Background: Obesity-driven nutrition education in schools does not appear to result in healthier adolescent food choices. This study explored food systems as an alternative pedagogical approach to engage students in nutrition education. Methods: After playing a food systems computer game, 250 13- to 16-year-old students in 5 Western Australian…

The prevalence of systems thinking pedagogy is growing in classrooms because of its inclusion in the Next Generation Science Standards and its potential as a tool for addressing complex, global problems. While most of the research on systems thinking targets the ways students develop system thinking skills, this qualitative study explores…

One core feature of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support (PBIS) is a systems-level teaming process for coordinating staff implementation of evidence-based practices and monitoring student progress across all three tiers. Prior research has shown schools that report regular teaming and team-based data use are more likely to successfully…

The benefits of student-staff partnerships are widely reported in the Students-as-Partners literature. It is envisaged that partnership initiatives can have a transformative effect on institutional cultures, however, how this transformation might be achieved is less clear. Building on transdisciplinary and systems change perspectives, we propose a…

The "nonidentical" is Adorno's term for anything that cannot be grasped by a concept or a system of concepts: sensual experience and events; emotions, understood as unconscious but influential layers of the psychic system; emergent results of interactions; the possibility of non-alienated and non-reified social circumstances. Within…

For many years, creativity research had been yielding contradictory results. More recently, these results have come to be regarded as creativity paradoxes. This research reviews a growing body of evidence that highly creative people tend to operate, either simultaneously or dynamically, at extremes along continuums, where the extremes are…

Our understanding of leaders and the role they play in organizations and society is changing, which has important implications for leadership education. At the turn of the century, society began to move from a mechanistic understanding of leadership to a more ecological one. The latter, ecological approach to leadership is characterized by…

Purpose: College and university campuses serve as a vital test bed for sustainability solutions of various types. To date, though, campus sustainability efforts have focused more on the environmental and economic aspects of sustainability, with less attention to its social aspects. This paper aims to draw on a study of student food insecurity to…

Sustainable community health improvement often requires the implementation of complex interventions in complex systems. Drawing from the "Four Keys to Success" frame (theory, implementation, support, and evaluation), this article describes how we used a formative evaluation approach to foster a learning system capable of monitoring and…

This article introduces sustainable learning and education (SLE), an emerging philosophy of learning and teaching founded on principles of sustainability. SLE is not necessarily education for sustainability, but rather sustainable learning, a new and different idea. The intention behind SLE is to create and proliferate sustainable curricula and…

There have been countless efforts to improve academic achievement in public schools across the United States, especially in urban school districts. Few efforts, however, use rigorous analytic modeling tools to anticipate and prevent the potential side effects of change. This chapter proposes the application of system dynamics on educational reform…

Purpose: Approaches to solving sustainability problems require a specific problem-solving mode, encompassing the complexity, fuzziness and interdisciplinary nature of the problem. This paper aims to promote a complex systems' view of addressing sustainability problems, in particular through the tool of network science, and provides an outline of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the applicability of Watkins and Marsick's model of learning organization in the school context and explore the relationship between the learning dimensions and perceived organizational outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: Using the instrument, Dimensions of the Learning Organization Questionnaire…

This article seeks to present the perspectives of three school leaders in one rural primary school in the English East Midlands, who, when faced with closure due to a falling student numbers, decided to offer and operate a flexi-schooling model of educational provision. We aim to find out, through a theoretical model of systems school leadership,…

Purpose: At a time when many education systems are grappling with the issue of school reform, there is a concern that traditional UK secondary schools are organised in a way that makes them unable to respond to increasingly complex environmental demands. This research-based paper uses complexity theory to gauge the organisational differences…