William E. Doll Jr.

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William E. Doll Jr. (January 29, 1931 – December 27, 2017), also known as Bill Doll, was an American educator and curriculum theorist who helped bring complexity thinking into education in the 1980s.

Born in 1931, Doll studied philosophy and history at Cornell University (B.A., 1953) and earned an M.A. in philosophy from Boston University (1960). After 15 years teaching in elementary and middle schools, he earned a Ph.D. in education from Johns Hopkins University (1972). He held leadership and teaching roles at SUNY Oswego, the University of Redlands, and Louisiana State University, where he directed teacher education and held the Vira Franklin & J.R. Eagles endowed chair (1999–2007). He retired in 2007 and later was an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria and a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia. Doll died on December 27, 2017, in Cobble Hill, British Columbia, at age 86.

Doll’s influential ideas include moving beyond a fixed, “measured” curriculum toward a complex, transformative approach. In 1986, his Prigogine: A new sense of order, a new curriculum argued for a curriculum that embraces complexity, time, and multiple realities. In his 1993 book A Post-modern Perspective on Curriculum, he outlined a postmodern view of curriculum inspired by chaos theory and the work of Dewey, Piaget, Prigogine, Bruner, and Whitehead. The book proposes a non-linear, open curriculum with no fixed beginnings or endings and introduces a framework of 4Rs: Richness, Relations, Recursion, and Rigor, as an alternative to traditional linear approaches. He later highlighted 3Ss: Science, Story, Spirit, and 5Cs: Currere, Complexity, Cosmology, Conversation, Community, to guide a postmodern curriculum.

Doll’s work has been translated into several languages and widely cited, especially in China. He received the American Educational Research Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Tampere in Finland in 2014.