Ecosystemic

Mutually transforming or self-reinforcing interrelationships are always present. Close analysis of a situation at one particular scale is often what is wanted; treating that scale as self-contained is not.

The cost of looking at a situation in isolation shows most plainly when something has gone wrong. A student is called lazy when it is the course structure producing the behaviour, and the description sticks because nobody looked at the next scale up when defining the problem.

“Systemic” might seem the obvious word, but in education it already names the administrative apparatus — systemic reform, system-level policy — which is close to the opposite of what is meant here. “Ecosystemic” follows from the way the Living Curriculum Architecture describes a curriculum: not a list of topics or a sequence of content, but an ecosystem of interacting conditions.

Rather than make a new word, I have used an existing one. The field this writing is about typically meets difficulties by adding something — a category, a perspective, a term — and a new word is an easy way to do that.

The tag does one job: it groups the posts that implicitly or explicitly put the scales in view.