Modeling and Educational Simulation as a Basis for Sustainable Development

Abstract

Sustainable development is the result of research and the application of science and technology in complex, uncertain and changing situations. To accomplish its effectiveness, it is necessary to establish such processes in education with an epistemological orientation on the same line; this is, to be understood as a complex system that allows a prospective and possible vision, in line with reality. Education systems are dynamic systems of increasing complexity that develop within unstable contexts of constant change. These are characterized by nonlinear interactions between multiple actors at different levels and scales of inter-and trans- disciplinary type, that generate the emergence of persistent patterns with changing components (selforganized, adaptive, self-recursive and with catastrophic behavior), resulting in the generation of possible scenarios that affect collective behavior. In other words, the education systems are developed in a continuous dynamic of order/disorder, with a permanent structural change that makes them unpredictable and far from any causal explanation. To manage unstable contexts of probable sustainability, education requires a new rationale, a new method of heuristic and metaheuristic type that does not focus on the reality that is known and that is predetermined by inductive or deductive ways with rigid and statistical processes. Instead, to manage these unstable contexts, education should be built on the interaction of variables and chaotic dynamics, through processes of modeling and simulation, in a work of synthesis (rather than in an analysis with nonlinear results) where it can be appreciated the dynamics of the levels and the generation of increasing complexity.