English Education • October 1998

Difficult Flows and Waves: Unfixing

Beliefs in a Grade 8 Language
Arts Literacy Class
Mary Ann Reilly

Introduction
It is not an unusual day as marked by temperature. The thermometer
edges toward 80 degrees as twenty-seven eighth graders and I settle in
on the first day of school. Morganton, defined by its large lake and wind-
ing mountainous roads, seems not to follow an inherent logic, resisting
the needs of commuters. Morganton is not unlike other towns in rural New
Jersey. Surely the influence of New York City, just a little more than an
hour away, can be heard in the language that typifies verbal exchanges
and seen in the allegiance shown to specific clothing labels and cars. The
homogenizing effect of television can be heard in students’ talk, as they
query one another about the upcoming premiere of their favorite sit-com.
And yet, there are deep differences here. Ones that rest beneath the sur-
face. Ones impossible to know for sure on a September day at the start
of a new school year.
For example, unknown on this particular morning is that in less than
four weeks, one of the students at this middle school will address a letter
to the Board of Education, requesting that creationism be taught along-
side evolution and labeling the efforts of his social studies and science
teachers as indoctrination. He will ask the Board of Education to consider
how he has been silenced, since creationism is not a year-long study at
any grade level. His formal inquiry will become front page news in a lo-
cal newspaper, as administrators scramble to reread science and social
studies curriculum and prepare a response for board members. Teach-
ers directly affected by the student’s request will begin to assemble and

Mary Ann Reilly is the Director of Language Arts and Literacy for the Newark Public
Schools in Newark, NJ.
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English Education, Vol. 31, No. 1, October 1998

Copyright © 1998 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
 Reilly • Difficult Flows and Waves

share among themselves other newspaper clippings of related stories

happening elsewhere in the country. The school’s principal will direct the
student’s social studies teacher to give a formal statement as to the hap-
penings in class on the day the student claims evolution was discussed.
The teacher will give the statement but refuse to sign it. Members of the
Board of Education will convene with district administrators to discuss the
student’s request, and through dialogue, will establish that the student’s
rights were not jeopardized, that a balance exists in the social studies
curriculum among methods of social science inquiry, such as narratology
and archeology, and that the science curriculum is enacted in support of
State mandated curriculum content. None of this will be reported in the
newspaper though. These actions will run beneath the currents that are
seen in the school day. Yet, these forces will influence and give shape to
the educational lives of the students, parents, teachers, administrators, and
board members.
Four weeks later, a parent espousing a similar ideology will begin the
process to have school officials censor Bette Greene’s text, The Drown-
ing of Stephan Jones, because he finds the book offends his Christian
sensibilities. He will address a separate letter to me, requesting that as
Supervisor of Humanities, I remove all copies of the book from the high
school, and will also address a letter to the high school principal request-
ing that if I don’t remove all copies of the book, that the principal do so.
Eventually all copies of this book, along with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest
Eye, will be relocated from English classroom libraries to the high school’s
library.
This request echoed another one made a few months earlier in July,
when another parent asked me to rescind a summer book list because
“there’s too many books ‘bout colored people.” She explained that her fifth
grade daughter couldn’t find one book she liked on the district summer
reading list. “We don’t know any colored people,” she explained. “Aren’t
there any books about us?”
I tell of these happenings that fold together, here in my memory, as I
believe that time does not simply function linearly. Imagine time as a
continuum, in which yielding and resisting become temporary borders that
can be lengthened, shortened, widened, narrowed, collapsed, and inverted.
As such, time operates on non-orientable surfaces. Between such move-
able ends are rhythms that flow and when presented with external forces,
break like waves. One can categorize these interruptable flows as events.
How one frames and thereby names a flow of experiences is a com-
plicated and complex matter. Katherine Hayles (1990), in writing about
chaotic systems, tells that complex ones “will have more degrees of free-
dom and consequently will require greater dimensions for their represen-
tation. When the degrees of freedom exceed three (dimensions), these

