Revealing the potentiality for chaos in a public high school.

Abstract

The heuristic methodology utilized in this study is critiqued and study findings are related to the current literature. Implications and recommendations are made to educators and education reformers. Finally, suggestions are offered for further research.

Additionally, several emergent themes from the study are explicated. (1) In a high school everything is related and interconnected. (2) Everything that occurs in the school has consequence. (3) The patterns of the school change frequently while the structures of the school change less frequently, making it appear at times that everything changes and while nothing changes. (4) Linear reforms can not adequately address the needs of nonlinear schools. (5) Power, predictability, and control issues are frequently misunderstood by the community and reformers.

Viewing the school as an organic, self-organized system, this study specifically explicates the new science tenets of: systems thinking, interconnection, relationship, open and closed systems, limit cycles, non-linearity, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, bifurcation points, irreversibility, self-organization, strange attractors, fractals and holograms, and learning.

This study is a qualitative investigation of the experience of seeing a high school through the metaphors of the new sciences of chaos and complexity. The heuristic research methodology was employed in an attempt to find postmodern meaning not previously considered in the research surrounding education. Data were collected through observations and field notes of the researcher as well as through interviews with other school personnel. Relying on the faculties of tacit knowledge, the researcher became immersed in the study, allowing the data to indwell, to incubate and, finally, to illuminate the hidden dynamics of the public high school as seen through the metaphors of the new sciences of chaos and complexity.