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Sally and the UniversariumSteve Shanna

a Faculty of Education, Science, Technology & Maths, University ofCanberra, ACT, AustraliaPublished online: 19 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Steve Shann (2014) Sally and the Universarium, Changing English: Studies inCulture and Education, 21:1, 53-67, DOI: 10.1080/1358684X.2013.875751

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2013.875751

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Sally and the Universarium

Steve Shann*

Faculty of Education, Science, Technology & Maths, University of Canberra, ACT, Australia

English teachers encourage the view that the imagination helps us understand,and engage with, the world. However, we don’t often write fiction as a means ofknowing and a way of telling. This short story emerged out of my experience asan English teacher, trying to make sense of the nature of my subject, and out ofmy reading of others’ attempts to define what it is that the discipline affords andhow it has come to take the shape now seen in secondary schools.

Keywords: English subject; story; fiction; mythopoetics

Introduction

To be an English teacher is to encourage the view that the imagination helps usunderstand, and engage with, the world. However, with some exceptions (Reed2006, 2008), we English teachers don’t often write fiction as a means of knowingand a way of telling (Bochner 2012), despite a growing interest in the wideracademic community (Barone 2001; Clough 2002; Greene 1995; Macdonald 1981;Somerville 2007) about the value of what one scholar has called ‘ethnographicfiction’ (Reed 2011).

Writing up our research as fiction is, therefore, another way of speaking up forour discipline.

What follows is a short story, a fantasy which has emerged out of my experienceas an English teacher trying to make sense of the nature of my subject (Shann 1987;Shann and Cunneen 2011). It also comes out of my reading of others’ attempts todefine what it is that our discipline affords (Edmundson 2005; Gibbons 2013; Howie2008; Kostogriz and Doecke 2008; Leggo 2011; Scholes 1998), and how it hascome to take the shape we see now in our secondary schools (Anderson 2013;Cormack 2008; Dixon 2012; Green and Cormack 2008; Misson 2012).

1

The time is the future, but also no time and all-time. The place is the Universarium,Canberra, Australia. And Sally is standing outside it with her Year 10 class, lookingat the old building (is it old, or just built to look that way?) and wondering if this isgoing to be just another vaguely tedious school excursion. There’s a bitingly coldbreeze. The throb and fume of the peak-hour traffic is faintly nauseating. Sally hopesit will be warm and quiet, even womb-like, in the building. It wasn’t easy to get outof bed this morning.

*Email: steve.shann@canberra.edu.au

© 2014 The editors of Changing English

Changing English, 2014Vol. 21, No. 1, 53–67, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2013.875751

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Until the excursion was announced a week or so ago, Sally had not heard of theUniversarium. Her father had a vague recollection of visiting a place called thePlanetarium in London back in the 1960s, where he’d joined an audience of around330 seated beneath a dome watching a show based on a view of the night sky. Butthis is the Universarium, not the Planetarium. This Universarium, Sally has beentold, offers a view not of the night sky but of the known universe. The knownuniverse! Not just the universe ‘out there’, but also the universe within, the humanpsyche. Everything there is. The lot. All that we know about our worlds, externaland internal. She wants to be excited, but is mainly sceptical. Too many promisedadventures in learning have turned out to be dross.

Sanjay’s a part of the group, though. She’s standing next to him now, as theywait to cross the road. That’s compensation. A day with Sanjay. Time, she hopes,for them to talk about what he’d hinted at the other day.

Her Year 10 English teacher, Mr Ellison, is with them. He knows a lot, thisMr Ellison, though Sally doesn’t enjoy his classes. There’s something … well,there’s something awfully dry about them. Sally is someone who loves to read andwrite, and these classes have been something of a disappointment.

Mr Ellison herds the class across the road and into the building.They find themselves in a small entrance foyer. The layout is odd. Sally had

expected the foyer to lead to a theatre of some kind, but instead she sees a narrowhallway or corridor to her right which curves its way around the circumference ofthe massive building. To her left, there’s a similar corridor, and Sally presumes(rightly, as it turns out) that this is the other end of the one corridor, and that theirvisit is going to involve discovering some of the corridor’s secrets.

‘OK then. Right. Let’s begin, shall we’, says the guide, a white-haired and ratheroddly dressed man. Sally wonders about the prickly speckled stubble on his chinwhich gives him a faintly homeless look. His manner is friendly enough, thougheccentric. ‘Let’s begin, eh! Follow me, follow me.’

He turns and limps with a kind of rolling gait towards the corridor on the left.Sally wonders if he’s got one leg shorter than the other. Or maybe, and the idea is alittle bit exciting, he was once wounded in some terrible battle. She tries to imaginehim younger and uniformed. It doesn’t really work. She can imagine him as theowner of some dark and overstocked second-hand bookshop. If he’s to be theirguide for the afternoon, she hopes he isn’t like Mr Ellison, keen to pour all heknows into their under-stimulated brains.