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 English Education • October 1998

systems cannot be easily drawn” (p. 148). I would suggest that schools
are such places where the degrees of complexity exceed our ability to
represent them in known three-dimensional space. As such, there are any
number of twists in movements—some which might be observed and others
that would be difficult to see. Against such uncertainty, the impulse to fix
one’s beliefs is strong. Consider again the actions of the middle school
student who believed that the presentation of information about evolution
threatened his own beliefs concerning how human life began. His response
to the situation was to become even more dogmatic in his beliefs. Or
consider the parents who wanted the elimination of texts that did not mir-
ror their specific reality. Their actions spoke of a desire to hold that which
they defined as “other” in abeyance. There existed in each situation a
tension between conflicting realities. To smooth such tension, allegiance
to a fixed set of beliefs was enacted. The practice to unfix beliefs was not
demonstrated.
In considering the students in the eighth grade class, I wondered if a
fixed and inflexible model of learning that privileged determined instruc-
tional methods and specified universal outcomes for all students might have
influenced some of the students’ chronic failing in school. In this class of
twenty-seven, more than half had failed a standardized reading and writ-
ing assessment taken during the spring of seventh grade. I wondered if at
the institutional level, we might also respond to non-linearity by being
unflinching in our own beliefs.
During the same time these events occurred, I had been quite involved
in reading about non-linearity. In particular, I found the discussion by
physicists Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984) concerning dissi-
pative structures to be most compelling. Prigogine and Stengers state that
“. . .we now know that far from equilibrium, new types of structures may
originate spontaneously. In far-from-equilibrium conditions we have trans-
formation from disorder . . . into order. New dynamic states of matter may
originate, states that reflect the interaction of a given system within its
surroundings” (p. 12). I wondered if Prigogine’s and Stengers’ theory of
dissipative systems yielding conditions where spontaneous structures
originate was applicable to student learning. What might happen if we
taught students how to fix and unfix beliefs? What might happen if we, as
teachers, were cognizant of our own fixed beliefs with regard to student
learning?
It was with such questions that on the first day of school in Morganton,
I gave each of my new students an introductory letter explaining in part
who I was and asked them to respond in kind, by telling me something
about themselves, such as: their likes, dislikes, and aspirations. In addi-
tion, I asked them to also consider telling me what type of teacher they
hoped I would be.

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 Reilly • Difficult Flows and Waves

Fixing Beliefs
Kevin’s sandy, light brown hair has blonde highlights throughout—
evidence, he will later tell me in his introductory letter, of the summer he
has spent vacationing at Lake George with his mom and stepfather. Kevin
will also tell me in his letter that he hopes I’m the kind of teacher who won’t
announce to his classmates that he had failed language arts the previous
year. In reading Kevin’s letter I wondered if beneath his request rested a
deeper structure—one that suggested Kevin had failed language arts be-
fore and that his failures had been publicly acknowledged by (a) former
teacher(s).
In responding to Kevin, I wrote:
Kevin, I don’t discuss individual students’ grades with the class ever. So
you don’t need to worry about that. Okay? Are you disappointed about
earning an F? It seems as if you are by what you write. You begin with a
clean slate in this class. Let’s talk a little bit about last year and what you
think happened in language arts class.

In rereading what I wrote to Kevin, I wondered how naive it was on my

part to assume such a ‘clean slate’ could exist. Did not Kevin and I carry
multiple understandings of what it meant to have failed? What safeguards
were there to insure that we would not fixate on his failure and in so doing
influence a present that had not yet come? In The Fold, French philoso-
pher Gilles Deleuze suggests, “Each body contains a world pierced with
irregular passages . . . in which there exists difficult flows and waves” (p.7).
In thinking about Kevin, I would suggest that the potential existed to rec-
ognize his past failure of a language arts course as a force that could de-
fine and redefine his experiences. Failure, in Kevin’s experience, operated
as a force with the potential to influence the present by fueling a fixed belief.
In so doing, Kevin’s belief that he lacked the necessary ability to read and
write well kept him fixed. For example, Kevin was initially reluctant to take
certain risks as a learner. When assigned the task to choose a science fiction
or fantasy novel to read, Kevin shied away from the project. Whereas most
of his classmates were eager to choose one of the books provided, Kevin
complained. After Kevin initially chose Ray Bradbury’s The Mart ian
Chronicles, he spent a good portion of the class time restless, needing to
shift reading places by moving from a chair to repositioning himself on
the floor. He and two other boys, all of whom had struggled in previous
language arts classes, had decided to work together in a group and read
this book. By the middle of the sustained silent reading period the follow-
ing day, the boys approached me and asked me quietly if they might
change their book.
“How come?”
“It’s boring,” said Kevin.
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 English Education • October 1998

