Complexity Science and Education: Reconceptualizing the Teacher’s Role in Learning BRENT DAVIS DENNIS SUMARA University of British Columbia ABSTRACT: This writing is structured around the question, “What is teaching?” Drawing on complexity science, we first seek to demonstrate the tremendously conflicted character of contemporary discussions of teaching. Then we offer two examples of teaching that we use to illustrate the assertion that what teaching is can never be reduced to or understood in terms of what the teacher does or intends. Rather, teaching must be understood in terms of its complex contributions to new, as-yet-unimaginable collective possibilities. KEYWORDS: Learning, teaching, teacher education, complexity science, curriculum studies. Over the past several decades, one of the more prominent themes of the educational literature in general, and the curriculum studies literature in particular, has been the nature of learning. Much of this writing has been represented in the form of critical responses to commonsensical beliefs about learning as a subjective process of “taking in” objective knowledge that is assumed to be “out there.” Such beliefs and assumptions, it is often argued, are prompted and sustained by a weave of metaphors that have come to be taken as literal in everyday conversation. In response, theorists and researchers have labored to offer a broad range of alternatives that challenge such taken-for-granted separations as inner/outer, knowledge/knower, objective/subjective, and individual / collective (see, e.g., Grumet, 1988; Lather, 1991). These perspectives include a host of constructivisms, social constructionisms, activity theory, critical theories, and socio-cultural theories, as oriented by a diversity of perspectives that include post-structuralist, feminist, and postcolonial epistemologies. As we have detailed elsewhere (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2000; Davis & Sumara, 2002), while such theories might be taken as conflicting and occasionally contradictory, in fact they can be read as complementary when one considers the implicit Interchange, Vol. 38/1, 53–67, 2007. © Springer 2007 DOI 10.1007/s10780-007-9012-5