A First Glimpse at the Whole – Christopher Alexander’s Fifteen Fundamental Properties of Living Centers and Their Implication for Education

We are currently experiencing an interesting discussion raised on how to transfer design patterns from architecture and software engineering to education. Computer scientists and pedagogues try to define patterns and pattern languages suitable for educational needs. The main goal of their work is to enhance quality and to foster best practices of teaching.

However, in most cases, within their pattern development these writers only refer to Christopher Alexander’s early works (The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language), which are an intentionally vague attempt to suggest the Quality Without a Name (QWAN), and, doing so, they do not consider the later ones (The Nature of Order, 4 vols), Alexander’s more refined attempt to not only name the QWAN but to describe its taxonomy.

In our perception, talking about a pedagogical pattern language requires definitely thinking about and describing its taxonomy, in other words, we have to think about a “grammar”, a set of logical and structural rules that govern the composition of meta patterns, patterns and sub-patterns like sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language.

Analyzing an exemplary educational scenario this contribution will demonstrate the applicability of Alexander’s fifteen properties of living centers in education and intends to open discussion and reflection about the important role of an educational taxonomy for classifying existing pedagogical patterns.