#ISSS2016 Boulder

2814 As systemists we need to be able to communicate using a common reference for the science of systems. Such a reference should provide a simple compelling framework for understanding systemist attitudes and systems concepts. It should be compelling for scientists, engineers and for people, even children, who are just starting out in their journey to understand systems. A candidate framework explored during the INCOSE international workshop in 2016 was used as a basis for developing a game at the IFSR conversation in 2016. The game is intended as a candidate contributor to Systems Literacy. The intended experience of the game is to help people to act in a systemic way when presented with a new situation. By playing the SysteMystery game the learners will be able to reflect on a situation and make improved decisions or judgements. Through playing the game learners will be able to grasp and expand their knowledge of core systems concepts. Through practice the learners will begin to naturally use concepts effectively when converting information into knowledge and forming their mental model of a bigger picture. Playing the game has three phases: a phase of experience which could be a story, game, poem, song or explanation of problem or situation; a phase of reflection and analysis of the experience using the SysteMystery cards and a post analysis phase where improvements to the SysteMystery framework are considered and fed-back to the repository.

2796 Throughout the years, there has been a concern about how the school systems in the United States can be improved. As population growth continues and existing issues remain due to a insufficient funding, it becomes more complex to address the specific areas where training is needed, students with special needs are forgotten, growing classroom sizes, parent involvement student health and more. The current issue we can see now is the lack of resources schools have to spend on research and development. By utilizing technology to conduct the research and collect data, it may be possible to optimize resources of faculty and improve student learning. Similar to any change in organizations, there will be resistance among not only the faculty, but also the parents and students whose cooperation and belief in the technology is needed. The presentation will build upon the ideas that success in implementing technology into classrooms relies heavily on collaborative teamwork from educators and education leaders, an established digital platform as a tool to keep all team members in constant communication and in sync, and well as trust in the relationships between the technology, the user, and the leaders advocating for this transition into the 21st century. Leaders who are successful should likely have less feelings of frustration, doubt, or impatience with the process. On the contrary, leaders THE PHENOMENON OF TECHNOLOGY IN K-12 CLASSROOMS 3 who have achieve levels of technology integration in their schools should feel hopeful, eager, enthusiastic, and inquisitive with their responsibilities. The analysis will be strictly K-12 focused considering that Higher Education operates significantly different than K-12 (Ensminger, 2005). The demonstration will attempt to provide insight not only on the success of what leaders have experienced through integrating technology in K-12 schools, but also some of the challenges they had encountered when working with students and parents to accept and believe in the technology they want to use. This investigation will help shed light on some of the likely obstacles and the solutions decided by these leaders in order to prepare future education leaders for the transition as more and more school board members and leaders begin to embrace technology as a positive and efficient change for their organizations