‘Clockwise’, says the guide enigmatically. ‘You see. Clockwise.’Sally forgets about Sanjay for the moment and moves to the front of the group.

He’s interesting, this man. Odd, but interesting. She’s not sure what he’s meaninguntil he says, ‘We’ll start here, at seven o’clock, and you’ll see, you’ll see!’ Ah, he’simagining the corridor as the outside of a huge clock! The strange man seems not atall concerned whether any of the young people behind him are listening, thoughmost of them are. Sally isn’t the only one intrigued.

‘Excuse me, Mister…’ says Sally.‘Wilson. Call me Wilson. First name. Call me Will if you want, though my

parents never did. Please yourself. Not bothered, really.’He seemed, to Sally, more like a Wilson than a Will.‘Wilson, how old is this building?’

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‘Here time disappears. Don’t ask a question like that one. Not relevant. Keepasking questions though. But I can’t answer that one. Wrong category. No suchthing as time here, you see. Despite starting at seven o’clock!’

For some reason Wilson finds this awfully funny, and has to stop while heguffaws into a rather crumpled handkerchief which he’s drawn out of a pocket.Sally’s not sure if she’s ever seen a handkerchief before, outside of old films. Butit’s not out of place with Wilson.

The tour begins, and the tour party comes to a door on their right. It has a signon it which says, in large intimidating letters, ‘SCIENCE’. Oh dear, Sally thinks toherself. Not just another static museum, with exhibits explaining what science tellsus about the known world.

She is in for a big surprise.

2

Wilson pushes open the heavy door. Sally is first into the room.The room is dark, and not large for a room that’s about to hold nearly 30 adoles-

cents. In the gloom, Sally can make out some armchairs and small couches – half adozen maybe, though they’re not easy to see – each facing a large window, or ascreen, it’s hard to tell which, that takes up the whole of the wall facing them asthey enter the room. There’s a low hum, as if the room is full of energetic vibrations.She feels wide awake, in the presence of some kind of welcoming mystery. Thesensations are all pleasurable.

Sally makes her way to one of the chairs. It’s like one of those swivel chairs shenags her parents to buy for their TV watching: black padded leather, head- and arm-rests. She sinks into it. If the show is boring, at least she’ll be comfortable.

There are two control panels, one in each arm-rest, and Sally begins to play witha joy stick. There’s a stirring in the dark beyond the window in front of her. Animage begins to form.

At first she thinks it’s some kind of hologram of a slowly spinning pearl, allwhite with oily greens and blues, suspended beguilingly in the air. But then she seesit’s not a pearl at all, but some representation of the Earth; there, through swirlingpatterns of cloud cover, she recognises the outlines of the continents against the blueof the seas. It’s breathtakingly beautiful, and she remembers suddenly whatastronauts have said about looking back from space and seeing one Earth, not lotsof countries with borders.

Pushing on the joy stick brings the Earth up closer and she begins to see moredetail: smoke rising from fires that dot the entire east coast of Africa, ice floesjostling for position in the Antarctic, the Ganges River dumping its murky,sediment-laden water into the Indian Ocean.

Sally realises she can zoom in and out again by pushing and pulling the joystick: in, so that she sees (and can actually hear!) the waves breaking on some islandshore; out, so that there’s suddenly a deep silence and the Earth is just one planetspinning in its orbit around the sun.

This is fun.For a while – she doesn’t know exactly for how long – Sally plays randomly

with the controls. By moving the joy stick to the right or the left, she can controldirection, and first, as if on Google Earth, she visits her own home and sees herparents’ car parked outside. Then she zooms back to outer space, beyond our galaxy,

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and sees the swirling patterns of whole galaxies amongst which ours is just a tinylittle dust mote in a rather insignificant galaxy. She feels both enormously powerfuland utterly insignificant.

‘I can look at anything I want’, she realises. She hopes that the rest of the classdon’t mind too much that it is she who is controlling the show.

The silence of outer space is unnerving, and so again she zooms in, back to Earthand the comforting sounds of winds and waves. She sees, as she moves closer, that she’s‘landed’ in England. Sally’s parents are from England, and were brought up in Leicester.Sally knows that Leicester is somewhere in the Midlands, but she’s not sure exactlywhere, so she looks at her control panels to see if there’s some kind of ‘FIND’ key.

It’s then that she notices, on the control panel to her left, a key marked ‘TOPIC’.Perhaps, she thinks, that will do. But when she presses it, her heart sinks. Thewondrous image of England, the sounds of the sea and the whisperings of unseenwinds, all instantly vanish, and, instead, lifeless words hover disappointingly in theempty space beyond the window where once the world was.

