About the Journal

Purpose

The purpose of this journal is to publish articles that are concerned with the application of complexity theory and related models in the field of education. Examples of related models are chaos theory, nonlinear dynamical systems theory, catastrophe theory, self-organized criticality, agent-based modeling and fractals. The intended purpose of the journal is to examine how those models can help us better describe the complex and dynamical aspects of the educational process. While the complexity aspects of the educational process are readily recognized by some researchers and practitioners (parents, teachers and school administrators), established research perspectives tend to de-emphasize or ignore them, resulting in a suboptimal use and interpretation of empirical data and ultimately in a disconnection between theory and practice in the field. Thus, this journal aspires to become the authorized source of accumulated knowledge attained from original educational research, which follows the complex dynamical system paradigm and can ultimately help improve the relationship between theory and practice.

The journal targets educational scholars, empirical researchers, practitioners and policy makers who take an interest in complexity in education, and are willing to engage in the details of its study. It presumes an interest among researchers and theoreticians in the implications of their models and findings for educational practice and a concern about the inability of the status quo in policy research to effectively address questions of transformation and educational change and reform.

Irrespective of their expertise, the journal should also be of interest in the community of complexity scholars who might want to know how that framework is applied in education in particular, and they might take an interest in the generation of new prototypical examples of complex processes. The journal should also be relevant to doctoral students who are dealing with the methodological challenges of their dissertation research, and who may look for different ways of framing the questions to which educational research is expected to provide answers.

We expect that the growing momentum of complexity research in education will create a need to incorporate that perspective into coursework in such courses as Organizational Dynamics in educational leadership programs, Statistics, Methodology and Mixed Methods courses at the masters and doctoral levels, and also areas of knowledge that rely increasingly on complexity models, such as educational psychology, science education and the analysis of social networks in school buildings and classrooms. In these areas of knowledge, scholars are entitled to complexity papers whose foundation is solid and rigorously evaluated.