I step with care, lightly, warily. I teach literature and writing to high
school sophomores. Let me offer thoughts on the words you wrestle over.
"Dynamics" clatters with activity, something happening before your eyes,
alive, visceral, blink-your-eyes-and-you-miss-it-reality, something to be
harnessed, questioned, tested, known. Its etymology tells all: to see its
impact on students as they watch graphs evolve-power!
"Thinking" is a conceptual foundation, a mode of thought, a paradigm, an
abstraction, epistimological, airy. Dynamics strikes me as subsumed under
"thinkings" broad heading; "thinking" is more a vision than a tool
("dynamics").
High school students get rapped on the head by six to eight teachers
daily, each with a different way of thinking." To most, "systems
thinking" is another idea to copy into a notebook, write on looseleaf paper
on test days, and then disgorge from the mind. Reaching young students, as
you know, is no small feat. Getting to their parents, as well as reaching
into other schools is harder yet. The word "Dynamics" harbors myriad,
intuitive, elegant connotations to attract a slightly older, more yawning
crowd-teachers, parents, administrators.
Just look at their eyes as you speak. They look back upon hearing "dynamics."
Were still new to it, feeling our way. High school students readily
understand "system" and "dynamics" separately, and have little trouble
assimilating them as a moniker for their work with stocks and flows, as
well as computer simulations. Traditional education, though not yet
threatened here, appears ready compost for SDs fertile concepts.
My own notions of what education ought to be, already subversive for years,
focus now on SD as a tool of integration, crossing disciplines, bringing
long disparate parties together under the same assumptions. Mathematics
and English-long the bastions of traditional classrooms and the holy grail
of ETS with its AP, SAT, PRAXIS, ad nauseum-ought rather SERVE the other
disciplines through SD. Be kinda cool, wouldnt it?
I have progress reports to complete. Keep all this going, please. Even
the math is OK.
Tim
Timothy Joy
CC-STADUS: Cross-Curricular Systems Thinking and Dynamics Using STELLA
La Salle College Preparatory
11999 S.E. Fuller Road (503)659-4155
Milwaukie, OR 97222 (503)659-2535 (fax)
tjoy@pps.k12.or.us
"I must Create a System or be enslavd by another Mans.
I will not reason and Compare; my business is to Create."
-William Blake,