2879 This paper brings together a systems approach and an academic literacies perspective to offer a response to the problem of how to support professionals enrolled for postgraduate study in the transition to scholarly research practice. While such study presents exciting opportunities for practice-led research, there are a number of challenges for the academic staff member who supervises the research. For becoming a researcher and scholar is more than a process of bridging a gap between the world of work and academia, as these students seek to maintain their professional identities while navigating what is valued in the academy and the power relations in and between contexts. Recent approaches to research capacity development have shifted away from viewing the transition to scholarly research practice as simply a matter of transferring skills across contexts or as socialization into the valued research conventions. Rather, from an academic literacies perspective, becoming a research scholar means coming to participate in a practice characterized by particular knowledge, tools, values, behaviours, ways of using language, and power relations, some of which is tacit and some of which is explicit. From this perspective, language use such as reading and writing is central to the process of thinking, producing data, and generating new knowledge. Supporting students in this process can present a challenge to academic staff for whom, as experts, the process of doing scholarly research has become tacit. Pressure to increase graduation rates and to reduce time to completion in postgraduate programmes, has placed the role, practice and responsibility of the supervisor in facilitating the development of research practice under increased scrutiny. Many universities have intensified their efforts at supervisor and research training by creating human activity systems with purposes aligned with this goal. At the University of Cape Town where the research reported in this article is located, discipline experts have also taken the initiative to draw on language and literacy experts to support students in research writing development for the research report or dissertation. This contribution of the literacy expert has often been in the form of a course or series of lectures as a service to a programme or group of students. This paper reports on an example of the systemic collaboration, at the level of a programme, between literacy and discipline experts in the design of a dissertation process. This programme attracts students who are working full time, usually in engineering disciplines and is offered as a block release Systems Practice Masters Programme. The purpose of supervisory practice in this programme is to develop practice-led research drawing on systems theory and practice. The specific aim of the collaboration between discipline and literacy expert is to facilitate the holistic development of the reading and writing practices valued in scholarly research practice. This design incorporates the integration of activities, modelling and feedback that facilitates interaction between the conventions of the research practice, what the student brings to the practice, and the agency of the student. The systemic approach involves working together at programme level with a clear conceptual framework of academic literacies. In this paper we present the integrative design as an activity system. We present preliminary findings of our investigation of the development of students’ research writing practices and their perceptions of the dissertation preparation process. These findings are based on the analysis of student texts, focus group interviews and reflections on the impact of supervisory practice. Key words: Academic literacies; dissertation preparation; postgraduate research capacity development; practice-led research; systemic design for learning; systemic collaboration

2775 The denigration of the world’s ecosystems has been driven by the economic imperatives of insatiable multi-national corporations whose goals are to concentrate the ownership and control of global resources in a progressively narrowing band of society. The impacts of this denigration are understood as crises called, ozone depletion, global warming, sea-level rise, extreme weather events, water scarcity, and the shrinking polar ice regions. These challenges involve significant degrees of complexity in our rapidly changing world. Engaging societies and communities in the meaningful changes of behaviour necessary to halt and reverse the denigration of our life-supporting ecosystems is extremely difficult, given that the majority of these societies are a significant part of the problem. They rely almost universally on the same epistemological basis of understanding the world as the multi-national corporations that are destroying it. In many ways, these societies support the behaviours of the multi-national corporations through their consumerism and political systems of representation. Decision making frameworks based on systems thinking can facilitate enhanced understandings of sustainability and potentially enlighten societies to behave differently. However to do so they must communicate an understanding of complexity that engages society at the level of values and beliefs, as these determine actions. They must also be transparent, inclusive, contextually relevant, and based on epistemological concepts that are much more strongly aligned with sustainability. The epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples are based on principles of interconnectedness, holism, relevance over long periods of time, inter-generational equity, and uniqueness to place. Indigenous Peoples have out of necessity had to develop ways of retaining their values and beliefs while accommodating the enforced changes associated with the destructive colonisation processes experienced in many parts of the world. The Waitangi Tribunal was born of the first recognition of New Zealand’s 1840 founding document in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975. This tribunal was established to avoid further transgressions of the Treaty. Many early claims were about environmental degradation while others related to the retention of cultural values, knowledge and language. Claims all identified impacts upon mauri, life supporting capacity. Indigenous concepts raised in hearings included; retention of intrinsic values / mauri; spiritual and cultural values; obligations to enhance mauri; and implications for future generations. Often successful, these claims resulted in significant rethinking of projects and ultimately informed changes in law. The Resource Management Act (1991) has the purpose of promoting sustainable development taking into account environmental, social, cultural and economic well-being of society. However while the ground-breaking new law incorporated numerous indigenous concepts, it stopped short of actually including mauri. The Mauri Model Decision Making Framework allows Indigenous Peoples to contribute understanding based on their own knowledge so that they can be effectively included in resource management decision making processes. The Framework adds a strengthened decision making context due to its ability to incorporate culturally relevant knowledge seamlessly alongside scientific understandings of a situation, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data consistently into the same assessment. When mauri is defined as the life supporting capacity of the air, water and soil the theoretical basis is created for relevance in terms of New Zealand law, and a means to measure and evaluate impacts in a holistic way then exists. Thus through integrating systems techniques and the indigenous concept, Mauri, the Mauri Model Decision Making Framework creates a new approach to cross-cultural communication and action. Independent research has assessed the Mauri Model as an exemplar against Bellagio STAMP and it is now included in curricula in engineering, planning and international studies at the University of Auckland, as well as being an online resource.

