Mission Control 

The conflict exhibited in this experience is a primary example if the interrelationship of order and chaos. I want the experience of a new context because I know a new context will bring a new experience. But the experience shows the conflicts we are creating within academia. On the one hand, we want the student to be in control; we want to decenter the classroom; we want the teacher's authority undermined. On the other hand, however, the will to order raises its head. How am I suppose to teach these students about writing? I can't even get their attention. I fall back on traditional methodology and pedagogy out of my lack of a methodology and pedagogy based on chaos, and because I have been constructed by an institutional situation that is predicated on order. It is this very dichotomy that is troubling me in this situation and in this project. The teacher and the students are caught up in a physical/rhetorical situation that constructs them. It is the teacher who is trying to order in this situation, but the situation is constructed in such a way that there is little possibility for control/order. The students don't seem troubled by it. Yet I can't shake this apparent contradiction: Are order and chaos really that different in this institutional setting? Do we ask students to produce certain kinds of texts when we in fact provide a context that is not conducive to those types of texts? Is there a context that is?