology, that's not really metaphysics of ethics. That's not metaethics. And why? Because everybody was enamored of Newtonian science. And so I think the one discipline that was harder to pigeonhole and shoehorn into that framework was biology. Biology knew there were all sorts of interdependencies and that you really couldn't take an organism out of its context and its environment, but anthropology tried. We tried to look at things as if in a test tube, as if in a lab. And it was only with ethology— what?— with Konrad Lorenz at the beginning of the 20th century that they decided, no, we've got to look at this thing in situ, right? And so the notion of a niche or a habitat, which is how I think of context, took a while to bring back in. And in part, I think, because of how difficult the looping circular causal relationships that are responsible for the creation of a niche or a habitat is still with Yale.

So if we, like, if we're kind of thinking about it in the context of education and teaching young people, you know, as you said, dropping a feather or, you know, teaching young people how the world works, do you think that from what you've said there, it was almost just a convenient myth to ignore this messiness of the context that affects things? Or, I mean, was it just the power of the conceptual apparatus that Newtonian physics brought?

I think it's the power of the conceptual apparatus. But in addition to that, you get the— I'm hoping to go to Bologna sometime the end of the year, and Bologna was founded in 1034. I think that taking education out of the tutorial frame where it's a mentor, a tutor working together with an apprentice and creating classrooms. That format itself, I think, tended towards a one-size-fits-all approach. It was much more difficult to take into account the idiosyncrasies of each student when you're in a classroom than when you're just working one-on-one. So I think it's a combination of both. The fact that the Newtonian framework was so incredibly powerful at prediction, whereas before prediction was almost like magical prophecy. It wasn't scientifically based. So combine that with the format in which instruction is imparted. And that's, I think, a recurring challenge because if you're going to scale up education, which obviously universities did, then how do you— and I struggled with— I taught for 31 years. I struggled with that. And I think at one point Kant also says something about, well, you aim your teaching at the middle and hope you hit. It almost sounds like the bowling theory of education. Aim the ball towards the middle and hope you hit as many as possible. And obviously that is not the way to go.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's true. And I'd like, I really would love to talk about the how in a bit, but just dwelling on the what a bit more as well. So for example, what's presenting to us now that is really questioning the inadequacy of the Newtonian framing, right? Because I've heard you talk about, like, for example, I'd love to talk about efficient cause and how dominant, how widely we assume that that's how cause and effect works in the world. But what, like, what would you point to as examples of the things where we could say to young people, for example, we could say, look, this actually doesn't work very well as a conceptual apparatus because of this.

I think the kids are very much aware of ecological issues, very concerned with ecological issues and the interdependence that is the hallmark of ecological issues.

Right.

Is exactly the reason why you have to bring context back in because you cannot isolate individual components because you lose the coherence or the emergent properties or the integration or what, or the relation. You certainly lose the relationships that make the whole the whole. And as soon as— I mean, I'm fond of quoting Montaigne. Montaigne used to say, il faut tuer pour analyser. You have to kill it to really break it down into component parts and analyze it because the life, which is an emergent property, is gone once you just try to reduce the interdependencies. And I think that's become increasingly apparent. You know, you wipe out a tiny little plankton in the ocean and you think, "Oh, that's— who cares? Tiny little plankton." And you realize that it has ramifications throughout the system and then everything falls apart. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have to— I just have to say, you've just kind of hit a point for me on Montaigne because I'm sitting here in Bordeaux, right? And he said, He's a hero of mine. He was mayor of Bordeaux and he's— I like Stephen Toulmin's book.

Yes, Cosmopolis.

Right, exactly. Because I think his thesis there is that if they'd taken Montaigne and the humanists, you know, the skeptics and the humanists more seriously than Descartes, perhaps we wouldn't have kind of quite got ourselves into the mess we've got, or modernity would've had a slightly different flavor to it, maybe. Right.

Well, and Toulmin points out that Montaigne is probably the last person to appreciate seeing things from a whole lot of different perspectives.