“Do better.”
“I thought I’d like it, but I’m having trouble getting into it,” offered Kevin,
showing me that he had tried to read the first few pages. “It’s kinda hard.”
“What would you suggest?” I asked.
“We really like Gary Paulsen. Can we read another by him?” Kevin and
his two classmates had read The River and Hatchet during the month of
September. In a letter from Kevin, he had told me that these two books
were the very first he had ever “really read.” I suspect that Kevin thought
the “magic” of his success rested in the books, not necessarily his trans-
actions with each text. From a collection of Paulsen titles, the boys ended
up reading Paulsen’s autobiographical text, Woodsong.
About a week later Kevin told me that he had been “real surprised”
that I allowed the change, adding that usually he would have just not read
the book and failed—thereby continuing a cycle of failure and I suspect
reinforcing the belief that he was a failure. I thought a lot about Kevin, his
initial reluctance to read and the rather dramatic change by December when
he asked his classmates to consider starting a novel club for the sole
purpose of reading “long books with good endings.” By that time in the
year, Kevin had independently read twelve novels. As his repertoire of
positive and successful reading experiences grew, he was better able to
take risks by choosing new authors to read and by expanding the genres
he chose to read. In so doing Kevin was beginning to challenge a fixed
belief about himself.
❖ ❖ ❖
In another letter, David, a slender and tall red-headed boy wrote about
his interest in computers, specifically that he was currently teaching himself
the programming language C++. His letter was typified by strong com-
positional controls and humor. In addition, he expressed an interest in
knowing more about stream of consciousness writing. When I sat down
to read David’s letter, I took with me my initial impressions fixed from the
first few days of class, potential forces that would influence the flow of
meaning I was constructing about David. During that earlier class time,
David had referenced Monty Python’s Holy Grail during an informal class
discussion, commented on writing poetry, informed me that he had his
own web page, and told me that he was an avid fantasy novel reader. After
spending just a few days with David, I wondered why he wasn’t in the
advanced language arts literacy class section, as students at this middle
school were tracked, or why he wasn’t a participant in the gifted and tal-
ented program. In checking David’s past language arts literacy performance
at the seventh grade level, I was initially surprised to see that David was
consistently a C student. In addition, David, like Kevin, had failed a trial
Early Warning Test (EWT) administered during the spring of seventh grade.

30
 Reilly • Difficult Flows and Waves

David’s writing received 4 out of 12 possible points. The EWT in 1996 was
the official New Jersey literacy test given to eighth grade public school
students across the state. On the composition portion, a writing sample
that earned 4 points would indicate a lack of writing command. I wondered
how was it that a student who appeared to be skillful, literary, and able to
use multiple languages (English and computer) such as David, could
demonstrate a rather fixed performance in class and a well-below aver-
age performance on a writing sample.
Tony wrote that he hoped above all else that I would be “fair and un-
derstanding.” In responding to Tony, I wrote: “I believe I am fair and un-
derstanding. If you think there are times when I’m not (that is possible),
please take some time to talk with me.” He also indicated in his letter that
he would like to pursue a career in marine biology. During the first few
days of class, it appeared evident that Tony was the type of learner who
was verbal and needed to talk out an idea. I was surprised when Ms. Burke,
a veteran teacher at the school, told me that Tony “had spent most of last
year out in the hallway.”
“The hallway?”
“Yes, the hallway,” Ms. Burke replied, explaining that because of Tony’s
hyperactivity and difficult social behaviors, most of his teachers last year
dealt with him by having him removed from class on almost a daily ba-
sis. “He was intolerable.”
Like the other students, Tony too had consistently scored D’s and F’s
throughout his middle school years. He, too, like fourteen out of twenty
four students in the class, had not demonstrated command of writing on
the trial EWT writing examination and proficiency on the trial EWT read-
ing test. As a result of these scores, none of these students were eligible
for the honors class. Tony’s writing sample was scored a 7. It was not
unexpected then, when Tony’s mother called one week into school.
“I wanted to thank you,” she began. “Tony told me that yesterday you
said he was doing good work. That he would be successful. That’s the first
affirmation he’s received in school. He was so excited when he got home.
He even called his grandparents to tell them that you said he was going
to do good this year.” In remembering this exchange with Tony’s mother,
I am again reminded of the number of forces enacted during a given school
day and the impossibility of knowing their many influences. Tony’s mother
explained that her son’s hyperactivity had been diagnosed and that he was
being treated medically. Further, she said that Tony had a “history” of not
staying on task and failing to complete assigned work on time. My belief
that Tony would do well nudged at a more fixed belief that was certainly
present at the school where Tony had failed each school year.
“We’ll need to stay on him about this,” Tony’s mother warned before
ending the conversation.

