An Introduction to Complexity Pedagogy

"Throughout An Introduction to Complexity Pedagogy, Hicks’s commitment to empowering relationships—between faculty and the university, students and faculty, students and texts, and humans and the environment—is steadfast. Complexity Pedagogy, she writes, “can help readers to gain a deeper understanding of the nonlinear, two-way interactions involving faculty, students, curriculum, individual artists and writers, and university administrators” (p. 33). I hope it will." (Click HERE to read full Teachers College Record review.)

Review for Teachers College Record by Emily S. Meixner, PhD, English professor and coordinator of the Secondary English Education Program at The College of New Jersey

“D. Emily Hicks' new book, An Introduction to Complexity Pedagogy, makes important contributions to Education/multicultural education and literary studies. She presents a view of how complexity theory and what she calls the "new materialism" can be used to combat neoliberalism in higher education and dominant modes of teaching and assessing critical thinking. She demonstrates new ways to engage important issues such as climate crisis, immigration, and a wide range of other current issues, central to contemporary education and the teaching of critical thinking.”

Douglas Kellner, UCLA, Distinguished Research Professor of Education Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA

“Performance artist, author, and teacher D. Emily Hicks crosses geophysical, gender, cultural, linguistic, and post-digital borders, shifts established academic boundaries and discovers new pathways to teaching and learning in her new work, An Introduction to Complexity Pedagogy. Join her as she embarks on a pedagogical journey that takes us into the hinterlands of meaning-making and the metropolises of theory. At a time in which teaching has come under vicious assault by forces on the right, D. Emily Hicks has created a politics of refusal and possibility that teachers can embrace with intellectual verve and creative hope.”

Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Chapman University

“If the world is non-linear why should we teach it linearly? At some point those who teach critical and complexity theory realize that their pedagogical methods are not consistent with the material they are teaching. And this undercuts our efforts and our students. Dr. Hicks has written a well-researched field guide to help those of us struggling to teach radical, critical, and complex theory in a neoliberal academy.”

Thomas Nail, Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Philosophy, University of Denver

Acknowledgments

Introduction:
Critical Thinking, Frankfurt Theory, Complexity Pedagogy, and the Neoliberal University

Chapter One
The Complexity Foundations of Complexity Pedagogy

Chapter Two
Choctaws, Palestinians, and LeAnne Howe

Chapter Three
Anzaldúa: From the Borderlands to the Border as a Complex System

Chapter Four
Performance, Roma Identities, and Decomposition: Karen Finley

Chapter Five
Flanagan and Rose: BDSM, Decomposition, the Limits of the Body, and Performance

Appendix

About the Author

Index

D. Emily Hicks

Emily Hicks attended the San Francisco Art Institute, UC Berkeley, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris), and UC San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in 1979 and is a professor emeritus who has taught at San Diego State University in Chicana/o Studies and English and Comparative Literature; she has also taught at UC Irvine, USC and the UABC in Tijuana, Mexico. Hicks is the author of two books, Border Writing, the Multidimensional Text, and Ninety-five Languages and Seven Forms of Intelligence: Multicultural Education in the Twenty-first Century, as well as a variety of academic articles and art reviews.