Right, exactly.

And talks also about, that was the last period where you have triptychs. And triptychs are three entirely different perspectives. Once the Renaissance figured out perspective, one, and that vanishing point in the end, it was the realism that enabled— yeah, in painting, for example, there was no going back. It was— we had to go through that process before we realized, yeah, but you know what, there may be a lot of different vanishing points depending on where you're standing. Yeah, but we had hoped that— I think, again, with— Thomas Nagel calls it the view from nowhere. We had always aspired to the view from nowhere because it seemed so objective and real, and, and this is reality, this isn't just my perception of it. We have to go through that process.

Yeah, and I, I think that's— I mean, that's a huge part of it, isn't it? Is that drive to like to somehow pin down the objective reality that is out there, that is separate from me, that we can tell our children about, that is, there's no arguing about it. It's not about your own perspective. And it's, you know, this, then exactly. And then this kind of binary opposition of then, well, if it's not objective, it must be subjective and therefore lacking value.

And then the slippery slope to relativism looms. And I think people are most fearful of it in ethics. You know that? Well, wait a minute. Aristotle didn't think that you could treat ethics with a universal ruling. And his example was, which is, I think, a good model for education, and that is, do you stop teaching principles of medicine even as Aristotle knew them at the time, which is nothing compared to what we know? Do you stop teaching the principles of medicine? No. Is a good physician the one who goes by the book? No, emphatically no. A good physician is the one who's able to take the principle and then understand how the local individual, the person who's the patient, is processing those principles into their own body and into their own psyche and so on.

Exactly.

I think that's a very good example. You understand the principle, but you don't then just go— if a physician told me, oh, I just went by the book, I'd fire him and I'd be hurt, right?

Exactly. I mean, it's like this deeply mechanistic framing that we're all machines and basic. And actually I think that's how we then run our institutions and organizations, you know, because we are somehow scared of the accountability. So it's, well, I followed the rules, I followed the procedure, I followed the recipe. And it's like treating as the mechanization of everything. But I would love to, 'cause for me, when I read about you talking about efficient cause, that was a huge eye-opener for me. Because I mean, I was kind of vaguely aware of Aristotle's causes, but the way that you explained it, I think is brilliant because it shows, I think in so many ways how we have so narrowly interpreted the idea of cause and effect in so many aspects of our lives. So yeah, could you just say a little bit about efficient cause?

Well, efficient cause is the billiard ball notion of causality, and that is the cue stick It transfers energy from my arm to the cue stick, from the cue stick to the billiard ball, to that one ball, to the rest of them. And the paths they take are deterministic. They are linear. They are transference of energy that goes with the Newtonian notion that time and space are empty, featureless containers. And so you can predict. The way I got interested in this, I did my dissertation in ethics on how does intention cause behavior. Because in America and in Great Britain, the difference between first, second, third-degree murder is precisely the notion of the role of intentionality in bringing about the behavior. If I stumble and I happen to have a knife in my hand and I plunge it into the person next to me, that is not murder. That is not first-degree murder. That may be accidental. Homicide, negligent, what— but it isn't murder. Because the idea being moral responsibility must be traceable to an intention. So my question back in the day when I was doing the dissertation was, well, A, what is an intention? And B, how does the intention cause behavior? And aside from the notion of what is an intention, bringing in a Cartesian non-physical— so at this point, I don't think many scientists are going to bring that in. Then the question is, all right, so assume it's a neural pattern. How does a neural pattern operate like a billiard ball to push the motivating neuron to push the muscular neuron to get— no, you know what? That doesn't work that way. But I happened at the time to be friends with a whole bunch of people who were doing systems engineering, systems operations research, and systems analysis. And they were talking about network properties way back, way before Laszlo Barabási and all the rest of them. They were talking about network properties. You know what? There's gotta be something like that going on in the brain. It's a network phenomenon. But then the question is, how does a network, A, embody meaning? And B, how does that meaning cascade down into behavior? There's got to be another form of causation that is not just this transference of energy. It's more akin to Aristotelian formal cause, but I knew I'd be dead in the water if I tried to suggest that I was bringing back Aristotle's formal cause. So then the question is, what kind of notion, what kind of language could we talk about that would capture what I'm trying to get at without falling into classical Aristotelian terminology and ideas? Because he thought it was all built in from the start and all formal cause and effect were all built in. So then that's when I settled on the notion of constraint. That's what I I decided that constraint would give me a form of causation that was different from efficient cause, and I wouldn't get any grief from the engineers so long as I didn't use the word cause.