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 English Education • October 1998

In thinking about Kevin, David, and Tony, I consider the power of learn-
ers fixing and unfixing beliefs—for in a world pierced with irregular pas-
sages, certainty with regard to intent cannot always be known; for such
certainty is at best manufactured temporally. It seemed crucial that the
students and I learn how to unfix certainties about our potential and our
performances.

Non-Linearity and Learning

Katherine Hayles, in Chaos Bound (1991) forwards the idea of chaos
as an initiating force. She argues that “at issue is whether chaos should
be associated with the breakdown of systems or with their birth. Viewed
as the epilogue to life, chaos almost inevitably has negative connotations.
Seen as a prologue, it takes on more positive evaluations” (p. 91). As
Hayles outlines, a pre-modern sense of chaos embraced the notion of chaos
as an organizing creative force.
There are several key characteristics to chaotic systems—character-
istics I would suggest are evident in the learning of Kevin, David, and Tony.
Chaotic systems, like learning, are nonlinear and are sensitive to initial
conditions (Hayles, 1990, pp. 9-15). As such, we know that approximate
knowledge of a learner does not lead one to correctly calculate the ap-
proximate behavior of that learner since learning is not a linear system.
A linear system is one “in which cause and effect are related in a propor-
tionate fashion” (Davies, 1988, p. 23). Yet one fixed belief I would sug-
gest that is often present among educators and engendered in schools is
a belief in approximate conditions. Consider how student assessment data
are used.
At this school site, there was a privileging of one assessment system
through which meaning was constructed—namely a system that privileged
a belief in predictability based upon initial approximations. How students
did on the spring-administered assessments each year were used as reli-
able indicators to predict their performance for the next school year. This
interpretation became the means through which students were tracked into
general and honors sections.
In dynamic systems the “truism” of relational causes and effects is not
the case, as chaotic systems are sensitive to initial conditions. Proportion
as understood in cause and effect constructs does not hold in complex,
non-linear systems. David’s poor performance on a standardized measure
did not hint at the fullness of his abilities. Likewise, at the beginning of the
school year, Kevin and Tony had few workable strategies to rely on when
faced with comprehension problems. Left uninterrupted, these patterns
might have continued and the students would more than likely have con-
tinued to fail. Yet, by helping them to learn how to use specific reading
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 Reilly • Difficult Flows and Waves

strategies to “fix-up” comprehension problems, both students were able

over time to change past behaviors and become more productive learn-
ers. These changes could not be determined, nor predicted, by a single
spring assessment. As Prigogine explains “for a large class of dynamic
systems, small perturbations in the initial conditions are amplified over
the course of time. Chaotic systems are an extreme example of unstable
motion because trajectories identified by distinct initial conditions, no matter
how close, diverge exponentially over time” (1997, p. 30).
In thinking of Kevin, David, and Tony, I considered how these students
had been tracked into a general language arts literacy class, as none had
test scores or school grades that showed the potential or presence of higher-
levels of language arts literacy ability. Inherent in the logic that guided such
placement was a belief in approximate understandings of initial conditions.
Yet, what these students’ scores represented could be understood in any
number of ways—as forces, flows, and waves.

Non-Linearity: Learning with Tony

I think of the difficult flows and waves that have characterized my stu-
dents’ educational journeys. I think about how such flows and waves con-
tinue to influence, for in a world where time is curved and can be folded
and refolded through memory and projection, how often is the past reen-
acted through teacher and student expectations? How often are scripts fixed?
At the close of the first marking period, I sat with the grade eight stu-
dents to discuss and help each to formulate specific learning goals for the
next marking period. In addition to whole class projects that I determined
with the students, each student also needed to shape specific and at times
idiosyncratic projects for him or her self that focused on extending, deep-
ening, complicating their literacy. The conversations were intended in part
to provide the students and me with a better understanding of what be-
liefs we might be acting upon without having necessarily been articulated—
at least at a conscious level. By reviewing each student’s work completed
or not completed during the first marking period, there was an emphasis
on demystifying un-named forces.
Tony had come to the end of the first marking period averaging a D.
He had worked well in class and led numerous discussions. Yet, Tony had
also neglected to complete a major project—one in which he had to read
and respond to a self-selected text. Further, Tony’s production in class
decreased as the marking period came to a close. He chose not to com-
plete assignments. In meeting with Tony, I wanted him to articulate and
then acknowledge what he did when confronted with long-term assign-
ments. Through this naming process, I wondered if Tony might be able
to disrupt his pattern of not completing assignments.
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 English Education • October 1998