TYPE IN YOUR TOPIC

To type in ‘Leicester’ risks bringing up some boring lists of possible sub-topics,so instead, given the news that’s been breaking in the media all week, she types in

DISCOVERY OF RICHARD III’s BODY

Immediately a much more stimulating set of sub-topics presents itself.

CHOOSE YOUR SUB-TOPIC AND QUESTION.

The Leicester Council Car Park.

Digging for Richard.

Finding the body.

Archaeology.

DNA testing.

Carbon dating.

Forensic science.

The battle of Bosworth: the scientific evidence.

Scientific knowledge in the time of Richard III

Scoliosis…

Sally has seen the photos of the king’s skeleton. She’s seen the bend in his spine.She’s had backaches herself. A doctor once mentioned the word ‘scoliosis’, but shewasn’t clear whether he was talking about a chronic condition or a temporaryailment. She chooses ‘Scoliosis’.

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WHAT’S THE QUESTION THAT IS STIMULATING YOUR CURIOSITY ABOUTSCOLIOSIS?

the invisible AI beyond the window asks, and after a moment’s thought, Sally types

WHAT IS SCOLIOSIS AND IS IT CURABLE?

A face appears on the screen, a doctor from Texas giving a short and luciddescription of scoliosis as it appears in children and adults. There’s an X-ray behindhim showing a spine with a curve in it almost identical to the curve in Richard III’sspine.

A host of questions suddenly elbow each other for attention inside Sally’s head.Does my spine look like that? How much pain must Richard have felt, and howcould he ride a horse and fight in a battle? Does scoliosis get worse as you getolder? Are there cures? Will my backache limit what I can do as an adult?

But just as she begins to type one of these questions, the window suddenlydarkens, the room’s lights come on, and the words ‘SESSION OVER’ appear in frontof her.

Sally’s heart sinks. She could have stayed here all day.She stands up. Then she looks around.She’s alone in the room.Maybe everyone else got bored, she thinks, the shame of it causing her to blush.

They all had to sit here and watch the show that I created! Maybe they all up andleft.

Sally moves towards the door. There are agitated voices being raised in the corri-dor outside. She hears her teacher’s voice. Mr Ellison. He is sounding very angry.

3

The corridor outside is crowded, and to begin with Sally can only see the backs ofher classmates, some of whom are standing on tiptoe to see more of what’s goingon ahead of them.

‘What’s happening?’ she whispers to Sanjay.‘Mr Ellison’, says Sanjay. ‘He’s upset that this is all a waste of time.’‘A waste of time!’ says Sally. ‘That was awesome!’‘Totally’, says Sanjay.Sally hears the disembodied voice of her teacher above the push of bodies in

front of her.‘I won’t have my time wasted like this! We’re here to be educated, not enter-

tained.’There’s no reply, and Sally wonders how Wilson, who is clearly the target of this

outburst, is taking it. Perhaps he has heard this kind of thing before and it’s wateroff a duck’s back. Maybe he’s wishing, as Sally has often wished, that Mr Ellisonwould stop talking and let everyone get on with something useful.

‘This next room, this HISTORY room, had better not be the mindless entertain-ment centre that the last room turned out to be.’ Mr Ellison’s tone is full of thatassumption of the principled high ground that Sally has heard a thousand timesbefore. ‘If the public knew that they paid taxes in order to fund days off school for

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students to sit in dark rooms playing computer games, there’d be an outcry, andquite right too.’

‘Computer games!’ whispers Sally. ‘Sheesh. It might not have been everyone’sidea of an interesting topic, but all that stuff about scoliosis was interesting to me.’

Sanjay looks surprised. ‘What?’ he asks.‘It’s something I’ve always wondered about. Seeing the pictures of Richard’s

skeleton made me think about my own back.’Sanjay turns, frowning. ‘What skeleton Sally?’A hasty whispered conversation solves the mystery. Only Sally has seen the

show she’s imagined everyone had been forced to watch; each student has seen andlearnt something different. Sanjay doesn’t know many of the details other than thathis friend Harry, the guitarist in their band, has learnt about soundwaves in theScience Room, and Sanjay himself has been discovering more about mind controland hypnotism. It seems that what each student ‘saw’ on the screen was somehowdetermined by how the student managed his or her controls.

‘And apparently’, whispers Sanjay, ‘Mr Ellison stood stiffly at the back of theroom, refused to take a seat at one of the consoles, and just watched all of usfiddling with what he thought were glorified Gameboys. He saw nothing on thescreen, and assumed nothing was going on.’

‘Typical’, says Sally.The corridor is now silent; it seems that Mr Ellison’s steam has evaporated –

Wilson has remained silent during the whole monologue – and the student caravanis now shuffling slowly on towards the next room.

HISTORY ROOM

This time, Sally enters the room last. Wilson is standing by the door as sheenters.