It's, it's so interesting, isn't it, how the hard science kind of influences what we can and can't say, right? Because in some ways, what you're talking about there is so intuitive. The kind of emergent properties of a group of people, and they're all influenced by the dynamics of the group, and that's going to influence them as individuals. It's almost obvious that there are kind of causal connections of the group dynamics, right? And the kind of those interactional dynamics. But as soon as you then try and take it into a scientific frame, you then have to be really careful with the kind of language that you start using, maybe partly because of the dominance of the logical positivist kind of way of thinking about the world, right?

And I do think that, I mean, it's still a challenge for neurology to explain how this unbelievably complex network, A, self-organizes to embody those cultural dynamics, social dynamics, and so on, and have those oftentimes subconsciously influence our behavior. And we're carrying out those dynamics even unawares.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and so you mentioned the, I mean, you mentioned the concept of constraint as your language that you were giving to some of these, you know, what are they, relational dynamics that turn up in, in these different systems that, you know, whether they're social or neurological or, you know, at all, all levels. How would you explain to someone who's never come across that term before, what, what is a constraint? And maybe any examples of what that might look like?

I try to make a distinction following Lila Gatlin's, uh, book from a long time ago between context-independent constraints and context-dependent constraints. Yeah. First of all, if you're in a situation of total randomness, total white noise, there is no organization, there is no dynamics, there is no complex system. So the first thing you need is to take a system away from equiprobability, away from randomness. And for example, a gradient will do that.

Yeah.

So even supposedly the early cosmos, the first thing that happened was this inflationary period, and that sets up a gradient, a beautiful gradient. So at least you don't have homogeneity in the entire cosmos. Polarity, chirality in the protons and the subatomic particles.

What does that mean? Chirality?

Oh, some of these subatomic particles, one spins in one direction and one spins in the other direction, or bilateralness in human beings, or that sort of thing. So these are what I consider context-independent constraints. They kind of set the stage of an inhomogeneous landscape, possibility space. But that alone, I don't think gets you complexity, because at one extreme, if you have a lot of concentration and things clump, you get a black hole. Everything would implode in that black hole, and that would be the end of it. Or if you have everything expanding and dissipating into the cosmos in expansion, then everything would dissipate, and you'd have basically nothing either. So you need something else. And I think that what happens at a certain critical density point is that what Lana Gatlin calls context-dependent, context-sensitive— I prefer context-dependent constraints— kick in. What are those? For example, I would consider that things like catalysts are context-dependent constraints, meaning they must be in the context. But catalysts, as we know in chemistry and biochemistry, do not use up energy. They do not operate as efficient causes. They simply change the likelihood and the speed at which things happen. So I consider that an enabling context-dependent constraint. I think of feedback as an enabling context-dependent constraint, which I think is incredibly important. The word catalyst is used not just in chemistry. We talk about people being catalysts.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I would think that a good teacher in a classroom is doing exactly that. They are a catalyst for the student's transformation that would enable the transformation. I used to say to students the first day of class, look, this is not going to work if you think I'm just the pitcher pouring knowledge into your brain and all you have to do is open your brain. No, it doesn't work that way. Because if I could do that, I could do that when you were asleep. This is learning. It's hard work. It's work and you're doing the work. My job is only to catalyze the process. Yeah. Maybe by asking certain questions in the right order. Yeah. See, that is a temporal context-dependent constraint. Asking the question in the right order makes a heck of a difference. Yeah. Whether the student learns, gets the aha moment or not.

