GEORGIAWe analyze the discussion that developed when four fifth-grade girls, three African American and one Hispanic, and Karla Möller, a European American, transacted with Mildred Taylor's The Friendship (1987). Framing our analysis within the intersection of readerresponse theory and sociocultural and critical theories of literacy learning, we show how participants' responses to Taylor's text and adult and peer guidance helped to create a response development zone that allowed for a dialectic of connecting with and resisting the evocation. The girls, all struggling readers, used reading, writing, and discussion to address comprehension difficulties and construct multiple levels of meaning. They became increasingly aware of historical racism and connected that knowledge to events from their own experience, including encounters with the Klan and memories of a relative's murder. We present the group's discussion as a metaphorical play and the girls as spectators who become actors as they engaged in this "theater of discourse" (Boal, 1985).
We thank the JLR editors and the Critical Issues authors for giving us this opportunity to read and respond to their work. Alas the timing-if only we had read them before we wrote our article (Möller & Allen, 2000, this issue)! But even after the fact, we found their insights most helpful in thinking about our work. Sumara (2000, this issue) describes Complexity Theory as a rubric for collecting theoretical understandings across multiple domains of physical and social science to investigate complex systems as volatile, adaptable, evolutionary, and creative. In a related investigation, we used the physics metaphor of complex adaptive systems employed by Patterson, Cotton, Kimbell-Lopez, Pavonetti, and VanHorn (1998) to reflect on the dynamics of literature discussion groups (Allen, Möller, & Stroup, 1999). This metaphor provides a framework for teachers to "make sense of the dynamic and unpredictable complexities of conversations so they can make quick decisions about how to lead generative literature conversations among students" (Patterson et al., p. 143). As we discovered, it was not just the teachers who must make quick decisions-the whole system
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