‘Can I ask you something?’ she whispers.‘He he!’ chortles Wilson. ‘A question, my word. I’d like a question. Lots of

words I’ve been listening to, these last minutes, and not a question to be had forlove or money. Would love one. Ask away, young lady, ask away.’

‘You said earlier that time didn’t exist here, in this Universarium.’‘No such thing as time here’, repeats Wilson.‘I don’t know what you mean, and it’s kind of nice not to have your meaning

explained, not yet anyway. But I do have a question about it.’Wilson looks delighted, and maybe (Sally hopes) not just about the prospect of

an interesting question. Sally has always hated premature explanations of deep ques-tions, explanations that rob a mystery of its potential for meandering and pleasurableexploration. Sally senses in Wilson a kindred spirit.

‘But we’re about to enter the History Room’, says Sally. ‘Isn’t History all abouttime?’

‘You’ll see, you’ll see’, says Wilson, delighted. ‘It won’t be time you’ll findyourself face to face with when you walk through that door. Timelines. Bah! Thin,lifeless things, timelines. History’s fatter than that, as you’ll see. Full of paralleluniverses, is history. No such thing as time in there’, he says, nodding towards theroom’s interior. ‘Have a squiz. Tell me, when you come out, if you’ve been encoun-tering time. Thin, nasty, two-dimensional invention, is time. No elbow room.’

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It’s odd, the way he speaks, and Sally doesn’t understand much of it. But it’sintriguing. Interesting. Unsettling, but in a pleasurable way. Sally feels invigorated.

She walks into the History Room.

4

It’s like the Science Room, lights dimmed, swivel chairs and small couches facing awindow, though because she’s last in, the seats are all taken. Mr Ellison stands, erectand grim, arms folded tightly across his chest, against a back wall. Sanjay, seated ona small couch, beckons Sally over and she squeezes in next to him. It’s a tight fit.

Sanjay is excited, she can tell, though she wonders if it’s less because of herproximity and more because this is history. Sanjay loves history. He’s always read-ing about it and telling her stuff. His love of learning and the pleasure he gets fromsharing what he loves is one of the things she finds attractive about him.

‘Well, what now?’ she whispers.‘You don’t have to whisper’, says Sanjay in a voice that clearly everyone in the

suddenly-silent room must be able to hear. Sally looks around quickly, but no-one islooking at them. There are mouths moving, but it’s only Sanjay’s voice that she canhear. It’s as if they are in a cocoon. A bubble. A parallel universe. Wilson’s wordscome back to her. ‘Full of parallel universes, is history.’ She wonders what he meant.

Sanjay is fiddling with the controls, trying to make something happen. Perhapshe’s expecting something dramatic, and he doesn’t notice what Sally can now see.Along the bottom of the window there is a thin white line. It looks alarmingly like atimeline, one of Wilson’s thin, lifeless pet hates.

Sally looks down at the control panel on her side of the small couch. She’s gotthe keyboard. And on the panel there’s a screen called ‘dates’, and two small textboxes. So much for time not existing in here, Sally thinks.

She types her birth year into one box – 1998 – and then this year – 2013 – intothe other. Instantly, the thin white line become calibrated. It is a timeline, now show-ing years and months between 1998 and 2013. Around the walls of the HistoryRoom there suddenly appear hundreds of images, quotes, paused videos, newspapercuttings, virtual filing cabinets full of documents, a virtual door labelled ‘secondarysources’. The mass of material is overwhelming. Sally feels dizzy.

‘What’s going on?’ Sanjay asks, then he sees what Sally has done. Heunderstands straight away.

‘Not those dates’, he says impatiently. ‘Type in something interesting.’Sally doesn’t like his dismissive tone. She’s made something happen, after all;

he might have given her credit for that.‘Like what?’ she says rather coldly, then regrets her tone.But Sanjay doesn’t seem to have noticed. He’s too excited.‘Try mediaeval’, he says. ‘Say 1100 to 1400.’Sally punches in the numbers and again the walls are filled with images, an

overwhelming array, and not just European (as Sally had unconsciously expected).There are images and virtual documents from Southeast Asia, the Middle East,Africa, China, the Pacific Islands. She can’t see anything that might be from indige-nous Australia, though. No records? She wonders who put this collection together.Is it a dump of everything, or have decisions been made by someone? She realises,with a little frisson of pleasure, that she’s thinking like an historian.

But just as she’s about to share some of these thoughts with Sanjay, he speaks.

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‘On your control panel. Is there somewhere where you can say what location?’Sally looks down and notices many other fields. Yes, there’s a text box labelled

‘Location’. But there are also ones for ‘Class’, ‘Gender’, ‘Work’, ‘Home’ and manymore categories. The control panel, like the wall, is overwhelming. ‘So that’s whythey give us a textbook’, she thinks, but dismisses the idea straight away. She hatesthe textbook. So does Sanjay. No elbow room, she finds herself thinking.