Sure.

Yeah. And that's the difference in a good teacher who knows that the particular sequence matters. Yeah. Step. In the very same way, the example I really love is the swing in the playground. And that is the kick is the efficient cause, correct?

Yeah.

It transfers energy.

The energy. Yeah.

Fine. Nobody's— I'm not saying efficient cause is not important. No, obviously. But in addition to the kick and the amount of energy you transfer, the child learns to transfer in the kick on a swing in a playground. Is the timing of the kick, and the timing is as important as the energy that's transferred. And that is not an efficient cause. That is an enabling temporal cause. Correct. The same applies if you live in Denver because of the altitude. You know that your recipes have to vary because you have to put the thing in the oven longer.

It's true.

Yeah. But most of the time people don't even think about it because if you are used to, if you've lived in Denver, you're, whoever taught you to cook, your mother, whoever will say, look, you've gotta look at these recipes published in the New York Times, but then you've gotta modify 'em for where we are. But that's important because you have to take that context. So there are temporal enabling context-dependent constraints and there are spatial enabling context-dependent constraints. Again, the other example is from a playground as well, and that is a a seesaw or a teeter-totter, where each child sits is very important depending on the length of the plank and the weight of the child. But none of those transfers energy. So all of these are examples of constraints. And in the book, I thought I've got to give more examples. Buffers are examples of constraints that prevent things from happening. They don't enable, they prevent. Scaffolds are constraints that enable. There's a very good book by Caporal, Griesemer, and Wimsatt called something about scaffolding, or I can't remember what it's called, but it's about how scaffolds are aids to construction that provide local, if you want to call them adjacent, possibles. Moments of equilibrium, first of all, they point to the direction in which the step had to be taken, and then it enables, okay, I'm going to catch on. I'm going to go then to the next one. So scaffolding templates, buffers, and buffers can be temporal as well. It used to be maybe you have an audio lag buffer. So if I say anything outrageous, that happens, right? You know, you wonder, I taught for a long time and I used to teach the Monday, Wednesday, Friday 50-minute classes. And at one point, the college in its infinite wisdom decided they were going to have weekend classes. So you'd squeeze an entire semester into 3 horrendously long weekends.

Oh, wow.

It would start on a Friday at midday and would go to Sunday mid— you know what? It was the same total number of hours. But it didn't work as well. It's as if you need the buffering of the consolidation of each 50 minutes before you can sort of build on the next 50 minutes. And so the— that's a constraint. That's a temporal spreading out form of constraint that people thought, oh, it's the same number of hours in the classroom doing the same. No, you know what? Doesn't work that well.

But it's, it's so fascinating, isn't it? Because it's like none of what you're saying there on one level is at all controversial, right? It's kind of like, well, obviously, like, as humans, yeah, we're, you know, we're cooking in Denver, we're going to adapt the recipe, or, you know, with experience we learn those things, or we understand the swing or the, the seesaw. But somehow, why is it then that we've— it becomes so controversial to take those things genuinely seriously from a a kind of epistemological, ontological, scientific framing?

I think because we thought those were ancillary issues. They were secondary. Even once you get to Human Locke, they made a distinction between primary properties that were the essential traits. And that's what the table of elements, the periodic table of elements figured out. You see, Periodic table of elements talks about what's internal to each element and what's going on around. Or is your rep— well, you might get some mixtures and so on, that may— but, but the essence is inside of it. And so the idea was always to find the essence.

Yeah.

And when you do that, you remove the context. We didn't realize that for some phenomena like ecosystems, The relations are the essence. And we ignored that for— it took a long time to figure that out.

And the kind of that searching for the essence, that kind of purity, it's like it's some kind of obsession with purity somehow. Like that search for the essence has also done huge amounts of violence in the world, right? In terms of the way that we then think about people and their identity and where they come from and all these things.

