Complexity thinking: Creative dance creating conditions for student teachers to learn how to teach

Abstract

This paper will draw on Davis and Sumara‟s (2006) idea of complexity thinking to understand learning as an emergent process for (1) students in a creative dance lesson, and (2) generalist elementary pre-service teachers within a school integrated teacher education (SITE) course. Focused on a two-term generalist physical education preparation course, images from digital video clips, course materials and pre-service teacher reflections are presented as evidence to show the creative dance process and the pre-service teachers‟ responses to this material. The paper introduces complexity thinking to the reader through ethnographic fictional representation of an actual creative dance lesson analyzed through a complexity lens. Drawing on pre-service teachers‟ insights, this paper will conclude with speculations on how teacher education course experiences could be informed by how creative dance and SITE based courses create recursive tasks that allow bottom-up, peer-shared, decentralized and emergent learning experiences.