Tracing dynamics of intentions in Greek ELT

Note: I published this post in April 2014, when I was still a doctoral student, as I was preparing to go to a conference to talk about Greek ELT. Although I have moved on intellectually, I have chosen to retain this post here as evidence of my developing thinking on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory. If you scroll past the abstract, you can find an update that connects this early work with my more recent thinking on intentionality.

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I am happy to announce that I will be presenting a paper at the annual conference of the BAAL Language Learning and Teaching SIG in Leeds this July [2014]. Here’s the abstract that I sent in.

Update: Rethinking intentionality

You can read more about the conference and my presentation here. This conference was, in some ways, the ‘dry run’ before I defended my thesis in November 2014, and winning the best paper bursary¹ helped my confidence a lot at a time when such a boost was necessary.

The ‘dynamics of intentions’ idea, which appears in the abstract, continues to feature in my thesis and the book that I published from it, A Language School as a Complex System. I believe it captures the ‘messy’ character of multi-agent systems well. On re-reading my work, however, I wonder if my description manages to convey the dynamism that is core to Complex Dynamic Systems.² I suppose that’s an unavoidable result of my research design: a longitudinal study, perhaps spanning many years, might have yielded different perspectives.³

However, my definition of ‘intentionality’ evolved: in the abstract, it means something similar to ‘intention’. I had used the term to suggest that intentionality was something more abstractly, and perhaps unstated, akin to the collective intention of a group, or a direction of ideological motivations. In my publications with Juup Stelma since then (e.g., The Intentional Dynamics of TESOL), we have foregrounded this ‘directedness’, bringing our definition closer to the philosophical concept of intentionality, as described by Brentano (1874).⁴

A revised definition of intentionality

We argue that complex dynamic systems are not ‘real’ in the sense that a car, a scone or a falling piano are real. They are collections of ‘things’ and relations between them, which are assigned meaning by the human mind’s attempt to explain something. A group of interacting students, teachers, books, curricula etc. could be a complex system of language education. A partially or fully overlapping set of elements might be a complex system of ideological reproduction. What defines the system is its ‘aboutness’, i.e., its intentionality.

Looking back at my 2014 abstract, I think that today I would describe the same situation as a complex ‘system of systems’, which connected complex systems of protectionism, integration, etc. I think that the same model has a lot of explanatory potential for discussing situations where many agendas overlap, e.g., in language policy.

That’s why I believe that Complex Dynamics Systems Theory works well as a meta-theory in language education. If you’d like, you can read more about this idea in this post, written about ten years after this one.

Footnotes

1. The best way to spend that money, by the way, is on a post-conference dinner with the runner-up. ↩︎
2. Dynamic? Dynamical? Dynamics? You will find all three terms in the literature, and I am conscious that my own usage is inconsistent. I understand that some people use these distinctions where nuance is useful for their theory. I do not see the need for this here, though. ↩︎
3. Or not. I suspect that changes at this level would require decades to become evident. Complex systems can be volatile, but as one ‘jumps levels’ upwards, structure is easier to observe than activity. ↩︎
4. Brentano, F. (1995/1874). Psychology from an empirical standpoint. Routledge. ↩︎

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