Sanjay, however, is becoming increasingly agitated. He wants to get on withthings.

‘Can we swap seats’, he says, but he’s already getting up out of his chair. It’snot really a question.

Sally shuffles along to her right and Sanjay, his face a picture of animatedconcentration, takes control.

She hears him punching in inputs, and then August 21st 1485 appears at one endof the timeline in the window, and August 22nd 1485 at the other end. The walls aresuddenly, filled with images of the Bosworth battle field in 1485. Maps. Weapons.Contemporary accounts. Paintings. Photographs. Military documents. Letters. Farminformation. Supply lists. Weather reports. August 22nd, 1485! The day Richard IIIwas killed! Sally suddenly sits up, her irritation with Sanjay gone. She’d describedto him, in the corridor, all that she’d seen in the Science Room, and he’s obviouslyhad her in mind when he punched in his data. She feels renewed warmth. She putsher hand on Sanjay’s shoulder as the two of them scan the myriad images.

‘Is there a mouse on your side?’ says Sanjay. Sally looks down. There’s nomouse. But there’s a touch pad. She moves her finger around the touch pad, and thetwo of them see a small arrow moving around the four walls.

‘Which one will I click on?’ she asks.‘I don’t know. It’s overwhelming. Will I type in something different?’‘Not yet’, says Sally. She’s just noticed another part of her control panel. Did it

just appear? It’s like the one in the Science Room.

WHAT’S THE QUESTION THAT IS STIMULATING YOUR CURIOSITY ABOUT THEBATTLE OF BOSWORTH?

‘Look’, says Sally. ‘That’s going to help. What is it that we’re wanting toknow?’

‘It’s your topic’, says Sanjay. ‘You decide.’‘I want to know exactly how Richard was killed.’‘Ghoul’, says Sanjay with a smile.‘No, not just because it’s gruesome. I want to find out if the way he was killed,

the wounds he got, really do tally with what they’ve found in this skeleton in thecar park.’

‘But it’s not a valid question’, says Sanjay.‘Why not? Of course it’s a valid question!’‘No it’s not. We can’t type in something like ‘Exactly how was Richard killed?’

because that’s not what history is about.’‘Yes it is! History is finding out what happened. Isn’t it?’‘I don’t think so’, says Sanjay. ‘History can’t tell us objectively what happened.

Only some all-seeing infallible god could do that. History can only tell us whatdifferent people, different groups, thought happened.’

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‘Bullshit’, says Sally. ‘Our history teacher keeps telling us we’re searching forthe facts. That’s why he keeps telling us we need to go to the primary sources.’

‘The primary sources aren’t facts’, says Sanjay. ‘Each primary source isproduced by people who give an interpretation of the facts. People see differentthings from their own perspective. We can find out what different people reportedabout Richard’s death, but we won’t know the truth of the reports.’

‘Unless they all agree. Surely then we’d know the facts.’‘But we don’t know if other eye-witness reports have been suppressed, or lost.’Sally isn’t entirely convinced. There’s got to be some solid ground, something

they can trust. But, for the moment, she doesn’t want to waste more time talkingwhen there’s so much to explore.

‘How about’, she says, ‘we type in something like

WHAT DO EYE WITNESSES SAY ABOUT HOW RICHARD III DIED?’

‘Let’s try it’, says Sanjay.But, before they can get the words typed, the walls go blank and SESSION

OVER appears in large letters.‘Shit’, says Sanjay in a room suddenly filled with many disappointed voices.

‘Can we stay here?’They look over at Mr Ellison, still standing with arms folded and face set.

Wilson is opening the door, a huge grin across his face.‘No, come on. Let’s get out and be first into the next room’, says Sally. ‘I like

this place.’

5

And, for the next hour or so – time is elusive here, Sally discovers – they movefrom room to room until there is only one door left. Each room has been both simi-lar and different; each visit has got Sally thinking about some new aspect of theworlds she lives in.

Some of this thinking, this new knowledge about the world, has been to do withRichard III, and she left both the Geography and the Politics Rooms knowing moreabout this man and his times.

Sometimes, though, as had happened in both the History and the Science Rooms,she’s ended up asking herself questions about the subject itself. What does it meanto think like a scientist? What is the central purpose of the historian? Are thereobjective facts out there just waiting to be uncovered? What is knowledge? She hasno answers, of course; just the delicious feeling of being drawn into interesting andpossibly important questions. Questions that her school subjects seem to steparound.

She has been thinking, too, as she and Sanjay have moved from one room toanother, about the walls which separate the different rooms. Why do they exist?They seem necessary, it’s true; this carving up of knowledge about the world intodiscrete units which helps her to see the same thing in different ways. But she’s alsobeen struck by some of the connections. Aesthetic beauty, for example, was presentnot just in the Arts Room, but in others as well, and especially in the Maths Room.That was unexpected. And thought-provoking.

