Search results for "systems thinking"
showing 10 items of 32 documents
Coastal Sustainable Development Studies in Latvia: Integrated Local Social-Ecological Systems Governance
2021
Importance of sustainable coastal governance also in the Baltic sea region has been widely recognised and since such governance has to have integrative nature that requires horizontal cross-sectorial integration as well as involvement of all governance levels and subsequently organisation of vertical integration among the levels. Besides some succesfull local cases around Europe, mainly special outside projects based, there is to be recognized that the municipal integrated sustainable coastal governance has not been yet neither well and widely locally developed in practice nor sufficiently researched field in order to permit necessary design of adequate policy innovations. Practical develop…
Why Does Systems Thinking Matter?
2012
The social and economic complexity of our times triggers intense transformations in the competitive logics of markets and, broadly speaking, of business systems. Business scenarios today are typified by dynamism, connectivity, nonlinearity, and emergent properties—in other words by "complexity". Asserting that the world, and consequently business systems, are complex means that it is impossible to understand them by considering their individual elements separately, and that there is no option of predicting the future, but only of grasping and proactively influencing future scenarios. Reductionist models are unable to fully depict, or to allow us to deeply understand, new complex and dynamic…
SYSTEMS THEORY OF SYSTEMS THINKING: GENERAL AND PARTICULAR WITHIN MODERN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION
2016
Following the concept of human as spiritual alive body, human thinking is spiritual activity of our brain – brainwork. Today we accept that thinking means processing of information what is important for management of human body life. Studying organization of human brainwork, people have discovered that all our thoughts and thinking activities are interconnected and form definite hierarchic structures. Humans reflect world as a set or network of diverse phenomena by building corresponding theories or models of observed phenomena. In other words, all phenomena in human world of thoughts are reflected as SYSTEMS, which are organizational units of Systems Thinking. Every system contains their i…
Integrative thinking is the key: An evaluation of current research into the development of adult thinking
2011
Post-formal relativistic-dialectical thinking has been widely claimed to be a new developmental stage of intellectual development. Other theoretical models come very close to post-formal thinking, with overlapping features such as the study of wisdom and epistemic understanding, as well as models of expertise, critical thinking, and scepticism. No coherent theory exists in the fields of post-formal and relativistic-dialectical thinking, though scholars have claimed that there is some similarity between the models. While empirical evidence of interconnectedness between them exists, a major difficulty lies in the theoretical definition of concepts. We critically assess the definitions of rel…
Pupil's ecological reasoning with help of modeling tool
2006
Ecological concepts, and in particular population dynamics, has been found to be among the most difficult topics in biology. Some researchers pointed to students' relatively weak mathematical background as the main source of learning difficulties. This paper reports on an investigation of pupil's (n=73) reasoning about the ecological phenomena by using an iconic modelling tool, WorldMaker. The simulations eliminated the need for understanding of mathematical equations, and made the ecological concepts much more accessible to some children. However, many of the pupils reasoned from an anthropocentric perspective that obstructed their ability to predict ecological phenomena which requires sys…
A Framework of Professional Transferable Competences for System Innovation: Enabling Leadership and Agency for Sustainable Development
2021
System Innovation (SI) is a critical approach in driving individual and collective actions towards sustainable development (SD). This article presents the validation process of the Climate-KIC Professional Competence Framework (CF) for SI. This framework is based on principles of system thinking and the need for human capital to deal with challenges related to long-term sustainability. It comprises twenty competences grouped into five stages that describe contexts where professionals implement transformations: Exploring, Framing, Designing, Implementing and Strengthening. The stages are not linear or strictly sequential because overlapping and loops are frequent in transformational and disr…
El aprendizaje-servicio : una estrategia para la formación de competencias en sostenibilidad
2015
El artículo presenta la estrategia docente del Aprendizaje-Servicio como herramienta para desarrollar competencias vinculadas al reto de la sostenibilidad, tal y como establecen las directrices de la Conferencia de Rectores de las Universidades españolas (CRUE) y otras instancias institucionales a nivel local y global. Se analiza la experiencia docente de la autora, que ha utilizado la metodología del aprendizaje-servicio en la enseñanza universitaria para la formación de futuros y futuras profesionales de la educación en el logro de competencias clave exigidas por el desarrollo sostenible: el análisis crítico, la reflexión sistémica, la toma de decisión colaborativa, y el sentido de respon…
Towards a learning community: understanding teachers’ mental models to support their professional development and learning
2021
Amidst societal, demographic and educational changes, teachers are expected to engage in professional development and learning (PDL) throughout their careers. This study explores school teachers’ mental models about their work in the framework of Senge’s learning organisation, aiming to support their PDL during curriculum reform and organisational changes. The study’s data comprise 41 semi-structured interviews with each teacher in one school community. These interviews were analysed using qualitative, data-driven yet theory-informed content analysis. In the first analysis phase, fragments of mental models concerning teachers’ work and their school community were explored. These fragments i…
Teaching and Learning Systems Thinking: What, Why, When, Where, Who, What For, How?
2017
Currently everybody needs to be educated for lifelong time, so we have to be careful what we put in the education programs, and when, in order to create a systems thinking acquired culture and an ethical holistic behaviour.
Challenges to the development of energy performance measurement : a systems thinking approach
2016
Growing global energy consumption and its consequent hindrance to sus-tainable development poses one of the greatest challenges of today. Impro-vement of the end-use energy efficiency is commonly regarded as one of the most basic and significant countermeasures for curbing the rising energy needs. However, it seems that the progress of end-use energy management is currently hindered due to the complexities involved in the measurement and management of energy efficiency. In essence, the lack of appropriate energy performance metrics constitute a gap between the current organizational needs and scientific literature. Furthermore, the current scientific debate has questioned whether ener-gy ef…