Messiness doesn't seem to be as attractive as Symmetrical order.

You think?

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Well, that was, I mean, from Plato on, and invariably whenever things get complex, people, there always is a call for law and order. Law and order means this very rigid, crystal-like meaning, inflexible. And what we don't realize, that a crystal may be very pretty, but it's brittle. It took a long time to make the association between messy, dynamic, and flexible resilience as opposed to stable and permanent and brittle. And it's gonna fall apart if you stress it in any excessive way. Right.

And ultimately, in a way, I mean, it's slightly crude, but in a way that means it equals death, right? I mean, if you stop, yes. If you stop moving, yes. Because you will die, right?

Yes, yes. I had the fortune to meet Umberto Eco years ago when he had just written Foucault's Pendulum. And that's the whole point of Foucault's Pendulum. If the thing stops, then that is death. It's movement and process. I blame the philosophers. Philosophers ignored process philosophy for a long time because, again, essences had to be stable, eternal, unchanging, fixed stuff, things, a thing, a process could not be essential. I kind of joke that in the battle between Heraclitus and Parmenides way back in ancient times, Heraclitus lost. One, Heraclitus is the one who said we cannot step into the same river twice.

It's awful.

And process and so on. It's kind of interesting because when you think of it politically, we in the West write utopias from Plato's Republic on to Skinner's Walden, right? What are we looking for? We're looking for a political social system that is akin to a crystal that is fixed.

Yeah.

One interesting point is that I wrote a paper about this years ago. It was really interesting. If you look at each utopia that was written in the West, They're all isolated. The authors always make damn sure nothing comes in, nothing goes out. It's fixed. That's it. Like, once you achieve perfection.

Yeah.

And there's all sorts of religious relationships there as well. Whereas I did some research, maybe not as much as I should have, but I did some research and I found no utopias written in East Asia.

Ah, interesting.

Because the notion of flow and process and dynamics that you get in Taoism, that you get in Buddhism and so on, is much more conducive to the idea of dynamic flow and therefore a certain amount of messiness.

Yeah. And it is interesting, isn't it? When you say about process philosophy and Whitehead and people, and you know, my background's in anthropology and then, so I'm very interested in Gregory Bateson and all those ideas there. And then you've got process sociology with Norbert Elias and it's almost like it never went away, but it just got so marginalized to the sides that people, you know, there was this tiny margin of people who were just saying, no, this is really important stuff. We can't forget this.

Ah, but the philosophers we're imitating were positivists and heirs to the positivists, and they were all looking for universal laws of motion, for human nature, for teaching, for human society, for everything. So we all tried to emulate that model, right?

Exactly. So, all right, here's a fun question. If you were going to teach young people basic science right from the beginning, so like imagine a 6, 7, 8-year-old and you're starting to teach, you know, the, the kind of elemental rudimentary science, how would you do that in a way that was taking context seriously and that wasn't, you know, so I suppose my other way to say the question is, do we have to go through the Newtonian simplistic framing to then get to the really good stuff where the important stuff happens?

It's, it's a better question than you think, you know, because I grew up in Cuba and it was all memorization. It was the Spanish, French, pure memorization. When I came to the United States at age 13, I knew English, and so the language wasn't a problem. And by and large, for the most part, I had studied everything I came across. In 8th grade here, I made honor roll the first 6 weeks, not because of me, because I already had studied this, with one exception in the science classroom. The teacher went through the proverbial mung bean experiment and planted all the beans. And then one, this one, we're going to have some water, and this we're going to put in a closet, but someone's going to get some sun. And then the teacher turned and asked the students, what do you think? And I almost had a heart attack. Nobody had ever asked me what I thought, ever. And so I thought that it was a much more experientially and contextually based than at least what I was used to.

Yeah, right.