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But now they’re about to enter the last room. The English Room. For somereason, however, Wilson hasn’t yet opened the door. With every other room, he’sjust opened the door and let Sally and her classmates experience what is inside. Upuntil now, it’s as if his role has been as an usher. But here it seems he wants to saysomething first. The group crowds around him.

‘Lucky last, eh, Mr Ellison’, he says. ‘Your subject, English. The jewel in thecrown perhaps? Eh? What do you think?’

Mr Ellison is at the rear of the group. He shrugs. ‘If you say so.’‘Not me, not me. I’m not doing the saying here. The building says so. The

building has English here, the final discipline.’‘Why do you say “discipline”?’ asks Sally. ‘Why do you call these subjects

disciplines?’‘Love it! That’s the girl. Discipline. Great word, bastardised by some. Each room

is organised around a different disciplined way of seeing the world, you see.’‘Do you mean that you have to work hard at them? Be disciplined?’ says another

student, someone who’s shown no sign of life during Mr Ellison’s classes, classeswhere to ask a question is to risk a humiliation.

‘Could be part of it, could be’, says Wilson. ‘But only part. The word has othermeanings. A field of study, a branch of knowledge. A discipline.’

‘But why call it a discipline then? Why not say “the History Field”, or “theScientific Branch” or something like that?’

‘Because, you see’, says a cheerful Wilson, ‘the word “discipline” implies somekind of order and regulation, an accepted way of doing things. We call science adiscipline because when you study the world scientifically, you’re following certainrules, certain ways of looking at things, ways that have been refined over time.Every discipline has its own ways of looking at the world, its own methods if youlike. Every discipline has its own ways of communicating its knowledge, its ownlanguage. Its own forms. So you can’t move confidently within a discipline, youcan’t be a member of its club, unless you abide by its rules. There’s a disciplineinvolved.’

This is so much more interesting for Sally than the usual teacher talk aboutdiscipline. It’s sounding like something that expands the understanding rather thanlimits it. It seems connected to a kind of freedom, a feeling she rarely feels whenshe’s in Mr Ellison’s class.

‘Seeing the world through a disciplinary lens can help you to see more’, he adds.‘That’s what you’ve been discovering in these rooms, haven’t you? You’re seeingmore of the world. Of your worlds.’

Is that what it’s been like, Sally wonders. Not exactly. She’s found herself think-ing as much about the different subjects – the disciplines – as she has about theworld. Yet she’s been learning about the world, too.

But English? English? Somehow English doesn’t belong with disciplines likescience and history and the rest. She’s not sure why.

‘Mr Wils … I mean, Wil’, she says awkwardly.‘Speak my dear! Tell us what’s going on behind that puzzled look! You’re full

of wonder, I can see, you’re wonder-full!’ He smiles, purses his lips, and his headstarts nodding. His body is finding it impossible to contain the mirth. Studentsaround him who, to begin with, would have mocked these eccentricities, are nowsmiling with him.

‘You say the disciplines exist to help us see more of the world’, says Sally.

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‘I do, I do’, says Wilson. ‘To see more of it, and to make sense of what is seen,and to communicate what is discovered both within and beyond the discipline. It’sexciting work, as I’m guessing you’ve been discovering. You’ve enjoyed yourself inthese rooms, I’m guessing.’

‘Yes’, she says. ‘It’s fun. I can see how what you’re saying about disciplinesapplies to the rooms we’ve visited, to science and history and economics and so on.I was learning new things about the world when I was in those rooms. But Englishis different, isn’t it? English isn’t about seeing more of the world.’

‘And what would you say English is about, my dear?’ says Wilson kindly,looking genuinely interested, but Sally finds herself blushing all the same.

‘I’m not sure’, she says. ‘It’s just that we don’t study the world when we’re inEnglish classes. We study…’

‘Texts’, says one boy. ‘And how to analyse them. How authors use language tocreate meaning.’

Wilson involuntarily frowns. ‘Doesn’t sound much like fun’, he says quietly, andthe few at the front who hear him nod.

‘How to write properly’, says another.‘How to communicate. To read better’, says a third.Suddenly Mr Ellison, who has been brooding up the back of the group, speaks

up.‘Exactly. Well done you three. Good work. If English is, as you so kindly put it,

Mr Wilson, the jewel in the crown, it’s because without it…’He pauses, but when he sees that Wilson seems to be listening with genuine

interest, he continues.‘Without English, without communication skills, without literacy, you’d have

none of these other subjects or disciplines. You’d have ignorance. Without English,our students couldn’t read their science textbooks, or write their history essays, orunderstand their maths problems. Without English…’

‘Yes? Without English. Go on, Mr Ellison. Don’t stop now. Without English…’‘Without English, without the literacy skills we teach, without the language we

use and the literature we read, there would be no common experience for themigrant and the native born, no common experience for the refugee and indigenousstudent, no common experience for students from the bush and the students fromthe cities. We’re helping diverse cultures to assimilate.’

