Edusystemic

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.

English has no single adjective for thinking about education in the ways that the Living Curriculum Architecture invites. The word "systemic" in education already names the administrative apparatus — systemic reform, system-level policy — which is close to the opposite of what is meant here. "Ecological" belongs to the developmental psychologist Bronfenbrenner and arrives with his concentric layers. "Ecosystemic" has a narrower home in the school behaviour literature.

Rather than bend one of these to a new use, I have made a label.

Making words is not something I want to do often. 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.

So the coinage of edusystemic does one job and no other: it groups the posts that implicitly or explicitly put the scales in view.