This paper seeks to juxtapose the work of Sir Geoffrey Vickers and Humberto Maturana with a view to thinking more about the theoretical underpinnings of Peter Checkland’s soft systems methodology (SSM) and of soft systems and soft operational research more generally. The paper argues that Maturana’s ‘Theory of the Observer’ can usefully complement Vickers by specifying more precisely the nature of the cognitive structures that underpin people’s descriptions of situations, by clarifying the relationship between cognitive creativity and the historical and relational constraints that bear upon people’s descriptions and explanations, and by providing a more complete description of the dynamics that underpin individual and social learning.

Key words: Appreciative system, soft systems, theory of the observer

Open peer commentary on the article “I Can’t Yet and Growth Mindset” by Fiona Murphy & Hugh Gash. Abstract: Murphy and Gash’s target article offers an important emphasis on emotional and relational dimensions as part of a radical constructivist paradigm to challenge failure identity, fixed notions of intelligence and to go beyond social learning theory. This commentary seeks to expand their conceptual framework further as part of a spatial turn for constructivism to focus on background relational space and systems of relation. Concentric and diametric spatial systems are proposed as background foundational conditions for framing systems and meaning with regard to inclusion and exclusion in education.

In this article, we integrate two constructionist approaches – the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism – to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional development. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular context but are highly variable in their affective, physical, and perceptual features. Next, we discuss the possibility that emotional development is the process of developing emotion concepts, and that emotion words may be a critical part of this process. We hypothesize that infants and children learn emotion categories the way they learn other abstract conceptual categories – by observing others use the same emotion word to label highly variable events. Finally, we hypothesize that emotional development can be understood as a concept construction problem: a child becomes capable of experiencing and perceiving emotion only when her brain develops the capacity to assemble ad hoc, situated emotion concepts for the purposes of guiding behavior and giving meaning to sensory inputs. Specifically, we offer a predictive processing account of emotional development.

Key words: prediction, construction, variation, social learning, culture

We offer a reflection on our own praxis as designers and developers of a learning system for mature-age students through the Open University (OU) UK’s internationally recognised supported-open learning approach. The learning system (or course or module), which required an investment in the range of £0.25–0.5 million to develop, thus reflects our own history (traditions of understanding), the history of the context and the history of cyber-systemic thought and praxis including our own engagement with particular cyber-systemic lineages. This module, “Managing systemic change: inquiry, action and interaction” was first studied by around 100 students in 2010 as part of a new OU Masters Program on Systems Thinking in Practice (STiP) and is now in its fourth presentation to around 100 students. Understanding and skills in systemic inquiry, action and interaction are intended learning outcomes. Through their engagement with the module and each other’s perspectives, students develop critical appreciation of systems practice and social learning systems, drawing on their own experiences of change. Students are practitioners from a wide range of domains. Through activities such as online discussions and blogging, they ground the ideas introduced in the module in their own circumstances and develop their own community by pursuing two related systemic inquiries. In this process, they challenge themselves, each other and the authors as learning system designers. We reflect on what was learnt by whom and how and for what purposes. Relevance: This paper builds on an earlier chapter “Blackmore, C.P.; Ison, R.L. Designing and Developing Learning Systems for Managing Systemic Change in a Climate Change World. In Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change; Wals, A., Corcoran, P.B., Eds.; Wageningen Academic Publishers: Wageningen, The Netherlands, 2012; pp. 347–364" and a conference paper “Ison, R.; Blackmore, C. Designing and Developing a Reflexive Learning System for Managing Systemic Change in a Climate-Change World Based on Cyber-Systemic Understandings. In Proceedings of European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2012), Vienna, Austria, 9–13 April 2012".

This article offers a re-description of the concept of learning context. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann and Gregory Bateson, it suggests an alternative to situated, social learning and activity theory. The conclusion is that the learning context designates an individual’s reconstruction of the environment through contingent handling of differences and that the individual emerges as a learner through the actual construction. The selection of differences is influenced by the learner’s actual knowledge, the nature of the environment and the current horizon of meaning in which the current adaptive perspective becomes a significant factor. The re-description contributes to didactics through renewed understanding of the participants’ backgrounds in teaching and learning. Relevance: The paper focuses on learning context as individuals’ mental construction, on the distinction between teaching as context for learning and learning contexts, and on re-description of participants’ backgrounds as temporary horizons of meaning.