Sanjay, whose parents were born in India, nudges Sally and Sally knows why.Sanjay is not ignorant, nor is he unassimilated. But it’s got nothing to do with whatthey do in Mr Ellison’s class.

‘So, you’re not a discipline at all’, says Wilson. ‘You’re saying your subjectdoesn’t belong in this corridor, it shouldn’t be represented as a room with a particu-lar view out through a window to the world. It should be housed separately … say,in the Entrance Hall … to provide the tools for making sense of the rooms off thecorridor?’

‘That’s exactly what I think’, says Mr Ellison, having regained his composure,his confidence and his air of superiority. ‘And you, Mr Wilson, do you think anydifferently? What do you think English is?’

Wilson smiles. ‘I’m glad you asked’, he says.He turns and opens the door.‘Welcome’, he says to the students rather than to Mr Ellison, ‘to the English

Room … to the English Discipline.’

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6

Sally and Sanjay are amongst the first through the door. The room looks the same asthe others, though this time Sally notices a semi-circular couch facing the windowwith enough room for four or five, and she takes Sanjay’s elbow and steers himtowards it. She is not sure exactly why. Maybe because she’s looking for somethinga bit less intense – she’s suddenly feeling quite worn out – and she imagines thatworking with a group might allow her to take a back seat for a while. They’re joinedthere by Toby, the boy who gave one of the earlier answers in the corridor that MrEllison had praised. The other space is left free.

The room quickly fills up. Mr Ellison stands again at the back with arms foldedand sneer in place. Then Wilson slides in next to Sanjay on the couch.

Immediately Sally feels less tired.Again they’re in their capsule, unable to hear other conversations or to see what

others are seeing. For this group – Sally, Sanjay, Toby and Wilson – the windowremains dark, and instead they sit in silence, the three young people waiting forWilson to say something. He just smiles.

‘Well, this is different’, says Sanjay.Wilson nods and smiles.‘Hey, we don’t have any controls this time’, says Sally.‘You don’t’, says Wilson, producing what looks like an elaborate remote from

his coat pocket. ‘I do.’‘At last’, says Toby. ‘A teacher in charge. Now I might learn something.’‘You might’, says Wilson. ‘Then again, you might not. I don’t see much wonder

in you, my young friend, not yet anyway. Without our wonder, the world doesn’toffer much.’

Toby looks simultaneously bored and bemused.‘Watch’, says Wilson. He points his remote at the screen, and the words of what

is obviously a poem appear. ‘It’s by Sylvia Plath’, he says. ‘She’s been in the newsrecently, you may have noticed.’

Sally has never heard of Sylvia Plath.Along with the words on the screen, the group on the couch now hears a

woman’s clear voice, reading the poem, at first quietly but building in intensity,moving towards a restrained crescendo.

‘Mushrooms’, the voice announces. It’s clearly the title. Then, in a voice whichSally finds quite hypnotic, she hears the opening words: ‘Overnight, very whitely,discretely, very quietly…’ Sally at once sees, in her mind’s eye, mushrooms on aforest floor, pushing their way relentlessly through the undergrowth. She especiallyloves a bit about ‘soft fists insist on heaving the needles’. It’s all so evocative, sospellbinding. And then, the ending:

So many of us!So many of us!

We are shelves, we areTables, we are meek,

We are edible,

Nudgers and shoversIn spite of ourselves.

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Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morningInherit the earth.

Our foot’s in the door.

The words remain as the voice falls silent. Sally and Sanjay continue to look at thescreen, Wilson looks at the students, and Toby fidgets.

‘That was stupid’, says Toby. ‘Mushrooms don’t have minds!’‘Just sit with it a minute’, says Wilson quietly. There’s something reverential in

his tone, as if he’s taken them into some church and is wanting them to respectfullytake in the atmosphere.

‘So’, says Wilson at last. ‘What do you notice? What do you wonder? Don’t tryto be clever, don’t rush to judgement. What do you notice? What do you wonder?Just little things, if you like.’

‘I notice that it’s broken up into little bits’, says Sally. ‘Like little haikus, butthey’re not really … I don’t think.’

‘I notice the sounds’, says Sanjay. ‘Soft fists insist on/heaving the needles’. Itsounds great. The words seem to be connected to each other somehow. The soundskeep getting repeated. It’s like music.’

‘It doesn’t rhyme’, says Toby. ‘It’s about mushrooms and it doesn’t even rhyme.’Sally wishes Toby would just go away and leave her and Sanjay to have a

conversation with Wilson about this piece of magic that she doesn’t really get yet,but which she already loves. But Wilson seems happy to have Toby there.