That said, there's still— I understand where you're coming from. There's still an incredible amount of very rigid way of, of teaching science. But I certainly think that taking students out to field trips and having them look That works very well for anything biological, for anything, for botany or zoology or anything like that. I'm not sure we know how to teach arithmetic.

Right, exactly.

Because there's been— I cannot remember how many iterations of new math, this, this, this. And somehow it hasn't seemed to work as well. And math is not my field. But I always would say, I wish I were better at math, but I had to do all the boring stuff, which I never got right. And what I would really would have liked is the whole idea of Hilbert spaces and all that kind of cool stuff. And I never got there, I think, because probably of the way the early stuff was taught, where my mother used to say that on my tombstone, I was going to say fast but sloppy. You know, she was absolutely right, first of all. But secondly, then I discovered that evolution selects for fast but sloppy because slow and meticulous gets eaten. So it doesn't bother me. It never did bother me. But I would always get the wrong answer, not because I didn't understand the concept, but because I did some stupid sloppy mistake in the addition. And then, and I would get very upset that I would be poorly graded when I really understood the process.

Yeah, right.

The other side of the, the coin was that I was hired actually to teach symbolic logic, not informal logic like fallacies and stuff, formal symbolic, uh, modus ponens, the works. And the last few years that I taught before I retired, I taught symbolic logic online. And it was the first time I'd really done anything online and there was software that would help that the students could work through proofs on. And let me tell you, Tim, I thought it was very useful because I had a classroom of 35 students. Even though I walked around and I had them do it while they were doing it, I was trying not to just do, do the proofs, me on the board and have them See, but have them do it. The fact that the software could check each line in the proof and stop them right there. Well, take a look at that. That's not quite right. Why? It was almost like each student had their own feedback.

Exactly. Yeah, right.

And for that, it worked very well. Now, I don't think that would work well for literature. I don't think that would work. So again, The first issue is knowing the subject matter and knowing what you can use technology for.

Yeah, no, it is. I think that's a really important insight, isn't it? Because in a way, what the technology is doing is multiplying your ability to manipulate constraints, right? In a way, right? Correct.

Correct.

So providing more feedback or, you know, putting the certain thing in a certain order, as you said. And I, I think that, I think is one of the most interesting affordances of this way of thinking about context is for me is thinking about, you know, in a classroom with 25 young people, with all these things are going on, how could we reframe the notion of a teacher in that space working with constraints, not just imparting decontextualized information, but saying actually what the teacher does is constantly works with constraints and affordances and, you know, and enabling—

providing the constraints, removing the constraints, providing enabling constraints, removing impedances, which would be the opposite of affordances. Correct. And being able to understand which each student needs and have the capacity to modify each on the fly. That's not easy to do.

No, exactly. And that's where people will then will reach for the technology because it may, you know, augment and increase your capacity to do those things fine. But that comes at a cost, as you say, because there's, I don't know, there's so much responsiveness in the human interaction that I think we're so perceptive to constraints, even though we don't have the under— we don't understand what they are. We don't have the language for it. We haven't read your book. You know, there's like, there was all that, but it's somehow built into our intuitive mechanisms. Like, we can see these things happening and we respond constantly, and the technology can't do that, right?

Correct. You wonder, some of the 10-year-olds, whether they are maybe sometimes more comfortable making mistakes with an artificial machine than they would with a human being, which has all sorts of— it's a whole different layer of rewarding and punishment and expectations and so on. And how do you organize the context so that there is the appropriate human interaction of reward? And yet at the same time, if you do have 35 students in a classroom and you can't be at each one of those 35 seats, how can you deploy the those, the affordance that the technology would provide to enhance each.

Yeah. But you know who, you know who got that really deeply was Maria Montessori. Yes. So her whole notion of the prepared environment.

Correct.

Is, is like, is, is pure, pure context, right?

It's, you know what, I should have mentioned her in the book and I never, and I didn't. It just, you just reminded me.