“Tony, I want you to think about the book project that you didn’t hand
in. Okay? And I want you to try to help me understand what happened
between your intention of doing it and it not being handed in. Take me
through what happens when you’re given a project like the book project.
Share with me your thinking,” I began.
“Well, I like kind of put it (assignment) off to the last minute until it’s
kinda too late,” explained Tony. “And then it’s like I have so much work
to do and I get all frustrated cause I put it off. And then like I just forget
about it ’cause, ‘Ah there’s so much work to do, I’ll never get it done any-
way.’”
“So you dismiss it thinking ‘Eh, I can’t get it done’?” I asked.
“But I really got to change that and I got to work harder next marking
period,” Tony said with certain belief, perhaps attempting to change the
conversational direction.
“That’s fine, but let’s talk a little bit about the dismissing. Do you ac-
tually forget about it or does it stay with you?” I asked, wanting to develop
a more articulated understanding of Tony’s thinking.
“I remember every night,” Tony said, pausing a bit before he contin-
ued. “It’s just that I put it off.”
“What do you tell yourself when you go to put it off?”
“‘Oh, no big deal. I guess I can do it tomorrow,’” Tony said aloud,
imitating himself.
“Okay, and what happens when tomorrow comes and you don’t have
it done? What do you say then?”
“The same thing. It’s just,” Tony said and then paused. “Like when it
starts coming down like the week or two left, you know, I’ll like say, ‘It’s
not worth it, you know. It’s not worth a big grade anyway, even if it is.’”
“And why is it not worth a big grade? What do you convince yourself
of?”
“Well, I just say, ‘I’d probably get a C in the class anyways, so.’”
“So you convince yourself that it’s not going to much matter anyway.”
“Yeah, I do, but . . .” Tony said as his voice got softer and he paused,
then stopped talking.
“Tony, do you believe that?”
“No,” he said, and then awkwardly laughed.
❖ ❖ ❖
In “Dilemmas of Definition: Peripheral Visions on Interdisciplinary
Education,” Ruth Vinz (1996) writes about interdisciplinary learning, saying
that it “may involve the ability to create or to trace the nearly nomadic
lines of resemblances, difference, displacement, disjunctions, and conjunc-
tions . . . Along the fold, displacements occur, causing deviation. The world
is in perpetual motion and the past is an interval inside the present fold.
The fold holds diverging series together.” In thinking about Tony and other
34
 Reilly • Difficult Flows and Waves

students who exhibited “at-risk” behaviors, I began to wonder if there might

not be an opportunity in coming to better know the academic and social
patterns that resulted in failure by understanding them as beliefs and then
creating with the students experiences where displacements, uncertainty,
disjunctions, and conjunctions could occur that might serve to unfix once
certain beliefs. Might not something be gained by re-seeing these students’
histories as a collective pattern not of aberrant behaviors, but as “normal”
patterns in which there had been slippages? For none of these students
had “failed” each day. Rather, there were temporal slippages in which the
students’ classroom performances shifted, became unfixed. I wondered
how the students and I might come to understand and predict such slip-
pages. As Tony and I discussed his goals for himself, I wondered if there
might not be some deeper order that when studied across a larger band
of time could reveal a pattern of slippages that were difficult to discern at
a more topical level.
“Okay,” I began, “And then you tell yourself that you’re just going to
get a ‘C’ anyway, so what the heck.” I paused and then continued, “Have
you done that for a long time?” Tony nodded, although he did not speak.
“Okay, so that’s a pattern that keeps you fixed.”
“Yeah, I really ought to try to break out of that ’cause I want to get
better grades,” Tony said, sounding a bit relieved.
“I’m going to suggest to you that in addition to getting better grades,
you might give yourself an opportunity to learn. I mean when you keep
yourself fixed, it stops you from learning some things—for example: how
to complete a project, how to set a goal, how to establish things you need
to do with the goal, and how to complete a project and feel a sense of
success.”
“Yeah, that’s true.”
“Tony, I don’t think this is a problem or a pattern that’s just going to
go away on its own. I think you’re going to have to interrupt it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have a goal for you in mind. I’ve been thinking about this during the
week.” Tony picked up a pen to write in his notebook and I said, “Before
you write it down, tell me first what you think about this idea, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I want to fold time where you’re concerned and look at the book project
you didn’t do and construct a new project with you that you will do now.
Then I’ll apply that (finished project) grade to change your grade from the
first marking period during the second marking period. I’ll apply whatever
grade you earn to whatever scores you had, in order to construct a new
average. I’m wondering if one of the reasons why you don’t complete the
end of the marking period projects has something to do with the length of

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 English Education • October 1998

time. I think if we play around with the time, shorten the overall amount,
you might meet with success.”
“Yeah, it’s just that at the end of a marking period, everything is due,”
Tony explained.
“What I thought might be of interest to you is to choose a book you
like and to create a Hyperstudio™ stack around that book. You seem to
have an interest in that technology.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“My interest is for you to read a book independently and then re-present
your understanding and feelings about the text. I don’t want to simply give
you a letter grade and in so doing have you opt to miss this learning. Opting
to not do it doesn’t help anyone.” During the next four weeks, I resisted
monitoring Tony as a way to keep him on task. Rather, Tony worked in-
dependently to read the Avi book, The Fighting Ground, and constructed
a Hyperstudio™ stack that represented his reading of the text. He used a
similar card format for his project as he had learned to create when the
entire class responded to Karen Hesse’s novel, Phoenix Rising, using
Hyperstudio™.
In a mid-year interview, Tony said that his independent project was
the most significant one he had done during the first semester. I had asked
him what work he was most proud of and he replied, “I’d say the stack I
did about The Fighting Ground. I just went and sat down, thought about
the book and typed what happened in the book and how I felt about it and
I really didn’t know what I was going to do next. But then I would go and
then I would finish what I was doing and go to the next card, whatever,
and just think about it and then I would do it. Then I didn’t know what I’d
do next. It would just come at the time.”
“And are you comfortable with that process?” I asked.
“It’s so . . . You know. You think about something one thing at a time.
And then I’ll do all this. And then you forget. And you’re a little bit upset:
That was a great idea but what was it and stuff like that,” Tony attempted
to explain.
Tony’s progress in class was fairly steady after this initial success. I
did “refold” Tony’s average from the first marking period. Tony ended up
earning a letter grade of C for the first marking period. It was to be his lowest
marking period score for the year. During the second marking period, Tony
and I agreed to close the marking period a week early. This meant that I
needed to be organized enough to be thinking about multiple endings in
the classroom for different students. Tony needed to plan and pace him-
self within smaller chunks of time, which he demonstrated that he was able
to handle better. With the success and confidence that came during the
first school semester, coupled with an improvement in his reading pace,
Tony’s need to adapt time also lessened during the school year.

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 Reilly • Difficult Flows and Waves

Unfixing Beliefs
There appeared to be an uncertain randomness that punctuated
Kevin’s, Tony’s, and David’s performances in class. At times their work
was sterling, at other times absent, and still at other times incomplete or
simply adequate. I wondered if their performance patterns might be seen
differently if understood as elements within a non-linear system in which
randomness could be punctuated by deeper pockets of order, such as what
happened to Tony’s performance when his need for adaptations of class-
room time was articulated and met.
During the month of October I had plotted Tony’s classroom perfor-
mance on a daily calendar, indicating his level of engagement and whether
assignments done outside of class had been completed. As the month wore
on, a larger, more complex pattern could be discerned that had been
impossible to recognize on any single day. Tony’s completion of assign-
ments, especially those due during the middle days of the school week
(Wednesday and Thursday), lessened in frequency. His participation in
class also began to lessen when knowledge of specific content, such as
the plot details in a novel, was necessary to know in order to participate
in classroom activities. At the time I suspected he was juggling assign-
ments he had avoided doing in our class and in his other academic classes.
What I did not know at this time, but would later learn from Tony, was that
he did not differentiate ways of reading based on the text. Rather, the way
Tony read a school textbook was also how he read a novel. He skimmed
both types of text. In the mid-year interview with Tony, he commented
that he had noticed a significant change in how he was reading fiction.
“I used to try to get through the book quick,” Tony explained. “Skip a
couple of chapters. But now, you know you want to read the whole thing.
It makes it a kind of new way to read books.”
The symmetry that normally framed Tony’s learning was disrupted
when he was confronted with a difficult reading assignment. In the past,
he would rely on avoidance as his sole strategy for returning balance. In
so doing, avoidance became an option that would regularly surface.
Prigogine (1997) explains that when an environment changes, a complex
system will exhibit bifurcations—random options. These “bifurcations are
a source of symmetry breaking” in which the “homogeneity of time, or
space, or both, is broken” (p. 69). During this process there will be a point
of instability in which “a symmetrical pair of new stable solutions emerges”
(p. 68). For Tony, the solution had been avoidance.
Having read a dozen books by the beginning of December and com-
posed several stories, poems, and Hyperstudio™ presentations, Tony had
a more successful history to draw from when confronted with a challenge.
As Tony began to name this pattern and his repertoire of strategies grew,
he relied on self-organizing behaviors that were more productive as a
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reader, such as reading the whole work, rereading, reading on, and talk-
ing about what he had read. In essence, the new behaviors helped Tony
to unfix a belief about himself as a disabled learner.
“I stay more focused,” Tony explained when I asked if he had changed
as a reader. “Occasionally if I drift off or I don’t understand something, I’ll
go right back and read it over instead of just saying ‘Oh forget it. It prob-
ably wasn’t important.’”
In using these self-selected strategies, Tony was able to make sense
of print and in so doing, restore order by changing the system and its
environment. Out of chaos, the system far-from-equilibrium chooses to
follow one of the branches that occurred during bifurcations.

Non-linearity and Teaching

In thinking about Tony and other students I have taught, I began to
query in what new light I might come to understand their patterns that had
been characterized simply as failure and more so, help them to reconsider
their own beliefs. It occurred to me that one idea that results in studying
non-linear systems is that I learned that complex systems have the power
to self-organize and as such, to unfix former beliefs. In working with Tony
to name and rename patterns, I watched as he began to unfix beliefs and
in doing so provide himself and me with insights into how he preferred to
learn.
In discussing his process to create a Hyperstudio™ stack in response
to a reading of an Avi book, Tony commented that, he “just went and sat
down, thought about the book and typed what happened in the book and
how [he] felt about it and [he] really didn’t know what [he] was going to
do next. But then [he] would go and then [he] would finish what [he] was
doing and go to the next card, whatever, and just think about it and then
[he] would do it. Then [he] didn’t know what [he’d] do next. It would just
come at the time.” In thinking about systems that self-organize, I wondered
if the open-endedness of the process to think didn’t aid Tony to create more
effectively. In listening to Tony talk about his thought process, he began
by saying that he followed linear steps, such as to “tell what happened in
the book” by creating a series of Hyperstudio™ cards. Then Tony had
difficulty naming what happened next. He said that he didn’t know what
he would do next. In thinking about that space where one does not know
what he or she will do next, it occurred to me that this is a space where
self-organization is occurring. Imagine that bifurcation is an associative
process where ideas spark related ideas that spark related ideas exponen-
tially. This increasingly chaotic thinking results in the creation of a new
idea. This thought-production is thinking that occurs in a hyperspace, that
is, a space characterized by the collapsing or joining of separate ideas into
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 Reilly • Difficult Flows and Waves

a new thought. In considering how Tony and other students learned, I began
to reconsider what my role as teacher might include in order to support
their learning. Rather than provide or perhaps impose a means for stu-
dents to organize thought, I began to provide students with opportunities
to construct idiosyncratic and collaborative experiences, to use multiple
symbol systems (art, mathematical, linguistical, technological, musical),
and to have access to varying blocks of time in order for students to self-
organize their thoughts. Alongside such experiential learning, I also talked
with students about how they learned in an attempt to make more con-
scious their metacognitive strategies and to begin to challenge fixed be-
liefs about themselves as learners.
As the school year progressed—hyperlearning occurred. For example,
I watched as Tony’s command of writing responses to EWT-like writing
prompts improved, even though he was not spending much time actually
doing this specific activity. Rather, Tony spent a lot of time creating
Hyperstudio™ projects by working with story boards. To do this he had
to begin to organize information and locate pieces of the information on
different Hyperstudio™ cards. He also had to create transitions and did so
by using musical cues that served to join his cards into a coherent whole.
“I need a button, here,” Tony tells me one morning, pointing to a written
essay he had been working on.
“A button?” I ask, unsure.
“Yeah, you know, like when you move to the next card.”
“Oh, like a transition,” I say, beginning to see that Tony understands
that the essay is like a Hyperstudio™ composition.
“Yeah.”
I suspect Tony drew upon that deeper structure of thinking he frequently
used to create his Hyperstudio™ projects when writing responses to EWT
prompts. Tony had indirectly learned how to elaborate and better orga-
nize his written responses by creating and using story boards when com-
posing through hypermedia.
By January, Tony was beginning to make connections between the
computer-generated multimedia authoring he was doing and the writing
of EWT prompts. “Making stacks. It’s like a story,” Tony said. “It’s like
you’re making a story shout. It’s (multimedia’s) just like, you know, a great
way to write. It’s not like an essay, but you know it is writing.”
Through his Hyperstudio™ presentations, Tony was learning how to
elaborate the text he used by making more cards and creating connec-
tions between cards and stacks. Likewise, when commenting on his writ-
ing, Tony was able to articulate an area he wanted to improve. “I still need
to work on opening my information instead of cramming it into a little part,”
explained Tony. I suspect Tony had been told by countless teachers to
elaborate when writing and to use transitions to move a reader through a

