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Many scholars have concluded that teacher education research needs to take a complex view, resist simplification, and account more fully for teacher education's contexts and processes as well as its impact on teacher candidates' and school students' learning (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Grossman & McDonald, 2008; Opfer & Pedder, 2011). In this article, we describe a research for initial teacher education, developed by the Project RITE (Rethinking Initial Teacher Education) (1) research team, which combines key ideas from and critical realism (CT-CR) and applies these to teacher education. Our intention in referring to CT-CR as a research platform is to suggest that the integration of and critical realism offers a potentially powerful framework for exploring how initial teacher education programs and pathways function as complex systems and why their outcomes are so uncertain and variable. In this article, we suggest that as a research platform, CT-CR has the capacity to open up new questions, point to new places to look for explanations, and offer new ways of understanding the initial conditions, system interactions, and underlying causal mechanisms involved in initial teacher education. In particular, we suggest that the CT-CR may support studies of the extent to which teacher candidates learn to engage in patterns of practice that support the learning of students who have been historically marginalized on the basis of race, culture, language, class and gender. The primary purpose of this article is conceptual in that it is intended to describe CT-CR as a research for initial teacher education. To achieve this purpose, the article includes multiple examples of the questions, research methods, and analyses researchers have developed, guided by and/or critical realism. In addition, we use our own emerging program of research in Project RITE as a concrete in-progress example that elaborates the CT-CR framework and illustrates some of its applications to initial teacher education research. Some Key Ideas from Complexity Theory Complexity is not a single unified set of ideas, and multiple scholars have analyzed its major branches and its evolution over several generations (Alhadeff-Jones, 2008; Manson, 2001; Opfer, 2013). Despite variation, however, in the social sciences and in education, complexity theory is often used as an umbrella term to refer to a loose collection of theoretical frameworks that take up important questions about individuals, social phenomena and organizations--understood as systems--and how these change, develop, learn, and evolve over time (Mason, 2008; Morrison, 2008; Walby, 2007; Wheatley, 2006). Rather than parts, theories focus on wholes, relationships, open systems, and environments (Byrne, 1998; Davis & Sumara, 2006). Rather than predictable linear effects, theories emphasize that multi-dimensional relationships and dynamic interactions among agents and elements are responsible for patterns and phenomena (Byrne, 1998; Cilliers, 1998; Haggis, 2008). Most applications of theories to the social sciences and education also have in common the major ideas and perspectives they reject. These include: the assumption that how the world works can be explained using Newtonian machine imagery (Davis, Phelps & Wells, 2004; Richardson & Cilliers, 2001; Wheatley, 2006), linear models of cause and effect (Horn, 2008; Mason, 2008; Morrison, 2008; Radford, 2006), analytic/reductionist views of phenomena (Byrne, 1998; Horn, 2008; Radford, 2006; Richardson & Cilliers, 2001), and positivist research methods that aim to reduce complex phenomena to the key factors that determine outcomes (Byrne, 1998; Morrison, 2008; Walby, 2007). One big idea that theories offer teacher education research is the fundamental distinction between complicated and complex systems (Byrne, 1998; Cilliers, 1998; Davis & Sumara, 1997), both of which have multiple parts and interactions that may be difficult to discern and understand at first. …
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