2927 The public education of quality can mitigate educational differences between rich and poor families, according the report of United Nations about Human Development in 2014. The Human Development Index (HDI) is an index that measures the achievements of a country in three basic dimensions of human development: 1) A long and healthy Life, 2) Access to education and knowledge and 3) Dignified standard of life. The same report states that primary and secondary education worldwide remains at acceptable progress but in higher education levels there are large gaps between developed countries and those it in developing. Derived of policy national and institutional in education of Mexico, quality indicators involve various parameters within which highlighted, approval rating, the reproof rate and the desertion rate; although these rates are not the best way to measure the quality that exists in the process of educational training. It has been observed that ethics and responsibility of all stakeholders in the education system of this level have an influence unfavorably on the values presented by the mentioned parameters. This research attempts to find relation between educational performance and the behavior of the actors involved in the educational system; employing, a systemic methodology that allows us to evaluate the problem and contributing to the resolution of a holistically. Keyboards: Quality indicators, Educational Performance, Ethics, Responsibility.

2788 The proposed presentation will present the theoretical findings of my master’s thesis, as well as their practical application to youth engagement programming around the world. The presentation will first outline a traditional rites of passage framework as it relates to community-based engagement of youth. Research from the fields of psychology, anthropology, experiential education, and systems dynamics will be presented to demonstrate the importance of such practices in healthy youth and community development. The challenges that contemporary outdoor youth engagement programs are encountering will be explored, highlighting the specific system obstacles they face in effective implementation. The presentation will progress to present a research backed, theoretical model for the development of community-based outdoor rites of passage programming. The proposed model involves active community mentorship networks, locally based preparation and reintegration of participants by community members, and self-directed adolescent design of rites of passage experiences. Lastly, I will discuss the practical application of this model in various youth engagement initiatives around the world. The audience will be engaged to both share their own outdoor rites of passage experiences, as well as contribute tangible additions to the emerging new model of community-based outdoor youth engagement. Future research on the relationship of such programming to asset building communities will be proposed and discussed at the end of the presentation.

2920 Universities are organized into disciplines, but most real world problems are interdisciplinary. Holistic conceptual models could help to overcome this fragmentation in our thinking and allow a more multi-perspective view of issues. When analyzing complex problems in business or politics, there are a wide range of micro- and macro-economic factors involved. One of the most often used concepts in business literature is the so called PESTEL framework (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal) – some variations on this are PEST and PESTLE. The PESTEL framework is used for environmental scanning of risks and trends in strategic management. Despite its worldwide distribution there are known to be a couple of flaws with this framework. The selection of categories is questionable; the categories are often discussed in separate boxes and important interconnections between variables are lost. What is needed is a more systemic approach that does not cut complex issues into fragmented pieces but provides a more coherent picture. However it must still be easy and efficient to use in business practice. The goal of this current project is to build on the tradition of PESTEL but also to suggest some adjustments that would lift the concept up to new levels of analysis, application and visual representation. The new framework is the result of a cross-comparison of several dozen category frameworks used in business, politics and sustainability. The criteria for the development process and present version were a well-balanced selection of categories, practically useful for team work in the business context and beyond, and providing a better representation of important interconnections. The result is establishing a bridge between the PESTEL tradition and systems methods such as causal loop diagrams and thus allowing a more holistic view of complex issues. It allows visualizing global risks, megatrends or other topics of interest on the global or local level. Keywords: Problem solving, management, strategy, decision making, sustainable development, visualization, causal loop diagram, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinarity