Chaos in the writing classroom

Here’s why I like chaos theory in the composition classroom. Friday, I hauled the laptop CART down to my classroom for my basic writing students to use in a “revision workshop.” I opened the lesson by distributing a handout with revision prompts for “re-discovery” and “rethinking audience,” and before I set students to these tasks, I explained my understanding of revision by deconstructing the word on the board (re: to do again; vision: to see; revision = to see again). I had imagined this as a quiet, orderly day, students first attempting a revision prompt like creating character sketches of their target audience in their Writing and Reflection Journals, then opening their rough drafts of the Literacy Narrative on the laptops to begin their revisions.

Immediately, one student – I’ll call her L – bounded up to my desk to ask if I could help her decide where to go. I bit my lip; I vacillated between helping her (my initial inclination) and telling her to try the revision prompts. I want my basic writing students to become self-directed, so I hesitate to do too much of the work of writing for them. But here was L, hopefully extending her essay toward me, so I decided (as Mina Shaughnessy says) to dive in and see where the conversation led.

L didn’t want me to do her work for her, it turns out. She didn’t stand quietly beside my desk while I read her essay. Instead, she leaned over the paper with me, explaining each paragraph: “I was trying to say here why I liked writing,” “This is when I started to procrastinate,” “I don’t know how to end it.” I began asking her probing questions about what she was trying to tell readers and what she had learned about herself as a writer from composing the Literacy Narrative; she started talking about the good and bad aspects of procrastination, and how her writing classes had made her so fearful of writing she didn’t like to get started until she had to. When I suggested a structure that could keep her focused, L didn’t immediately capitulate to my advice. We talked it over, debated its merits, and settled on a strategy she could take back to her computer.

That wasn’t the end, however. Perhaps L’s example had prompted the rest of the class to take advantage of my accessibility. My own writing sat untouched on my desk, my vision of an orderly class disappeared in a puff of smoke, as hands shot up all over the classroom. Students had good questions. They wanted to know if this was a good introduction, if this theme was clear, if they should start over with a scrap of an idea, if this transition from one segment of the narrative to another worked. I ran all over that classroom. I had to set students to answering each other’s questions because there wasn’t enough of me to go around. While this was probably the best teaching day I’ve had in a very long time, to any outsider, I am sure it looked like absolute chaos. And I think that’s exactly what it was: the “productive” chaos Bonnie Kyzburg describes in “Meaning Finds a Way: Chaos (Theory) and Composition”:

When composition teachers and scholars consider their work in the context of postmodern sciences such as chaos theory, they may entertain the notion that order emerges from chaos in unpredictable yet comprehensible (albeit perhaps new and radical) ways. Earlier order-out-of-chaos models endorsed a fairly monolithic and unchanging notion of order that occluded the sorts of alternative discourses currently shaping (our thoughts about) "order" in the form of "effective writing"; they aimed at clarity, coherence, and correctness, specific genres, the modes, and pre- dominantly expository prose. Chaos theory reconfigures chaos as a conceptual metaphor in ways that privilege chaos as order, as a complicated kind of order, or as potential order. 505

Kyzburg’s chaos theory captures the potentiality of post-process theory for composition. Instead of nihilism, Kyzburg embraces a departure from the prescriptive orderliness (I hesitate to say “linearity,” for process theory, unlike process pedagogy, never prescribed a linear writing process) of process theory. Writing is a “complicated kind of order,” meaning that emerges from messy, dis-orderly thought processes that occur as a result of writing, reading, and talking. For instance, I think what happened in my basic writing classroom on Friday could best be described in Kyzburg’s terms as a self-organizing system: “As students engage in chaotic writing processes,…and as meanings emerge from within a wider cultural matrix…we see the possibility of multiple cultural and ideological influences…from a student's mood, to his health, to her gender, to a teacher's pedagogy. Thus, writing does, in effect, self-organize, as the number of influences is potentially infinite and therefore indescribable and uncertain” (510).

Had I assumed that my basic writing students could only benefit from one model of the revision process – the isolated model of a writer working through her/his own meaning, with nothing more than the memory of Wednesday’s peer workshop to stimulate dormant ideas or prompt restructuring and refocusing – I would have sent L back to her desk to “write through” her confusion. And she might have gotten there, and the rest of the class along with her. But by choosing to become an “influence,” a “variable,” within L’s writing process on this particular piece, I think I showed her (and by extension, the rest of the class) how fundamental is the give-and-take between writers and readers. Standing together at my desk, hunched over L’s essay, talking not in whispers but in normal, conversational tones, L and I modeled what Bruffee calls the “productive talk” that leads to new ideas, new insights, new goals. That model was so satisfying to the students listening in that they wanted their own turn, and that excites me because it suggests these disenfranchised writers have ideas they do care about getting across to readers.

In Kyzburg, I find a less troubling version of post-process theory. Although she agrees with Kent that “writing is thus irreducible to "a generalizable process" (5) and is pragmatically unteachable” (510), for her, having no single, monolithic Process to teach isn’t an end to writing instruction. In fact, it’s a new beginning, for “self-organization makes potentially equivalent variables of all variables; thus, students, teachers, contexts, ideologies, and much more all carry equal potential to contribute to the creation of meaningful texts, meaningful theories, pedagogies, and changes to the orientation of the system. That's progressive. That's promising” (510).

I, too, find chaos theory “progressive” and “promising” for the composition classroom because it reminds us that, not only does no single process exist, no single influence “makes or breaks” a writer. My decision to engage with L and her classmates in their revision processes becomes far less fraught with weighty pedagogical consideration when viewed this way, since it’s impossible that this choice means my students will remain stuck in teacher dependency, unable to engage in self-directed revision. Chaos theory gives me the freedom to teach each individual student, each specific class, each particular day according to my best judgment of what might work in that moment, on that task, for that writer. And at the same time, chaos they reminds me that getting it right once won’t solve every future writing problem for these students. They, too, need to learn to “develop a disposition toward the chaotic, to nourish an epistemology of chaos” (519) that values just how beautifully unpredictable writing really is.