39
 English Education • October 1998

text. Yet, I suspect the combination of reading more frequently, having

ample and regular time to talk about books, his own writing with myself
and his peers, and composing via hypermedia helped Tony to name the
need for elaboration. Further, Tony’s articulation of things he wanted to
improve in his writing and ways to do so hinted at the flexibility inherent
in his beliefs about himself.

Remembrance of my work with students in Morganton continues to

help me resist the easy placement of students’ complex lives into fixed
categories. Understanding that teaching and learning is complex informed
my study of learners’ histories of difficult flows and waves. When I thought
about the Morganton students who struggled each year and their accu-
mulated “failures,” I thought about David Bell’s work on measurement
(1993). Bell tells us that
measurement fulfills a hygienic function. It allows the thinker to purge
himself of the affective charge presented by something that is new and
strange and forces him somehow to situate the strangeness of encoun-
tered phenomena. In the absence of an attempt to take up the task of
describing certain aspects of an unusual phenomenon by the interplay
of measurements, the scientist would be able only to speak endlessly in
general terms about the object or event in question. There is always a
certain distance implied by the act of measuring but whether the distance
is the only possible theoretical one is another question entirely. (pp. 73–
74)

Bell’s commentary, along with my observations concerning fixed and

unfixed beliefs, led me to consider how I might begin to create instruction
that privileged students’ learning how to develop, extend, and refine idio-
syncratic learning strategies and in so doing begin to challenge the no-
tion of fixed beliefs about themselves and others as learners.

Notes
1. The Early Warning Test is an evaluation designed by the New Jersey Department
of Education and administered to all eighth grade students in New Jersey public schools.
This test was designed to serve as an early indicator of student success on the high stakes
testing. High School Proficiency Test (HSPT) is administered at the eleventh grade level. In
order to earn a graduation diploma from a N.J. public high school, a regular education stu-
dent needs to pass the HSPT.
2. The composition had been scored using the New Jersey Registered Holistic Scor-
ing Method. The score range is from 0 to 12. 8 and above demonstrate command of written
language, whereas 7 and below demonstrates limited lack of command of written language.
Two separate scorers had scored David’s essay as a 2. Their scores doubled giving him the
final score of 4, indicating that this work represented a lack of writing command.

40
 Reilly • Difficult Flows and Waves

Works Cited
Bell, D. F. (1993). Simulacra, or vicissitudes of the imprecise. In Nancy Easterlin and Bar-
bara Riebling (Eds.) After postructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and literary theory.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 71–88.
Davies, P. (1988). The cosmic blueprint: New discoveries in nature’s creative ability to or-
der the universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Deleuze, G. (1993). The fold. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Hayles, N.K. (1990). Chaos bound: Orderly disorder in contemporary literature and science.
New York: Cornell University Press.
Nayles, N. K., Ed. (1991). Chaos and order: Complex dynamics in literature and science.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Prigogine, I. and Isabelle S. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature.
New York: Bantam Books.
Prigogine, I. (1997). The end of certainty: Time, chaos, and the new laws of nature. NY: The
Free Press.
Vinz, R. (1997). Capturing a moving form. English Education, 29 (2), 1–5.
Vinz, R. (1996). Dilemmas of definition: Peripheral visions on interdisciplinary education.
Paper delivered at the Interdisciplinarity Art Conference at Teachers College, Colum-
bia University in New York on April 28, 1996.

New Members Elected to the CEE Executive Committee—1998

The newly elected members to the CEE Executive Committee are
Deborah Appleman, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota; Cathy
Fleischer, Eastern Michigan University; and Danling Fu, University of
Florida.
Elected members of the CEE Nominating Committee are Robert E.
Probst (as chair), Georgia State University, Atlanta; Jane Agee, Univer-
sity at Albany, State University of New York; Patricia Daniel, University
of South Florida; Sally Hudson-Ross, University of Georgia; and Jeffrey
D. Wilhelm, University of Maine.

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