Yeah, that's interesting. 'Cause I think that is, yeah, absolutely. And this is one of the challenges I have with the debates around education, 'cause it's that they often split into kind of camps around certain people calling for more student agency and, you know, as you said, experiential learning and individualized instruction, all of these things. And then other people in more of a traditional camp where it's more about structure and, and kind of more explicit instruction. And, and actually, The thing that the context language does for me is it, it really blurs all of that because you then have a language that unifies.

Correct.

Whether you're a young person with quite a lot of choice in a particular environment, you're still working with constraints in that environment. You can't not be because, you know, you're not floating around in, in nothingness. Right. So, but equally, if your work, if you're choosing to as a teacher work with the constraints in a way that is more choice that you have as an educator, and you're kind of doing more of the telling and the teaching and the leading, fine. But it's still working with constraints, and it just— you're just— I think that language really helps to unify some of that.

And both constraints, enabling constraints as well as the more restrictive constraints. Once something coalesces, then obviously it falls into that category. But that's the one thing that I don't know if I've done the right thing or not, because the word constraint does come— it may not come with the baggage that causation does, but it comes with its own baggage. And that is people tend to think of constraints always as restrictive.

Yeah, right.

But I think two kids working together in a classroom on the same desk, they can be enabling constraints for one another.

Right.

And so I think we have to think in terms of enabling as well as structuring constraints or constitutive constraints that you don't want anything to be enabled because that, that's, we're back to random noise then.

Right. Yeah.

You want, as a teacher, you want to provide the enabling constraints that are generative. And I tend to think of enabling constraints as generative, those that are more likely to produce a breakthrough to a new understanding, which would be an emergent property. You don't want the child to be able to do anything, right? So, so which are the enabling constraints? And they may not be the same for each child because again, we bring our histories with us. Took me a very long time when I— I don't know if you know how community colleges work in the United States. They're often derided as 13th and 14th grade as being babysitting. They are an incredible opportunity for kids who screwed up in high school or lazy or people coming back from the workforce to study. Anyway, I taught for many, many years at a community college. The first time I did was in California, and I had come from a very sheltered environment where the child's job was to study and learn, and if you didn't, it was because you're being lazy or obnoxious or whatever. And that was the end of that. But when I realized that many of the students at the community college were struggling with— this is where I got interested in context, practically, aside from intellectually— they were struggling with being single parents, or they were struggling with horrible violence in the house so that they had to set the alarm for 3 in every morning. It was the only time they could study with peace and quiet in the house. And it just absolutely floored me. It shocked me. I did not realize that there were so many people trying to get an education within these unbelievably difficult conditions. Yeah. So society obviously has an obligation to assist in many things, and America has a very poor social safety net. Situation that can help with that kind of affordances and enabling constraints.

Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? Because again, it gives a language to that. Like, it makes me, as you were talking there, it makes me think of privilege being just more enabling constraints, whereas poverty or, you know, challenging circumstances that you're living in are, they're still constraints, but they're more structuring constraints.

Lack of enabling constraints and an incredible amount of unnecessary limiting constraints. And when you start adding in America problems of violence and we now know epigenetics, which when I first— epigenetics, I went, oh my goodness, this is context-dependent constraints. Thank goodness. Don't tell me there is no context dependence when you're seeing Genetics at work. And once we know, look at the studies with the Dutch winter. We know these can be passed on to the next generation even though they are not genetic mutations.

Right.

And so we know the contextual valence atmosphere, whatever you want to call it, can be passed on to new generations. And can affect the capacity to learn. If you're petrified that the bullet's going to come through your window, which unfortunately in the United States in an urban environment happens way too often, then how can we expect a child to learn?

Yeah, exactly. And, and that also makes me think that if you are then in a position where you can affect the contextual constraints. Like, as a teacher, you can create safe spaces. You can't, you know, you do, you have a role, and that's such a critically important role, is to work with the constraints to provide, because it has, as you say, potentially generational impact, that that context is critical, right?

It's absolutely critical. And we don't think of that when we think of our ability to teach, but we have to take all of that into As we teach.

