DEXTER CHAPIN // NAIS 2012 MELINDA MUELLER PAUL NEWTON Marta Zuluaga Teaching Sustainable Systems.

DEXTER CHAPIN // NAIS 2012MELINDA MUELLERPAUL NEWTONMarta Zuluaga

Teaching Sustainable Systems

• Our students will live well into the 21st century; a century likely to be dominated by the three facets of sustainability:

• Ecology• Economy• Equity

• Teaching sustainability has to be about teaching students how to effectively intervene in complex systems to bring about change.


• Basic Assumptions:

“He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.” – Anwar Sadat

“Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.” –Peter Senge

“It is not enough to just do your best or work hard. You must know what to work on.” -W. Edwards Deming


So, what can we do?

•Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months*.

•We can help students to create or surface, and examine, modify, or correct their mental models in order to make explicit the patterns that give data meaning and construct knowledge.

•We do this by ST / SD modeling


• Change, guidance, and help is coming to a state near you.

•The State of Washington has established a series of standards and programs that support the explicit teaching of Systems Thinking and infusing Sustainability across the curriculum starting in Kindergarten.


•What does system thinking look like?

•It has six facets:



•10,000 meter thinking• The airplane view from 35,000 feet; you can see how things fit and flow; little or no detail but large scale structure visible.



•System-as-cause thinking.• This is the ST equivalent of Occam’s razor. It is the contents and structure of the system that generates system behavior; not exogenous elements.



•Dynamic thinking.• Dynamic thinking looks not just at an “Event” but combines events and precursors into patterns.



•Operational thinking.• Is about the nitty-gritty of the relationships, interactions, and effects of system components on each other.



•Closed-loop Thinking solves the chicken – egg question by allowing mutual causality through feedback loops



•Generic thinking is the recognition of repeating patterns. If complex systems are paragraphs, The sentences tend to be a series of simple, generic patterns found again and again in Nature.



•10,000 meter thinking•System-as-cause thinking•Dynamic thinking•Operational thinking•Closed-loop Thinking•Generic thinking



What does System Dynamics look Like?

Systems Dynamics is about making system thinking explicit, operationalized, and testable. it puts on “paper” what we think we know about the system and makes clear our assumptions. It is here that we can test our hypothesis.


We all operate on mental models. Each represents our best hypothesis about how the world works.

We simulate these models any time we make an either / or decision.

All of our mental models are incomplete and possibly incorrect or incoherent

However, our models are useful.


For example:

Suppose we have a tree farm with 100trees that mature from seedlings in 5 years. we plant 10 seedlings and cut 10 mature trees each year.

At year 5, we start planting and cutting 15 seedlings and mature trees each year.

Sketch a graph of the population of mature trees over time.

A second example:

Diagram possible causes of student achievement



A possible response


Perhaps a more useful response

Both these models have the following advantage:They make our ideas explicit and they give us a starting place for discussions. The disadvantage is that they cannot be simulated. We cannot ask “what if….” questions. If we want to increase student success levels, we want to know how to get the biggest “bang for our buck.” To discover how to change the system, we need to build a model we can “run” or simulate. To do that, we need STELLA, or it’s equivalent.



Building a STELLA Model



A STOCK is any accumulation in the system. A rough and ready definition might be anything that can be counted, measured or otherwise specified AT a moment in time.



A flow is any rate of change in the system. A rough and ready definition might be anything that can be counted, measured or otherwise specified per unit of time.



A converter is any element that is not a stock or a flow. It is often a constant, an external input or output, a mathematical operation, or a wide variety of functional elements.



A Connector is just that. It shows how elements are connected. There are two types; informational and action connectors.


generics

So let’s look at a model of the tragedy of the commons.

The first step is to choose what stock we are really interested in.

I suggest that the real question is, “How much grass is left?”

To generalize the model to any and all commons, instead of labeling the stock “grass”, let’s label it “resource”.


To build an SD model, we must learn to:

Express change over time graphicallyExpress a complex hypothesisResearch the details of the interactionsThink deeply about what they constructAnd be open to modifying their ideas

Does this approach sound familiar?


DEXTER CHAPIN // NAIS 2012 MELINDA MUELLER PAUL NEWTON Marta Zuluaga Teaching Sustainable Systems.

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