‘Keep your judgements on hold if you can, my young friend’, he says kindly.‘Time for that later.’

‘Toby said before that mushrooms don’t have minds’, says Sanjay, ‘and I’vebeen wondering about that. Maybe this isn’t a poem about mushrooms.’

‘If it’s about something else’, says Toby, ‘why write about mushrooms? Thatmakes no sense!’

‘I wonder why someone would write about mushrooms when really they’rethinking about something else’, says Wilson.

Sally has been quiet for a while, listening, thinking, rereading some of the wordson the screen. There’s a thought forming, but she’s not sure what it is. She suspectsshe won’t know until she’s tried to say it.

‘It is about mushrooms, I think. Or at least it makes me see mushrooms in myhead when I read it. It’s like one of those sped-up films that you see in programmesabout nature, the clouds scudding across the sky or a leaf opening up; it mighttake a day in real time, but we see it all happening in fast motion. When I listen tothe poem, I see in my mind a film like that. But then the mushrooms seem tobecome like some army. Last night I was watching a documentary on TV, all aboutthe Arab Spring, and I don’t understand what’s going on over there much exceptthat it seems like there have been all these people’s movements rising up againstdictatorships, and it’s been spreading, gaining power, toppling governments. Likethe mushrooms. Maybe it’s about mushrooms but also about the potential strengthof the apparently weak.’

Sally is surprised and not a little pleased by her last comment. She hadn’t seenthat until she said it.

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‘You know’, says Sanjay, ‘that’s not what I get from this poem at all. Or it’s notwhat I got when I heard it first, but now I can see what you’ve just said, Sally.That’s really interesting. Do you think this Sylvia Plath was writing about politics?’

‘You’ve listened to Sally and you’re now wondering if the poem is political’,Wilson says to Sanjay. ‘But that wasn’t your first reaction, was it. The poem madeyou think about something different.’

‘To begin with’, says Sanjay, ‘I just noticed the way the words kind of createdthe atmosphere…’

‘We’ll get back to the words later’, says Wilson. ‘Tell us what it made you thinkabout.’

‘Well, this is going to sound kind of far-fetched, but I’ll tell you anyway. It mademe think about what we’ve been doing today.’

‘What, here at the Universarium?’ says Wilson. He’s looking both interested butalso surprised.

‘Yes’, says Sanjay. ‘Sally and I were talking in the corridor earlier about howmuch we love this place. It’s really cool. I thought it might be interesting, but it’sturned out to be a whole lot more than just interesting.’

‘For some’, says Toby, though it’s clear that he’s engaged with this conversationat least.

‘We were saying, Sally and I, how the way this place is organised, and the stuffthat’s here, well … it makes us feel more powerful, somehow.’

‘More powerful’, says Wilson.‘Yes … I don’t know. When we’re at school, or at least when we’re in some clas-

ses, we’re sort of smothered…. It’s like the mushrooms. We get covered over withall this stuff. We get talked at, and we have textbooks to read and assignments thatget set, and outcomes we have to achieve, and tests to pass, and sometimes we feel… well, I feel anyway … like my true self is being smothered, suffocated. It’s nottrue in all my classes, but it’s true in too many. The end of the school day is like thisbig release … but then I get home and I have to start doing all this homework andstuff and the feeling of being smothered comes again. … And now, as I’m sayingthis, I’m realising that one of the reasons I really like this poem is that it seems to beabout a part of me that’s still alive, underneath all this rubbish on the forest floor,and how I think that if I get the right kind of conditions, then I’ll begin to grow andpush up strongly and make an impact or something. I know this might sound weird,but that’s how I’ve felt with Sally here at this place, like we’re being given the rightconditions for our growth, and it feels exciting and powerful somehow.’

‘One poem, different responses’, says Wilson. ‘Wonderful responses.’‘So are you saying that Sylvia Plath was writing about politics or about all that

stuff Sanjay was talking about?’ asks Toby. ‘What’s the actual meaning of thepoem?’

There follows a long meandering discussion about poetry, meaning, Sylvia Plath,school and English. They read the poem, or parts of the poem, again and again.There are new thoughts, new connections and observations made.

At the end of it, Sally’s over-stimulated brain is swimming. She doesn’t knowwhat to think. She just knows she’s been thinking, and that she will never forget thisday.

She hopes not, anyway.

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Notes on contributorDr Steve Shann has 40 years experience teaching in schools (primary and secondary) and alsoworked as a trained psychotherapist, before being employed at the University of Canberra.He has written articles and two books about education. He is a member of professionalbodies such as AERA, AATE, AARE, NCTE and ATEA, and in May 2014 gave the openingaddress at the 4th Global Conference: Storytelling – Global Reflections on Narrative, inPrague.

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