Not Just a Theory: Building the Lens

This isn’t just theory to me.

I’ve listened to stories told by my PhD advisor, Mike Fellows, describing how parameterized complexity theory came to be—how he and Rod Downey built it from the ground up. What stayed with me wasn’t just the theory—it was the intentionality.

Mike once confided in me that, at the time, he was consciously thinking about what a paradigm needs in order to be useful—not just elegant or interesting, but usable for real research.

That changed how I understood research itself.

They weren’t just solving puzzles or publishing results. They were reshaping the terrain:

What makes a problem hard, he explained, isn’t just its scale—it’s the chaos that scale allows.

To make that insight stick, they had to invent new terms. New standards. New questions. A new community of researchers who could speak the language and extend the frame.

That’s paradigm work.

And if we want to build a meaningful, democratic approach to education, we’ll need the same kind of scaffolding. Not just isolated practices or good intentions—but a framework people can build on.

The Craft of a Paradigm: A Working Map

This post steps back—not to slow down, but to show how new fields, new worldviews, and new models of education are actually built.

Paradigms don’t appear fully formed. They’re made—deliberately, socially, and often messily. They begin as insights, but become structures: shared assumptions, guiding values, and tools that let people work together toward something real.

What follows isn’t a checklist. It’s a kind of lens—a working map of the invisible labor that gives a paradigm its shape and strength.

It begins with word-making. Every paradigm needs its own language. New terms, new distinctions—these aren’t just labels, they’re tools that let us see differently. Without them, the paradigm can’t take hold.

From there comes question-casting: deciding what kinds of questions are worth asking, and which ones no longer belong. Paradigms don’t just answer questions—they declare what’s worth wondering about.

To work, a paradigm also needs rule-setting—a sense of what counts as valid inquiry. What counts as rigorous? What’s an acceptable method? These norms don’t come from nowhere—they’re crafted and negotiated over time.

And once you’re asking questions, you need to know what counts as an answer. That’s result-shaping. Paradigms set expectations for success: what progress looks like, what a breakthrough means, what counts as insight at all.

But they don’t include everything. Every paradigm involves line-drawing—not just what it includes, but what it leaves out. What’s central, and what’s peripheral? Who belongs in the conversation, and who doesn’t?

None of this matters unless people take part. That’s where commons-building comes in. A paradigm needs community—shared spaces, shared values, shared curiosity. Without this, even the best ideas fade.

Underneath all of it is value-weaving. Paradigms carry ethics and aesthetics, often quietly. They shape what’s seen as elegant, just, beautiful, meaningful—even when we don’t talk about it.

They also carry a sense of time. Time-tilting is how paradigms relate to the past and the future: are we breaking from tradition? Reclaiming something lost? Inventing what’s next?

And as they grow, paradigms need to take care of themselves. That’s frame-keeping: staying coherent, absorbing critique, refining their own terms without losing direction.

Finally, some paradigms catch on not just because they’re smart, but because they resonate. World-tuning is what happens when a paradigm lines up with broader cultural shifts—when it speaks to the moment, even before the moment knows what it’s asking for.

This isn’t a final theory. It’s just a sketch—a paradigm for thinking about paradigms. And it’s here to be questioned, revised, extended.

Because if we want to reimagine education—not just in theory, but in practice—we need more than good ideas.

The lens matters. Let’s build it well.