Yeah.

And, and that's why teaching, I think, is what— like, I mean, there's a Schulman quote about teaching being one of the most complex human inventions, second to working in an emergency room in a war zone or something, right? It's like there are so many things going on in a classroom environment.

Absolutely.

That the teacher is kind of perceiving and working with constantly, and it makes it—

absolutely. Absolutely. And what happens, I think, a lot here in the United States is you have sorting of the situation within the, the classroom.

Yeah.

Sorting by ability, sorting by whatever, which makes teaching easier on the one hand, but in a sense, you, I realize you're doing a disservice to the student because that's not the environment they're going to encounter. And, and I think if you expand on that notion, one of the problems I think that complex dynamical systems poses and teaches and alerts us to is that there are no clear-cut answers to many of these questions. They are maybe ranges of probability that you might get as outcomes, but there's no nice deterministic linear, you do this and this is what's going to come out at the end. And the end result. But if you take that seriously, you realize that the way we teach in the following sense, I often would joke to friends about students who were the best students were often the worst employees because the conditions they found in the classroom, and this goes all the way through college, are well-posed questions. Yes. With clear-cut answers, with methods and procedures that lead to those clear-cut answers very clearly defined. Correct? Well, that is exactly not what the world—

Exactly. Yeah, the world is not full of well-defined formulas.

Correct. And so how do you— and yet it's very difficult to impart a theoretical concept within the messiness.

Yeah.

You have to abstract some of the messiness. So the question is, how do you do that?

But, but to your point earlier about, you know, ordinality, right? You might, as a teacher, you know that it's important for a learner to go through a particular order of conceptual developments in order to get to a certain point. That's part of the art of teaching. I think that is not necessarily just kind of dull, traditional didactic teaching. It's just the understanding that I'm gonna work with the constraints of the order in which these things need to come. I'm not gonna just throw them into the deep end of these wicked problems that the world is full of. That's somehow abdicating the responsibility of being an educator because you're not working with those constraints in, in a coherent or kind of, I don't know, sensitive way.

Correct. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Interesting.

But again, back to the same issue and the same question. Order sequence was not part of Newtonian science. They were all— everything was reversible in time and space, backwards and forwards, so it didn't much matter. I was floored when I learned that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is based on his use of matrices, which I then learned did not commute. So the sequence in which you did these operations made a difference in the outcome. That was unheard of. And that's one of the things that makes the uncertainty principle overturn and bring into doubt all of science. Order matters. No, not really. In reality, in physics, there is no preferred order. And in a sense, Einstein's relativity theory kind of supported that. And yet at the subatomic level, apparently the order of the operations of the matrix just do not commit. It's really interesting.

It is. It's like our whole human story has been us trying to run away from the messiness of real life into this kind of abstracted cleanness and simplicity.

It worked so well, we have to remember. It works so well.

Of course.

It's hard not to have fallen for its promise.

And to be fair, it has obviously afforded a huge amount of developments as a constraint in itself, right? The Newtonian insight is a constraint that has afforded loads of amazing things in terms of technological development.

Absolutely, absolutely. And now our question is, how do we reconcile the very large with the very small? And in a sense, in the classroom, we're doing that. How to reconcile the individual student with the conditions of the way we teach.

Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Thank you. I mean, this is, this is so good. I know it's kind of probably a first taste of some of these ideas for some people listening. But I think it's— they're just such important ideas. And I think if there's, yeah, some kind of contextual revolution happening that we need, right?

I think that slowly, just the validation we're getting from all this epigenetics and all that. If we say the philosopher, oh, you know, those are philosophers talking, it doesn't mean anything. But if what we're saying now all of a sudden resonates with with epigenetics, with subatomic physics and so on, then you hope for an audience that might be more receptive than they would have been otherwise.

Absolutely. Beautiful. Thank you, Alicia.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It's a lot of fun.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us, on our blog or on social media or within your own networks.