How Can Opposites Attract? Teaching for Complexity

Since the political season, I’ve been reflecting on how polarized people have become. How have our realities become so splintered? How have people’s opinions become so calcified?  This sense of “you’re either with us or against us” has really permeated the fabric of our society. Is there any way forward for democracy if we can’t listen to differing points of view? 

And so I’ve been wondering what role education plays in all of this–is this inflexibility and warped views of one another the product of a “textbook answer” schooling and overvaluing authority over the good of the group? Surely this cult thinking has its roots in how we’ve been educating children and the enculturation process of young minds. 

When I consider this fact, I feel incredibly proud to be an IB educator, to know that the work I lead in classrooms is fulfilling a mission in which we 

“develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect….students across the world become active, compassionate, and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right. (Read the full IB Mission Statement here)

But whether your school is IB or not, I think we, as educators have an obligation to address this dualistic thinking in our schools. We have to address absolutes and teach into complexity. We must actively teach “grayscale thinking” that helps students grapple with uncertainty and change. They must become aware that there is rarely a “right answer” but many ways to arrive at a solution.  

A few years ago I came across the work of Sue Looney during the Build Math Minds Summit. Her website Same But Different had been a teaching resource for me but I had never considered the bigger picture of the work she does until recently. One would hardly think of Math as a subject to explore grayscale thinking because it is the ultimate “right answer” subject but her work clearly demonstrates that there is really no discipline in which this type of thinking can’t be taught. Complexity exists everywhere. 

 So I’d like to share 3 Concepts that were inspired by Looney’s work which can be taught in any subject area that develops perspective and nuance that we can imbed into our practice. 

The Power of Connection: Relationships

In order to discover the “gray”, you must explore the basis of how things are connected. Examining relationships to see how they are the same but also simultaneously different.  So let’s look at a couple of concepts and their related concepts in which students can start to develop an understanding of connection through a learning lens:

In math, one can explore the relationships through….

• Quantity: Backwards and Forwards

In language, one can explore the relationships through….

• Meaning: punctuation

In science, one can explore the relationships through…

• Properties: states of  matter

In social studies, one can explore the relationships through…

• Time: events (especially when the juxtaposition of the location to show cause and effect)

Identifying Misconceptions: Interpretation

One of the most important aspects of teaching into the “gray” is to use 2 ideas and compare them. When you think about the polarity that exists currently, using this binary approach to encourage the idea of nuance is helpful. Learning things in pairs really facilitates students to develop perspective and recognize distinctions.

Visual information like this is an example of how you can observe something that appears to only be one “way” and yet it can be adjusted to bring out other ideas.

Of course, you could do this in other ways. For example, using a probability continuum with “likely” and “unlikely” on the opposite sides and having plot a concept on it. Getting a kitten? Seeing their grandma during the holidays? Losing a tooth?–it doesn’t have to be big adult ideas because the purpose is to show how a shared experience can be interpreted in different ways. This is the whole point of the learning, and to have children think about where they might put this event/concept is where the thinking happens. Moreover, it doesn’t have to be a probability continuum, you can use emotions with one side “happy” and the other “sad”; the intention is to bring out one person’s point of view can be different from ours when filtered through a personal lens. 

Of course, you can do this in other ways. Let’s say you were doing a nutrition unit and you wanted to teach “healthy foods”. A good many of us would allow students to think that drinking soda is “bad” for us and instead children might drink fruit juice instead. But instead of allowing students to assume this, we could delve into the complexities of how things are processed and provide students with 2 kinds of juice with varying degrees of nutritional value. Can the kids “taste” the difference? Can they tell which one is healthier? How might they investigate these suspicions? (Hopefully, they will read a food label!)

So, there are many ways to explore complexity through interpretation, and hopefully this is sparking your creativity. 

Developing Complexity: Interrelatedness

From a young age, students learn how to categorize things. Sorting things into groups is probably one of the first skills that we teach children. But I want you to think about the last time you used a Venn diagram. This tool helps us to expand on our notions of difference and provides a visual representation of how there is overlap when looking at relationships.

Here are some rather simple examples of how you can use a Venn diagram to demonstrate interrelatedness:

 

Hopefully, these ideas inspire some of your own thinking. Black and white thinking–thinking in absolutes–can be so damaging to our society. As educators, we need to teach into nuance and the subtle differences between things. Developing students’ thinking skills through examing relationships, interpretation, and interrelatedness are key ways to develop critical thinking and an awareness of life’s complexities.