The Pedagogy of the King of Chaos in a Postmodern Era

• In Event: 30.047 - Echoes of God's Laughter: Entertaining the Generative and Generous Gifts of William E. Doll, Jr.

Abstract

A long long time ago, there is a monkey born from a rock in a big storm at the far end of East Sea in China. As one of the most well-known mystery figures in China, this monkey king is famous for his untiring battles against rigid social structure. He is also called as the King of Chaos because of both his birth from chaos and his adventures against all dead equilibriums including hierarchy.
In my first trip to China with Doll, one of our Chinese hosts, a middle school principal called Doll the “King of Chaos” after Doll finished his key note conference presentation on post-modern pedagogy of 4Rs. After the principal explained why he thought Doll as the King of Chaos, Doll was immediately fascinated by the story of the monkey king and loved his new nick name in China. In several important occasions, Doll called himself the King of Chaos and celebrated it.
This paper aims to explore the post-modern pedagogy of Doll in the magic kingdom of complexity, chaos, and culture, especially through my adventures with this King of Chaos in China. Like his idol, Dewey, Doll has claimed China as his second home country after the United States. As his graduate student, book translator, and colleague, I went to China with Doll in respectively 2007, 2010, 2011, and 2014, presenting in international and national conferences of education, visiting K-12 schools and state-approved teacher education programs in colleges and universities, having conversations with policy makers from national and local Department of Education, researchers from educational research institutes, college and university education faculties, administrators from school districts, school principals and teachers, across six major cities in China such as Beijing and Shanghai.
Following Doll’s footsteps in his four trips in China from 2007 to 2001, this paper tries to capture those precious moments and conversations Doll had with Chinese educators at multiple levels to explore the significant influence of his post-modern pedagogy in China. As the King of Chaos in the field of education, Doll’s post-modern theoretical framework is not unchanging; rather, like the complexistic twist in especially his later works in the new century, it is a complex and open system constantly welcoming perturbations and experiencing recursions between equilibrium and disequilibrium. As one of Doll’s major works on complexity and education, “Chaos, Complexity, Curriculum and Culture,” edited with Fleener, Trueit, and Julien in 2005, entitles its four subsections as four iterations, I would like to also borrow this term from chaos theory to highlight the critical changes of his currere during the four trips in China along with the significant impacts upon Chinese educational scholars and practitioners. Now let’s flow with Doll together through his four iterations/trips in China: First Iteration in 2007: The Father of Post-Modern Theory of 4Rs in Education, Second Iteration in 2010: The King of Chaos, Third Iteration in 2011: From the 4Rs to 3Ss and then 5Cs, and Fourth Iteration in 2014: The Danger of Chasing the Sun.

Author

• Jie Yu, Rollins College