Context: There are often children in schools who are at risk of failure because they have a view that their capacity to learn is fixed. Adults often reinforce this view. Children may be helped by providing counterexamples to show how failure can be overcome by persistence, trying different approaches, and by inviting them to reflect on ways to overcome their own challenges when learning new skills. Problem: Teachers’ implicit constructions of intelligence may interfere with their role helping children in school learn to approach problems with confidence. Our approach aims to change teachers’ and children’s constructions about learning with a view to helping children with their learning challenges in primary school. So, it is centrally about learning to learn. This study provides an opportunity to see whether it would be valuable to examine key ideas in growth mindset in a well-designed constructivist educational framework concerned with learning to learn. Method: The article is based on a qualitative analysis of one teacher’s views and of children’s interactions, using classroom video. The first author devised a set of lessons for a teacher to use in class around themes of learning to learn emotional aspects of learning. Use was made of positive models of individuals who overcome negative feelings and succeed. The children were videotaped in class and their interactions and conversations recorded. The aim was to describe the conceptual changes achieved by the teacher and the children around the concept of second-order learning or learning how to learn. Results: Children’s views of themselves as learners changed and so did the teacher’s views of learning and intelligence. As an approach to learning for children who are in danger of thinking of themselves as failures, the results are encouraging. Implications: The article is a demonstration of the possibility of changing teachers’ and children’s constructions of intelligence as fixed to a more positive flexible construction that children can learn to learn and overcome failure. Teachers working with children in difficulty will find the constructivist ideas about learning to learn helpful. Future research within a constructivist framework is needed to establish optimal timing for interventions of this type, to assess whether ability grouping may hinder the alteration of ideas about intelligence and to examine the durability of the changes in teachers and children. Constructivist content: Growth mindset is based on social learning theory, but implicitly it includes strong constructivist ideas. We consider our research to be similar to previous constructivist work on changing children’s representations and an example of Gregory Bateson’s concept of learning about learning.

Key words: Growth mindset, learning to learn, concepts of intelligence, children with learning difficulties.

Consciousness has many different connotations, some of which are amenable to treatment within neurobiological description systems while others are not. It is possible to define in neurobiological terms the brain states associated with conscious-ness. It is also conceivable that neurobiology will ultimately provide a reductionistic explanation of mechanisms which enables the brain (1) to construct from the sparse and diverse signals of its sensors coherent models of its environment, including the or-ganism itself, and to generate abstract descriptions, (2) to iterate the same strategy to monitor its own states, thereby generating meta descriptions, (3) to weigh the combined results of these analyses in order to reach decisions and to generate adapted behavioural responses, and (4) to communicate through various channels at different levels of ab-straction the results of these cognitive processes to other brains. Since it became clear that the concept of the Cartesian theatre is untenable, that processes in the brain are highly distributed and that there is no single convergence center where the results of the numerous parallel operations are brought together for joint interpretation and decision making, analysis of processes that are in principle amenable to neurobiological explanation is in itself a major challenge. \\Problems of different nature are encountered if one attempts a reductionistic explanation of the subjective connotations of consciousness associated with self-awareness, attributes that are assessed by introspection and by extrapolation from one’s own awareness of mental states to that of others. I shall defend the position that these aspects of consciousness cannot be understood as emergent properties of individual brains alone but come into existence only through communication among brains whose cognitive abilities must be sufficiently developed to generate a theory of mind, i.e. to generate models of presumed states of the respective other brain. Thus, self-awareness and the ability to experience sensations as subjective reality would have to be considered as cultural achievements or, and this is equivalent, as the result of experiencing dialogues of the kind: “I know that you know that I know.” Hence, these aspects of consciousness come into existence only through a social learning process in which brains experience a class of mental phenom-ena that emerge only from mutual reflection. These phenomena are ontologically different from those qualified above as amenable to direct neurobiological investigation because unlike the latter they are the result of a dialogue among brains that got in-creasingly refined during cultural evolution. This is probably the reason why these phenomena appear as not deducible from analysis of individual brains in the same way as one can analyse the neuronal substrate of pattern recognition, memory or motor con-trol. My proposal is that the phenomena that give rise to the so called “hard problems” in the philosophy of consciousness, problems resulting from the ability to be aware of one’s own brain functions can be understood as emergent properties of brains without having to take a dualistic position; however, because these phenomena have a social or cultural origin and hence both a historical and interpersonal dimension, they cannot be understood as an emergent property of an isolated brain alone and hence transcend the reach of conventional neurobiological approaches.