Gene- 3-31-19, comments on posts for this week

First, a shout out to Lamar, who has had a rough week. Your text, Lamar, makes me think of my own engagement with students in Newark – many stories of domestic violence, absent fathers, hunger, lovelessness. One of the conundrums with these stories is trying to navigate the macro-meso-micro conditions that mediate these stories. We can blame 400 years of racism and brutality against people of color in this country (macro) and yet none of that seems a sufficient explanation for the absence of love (meso) that haunts many families and the damage that this absence inflicts on our students (micro). All these levels of damage, of course, are relative and constantly intertwining. How do we confront them as teachers and researchers? How do we begin/join a process of healing that is needed on all these many levels of activity?

I wonder if it would make sense, Lamar, for you to make a quilt of sorts from the drawings, and maybe also a quilt of the selected texts with certain lines and words emphasized. Earlier you wrote about the colliding dreams of your students floating on water, which is an amazing image and idea, and though the ephemeral can be very powerful (see, for example, the work of Andy Goldsworthy), there are also other less emphemeral ways to present collective images/voices of hope and dreams. You could take all the different handwritings of the word “love” or “guns” and join them together in a poster with or without the drawings (and then show them to the students). I’m just quickly spouting out ideas; of course you want to do want makes sense to you. Or you might think about your students doing it. I think both are legitimate.

The line, “Being mean to each other like black and white” stuck out to me because of its non-judgmental voice. My students in Staten Island often say, “why can’t we all just get along?” as if their privilege has no relationship to macro-meso forces. Even young students have absorbed this (hegemonic) way of thinking and it definitely has an appeal to it because it makes it easier to believe that it’s just a matter of faith in individual good will. This optimism and belief in personal-power to create change  is also a necessary ingredient of systemic change, but it diminishes the reality of designed and purposeful oppression. Notice that the use of the word “designed” implies that oppression aligned with a vision- something visual. That’s why Mirzeoeff proposes a “countervisuality,” a new vision that we can see and thus design. I wonder if it helps to think of your stduents’ drawings in terms of the creation of a new vision.

I wonder what role the prompts play in the drawings/text.

The line “To live and stay with my family” also struck me. I’m curious about the “live” and the “stay.”

It’s interesting to look at Dahlia’s project after looking at Lamar’s. Dahlia has embraced the role of the artist who can “cook” the work of her students, something Lamar is hesitant about doing. Cooking may not be the right metaphor here, because Dahlia is not mushing things together but carefully and respectfully highlighting, making choices, curating in a way that many of you seem hesitant to do. The two images she constructed are phenomenal; they are visually captivating, evocative and complex. They visually present the “400-year long event” that Christina Sharpe writes about the past of slavery still present in the space and time of her students, her white students as well. And so there is hope in that. Are you going to show these images to the students you quote?

I am also excited to see the poem that Dahlia has extracted from the transcript, an arts-based approach to research that is being used by other researchers as well (see, for example, an article “The Teacher almost made me cry” by Honkasilta et al. that takes lines from different narratives of children with ADHD and turns them into poems). I love the part, “because I know every nook and cranny of Patrick Henry, not just because of the building  …because of the people there. But still I have a connection towards the actual building” and think it could be presented in a visually striking way if you wanted to think about doing so. Poems, of course, are visual (think again about Pink’s discussion of how every experience is presented simultaneously in multiple modes even though we can’t talk about experience that way) and I think playing with the words in this poem and their organization could be exciting. Have you ever looked at the way ee cummings writes his poems? You can think about spacing between words and letters, capitalizing, and of course adding actual drawings/photos and marks.

I think you’ve made exciting strides in your work Dahlia!!

The link that Dahlia shared with us under her heading “Incredible art to share” is truly incredible. You should all look at it.

I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that Patrick Henry owned almost 70 slaves despite his oratory against slavery

Since I have made a number of comments about curation, it is interesting to consider how Greg is curating his photos. He is using a contingent-dynamic process; he began by choosing participants but then the participants chose other participants. Greg loses a bit of control here, but in alignment with ideas of participatory research gives curatorial power to others. The photographs themselves are terrific, but to my eye they seem very different from the first set he showed us though like the fist set they are very clean and polished.  I get confused, Greg, by your concern with “sample-size” since that is a term usually used when talking about quantitative data that is meant to be generalizable. As far as I know, you are not making any generalizable claims. Where both Dahlia’s project and Lamar’s combine image with text, these photos, thus far, are without captions or participant reflections and comments. As with Lamar’s work, I wonder how the prompt mediates the response and how the prompt even gets interpreted by the participants.

I’ve been listening to Saadiq for the last ten minutes, one cut leading to another. Love that Girl made me think of Marvin Gaye and the Attica Days when we used to dance the “Bump.” A great deal of joy, and yet while that joy is, as Dahlia pointed out last week, necessary to any revolution we want to be a part of, it is not by itself sufficient to dismantle the macro oppressions our communities confront. Mindfulness has been terribly coopted, and yet on the micro scale mindful activities – if practiced in the spirit that Christina Trowbridge presents – has potential power to change macro systems. I find Noor’s comments on Lamar’s hard week and his students’ drawings resonating with me. Lamar is doing care work with his students, but the gap is wide between his students’ healing and their empowerment to transform their worlds so that the care work for their own children will not be necessary. But we have to start where we are. Still, I wonder, Lamar (and everyone else) how you push the tension between catharsis and transformation, and what is the researcher’s role in this process.

It is exciting to think about drawing as “a form of praxis”.

I am increasingly excited about the prospect of all of you exhibiting your work since it is so rich, though you don’t need to make any decisions yet. We can use Noor’s drawing, which I love, as part of the invitation. I’m not sure what it says that her first marks on the paper depicted wine on table! 🙂 Notice how Noor, drawing with the left hand, created a drawing that has all the vivacity of a child’s drawing – it is funny, has character (great lines) and no worries about absolute rendering.

Luis has been using visual methods as tool of self-care and reflection, but so far they have mostly been cries for help because the students are still struggling mightily with calculus. The drawings are not helping them become better at calculus, and even if the drawings helped student to temporarily disengage from solving math problems and find humor in their angst, their desperation will return with the next assessment. On a much more meso scale, the drawing cannot solve the students’ calculus problems any more than the drawings of Lamar’s students will vanquish the dysfunctionality that surrounds them. Can Luis use drawings in a way that will help his students contemplate calculus (visualize calculus?) in way that will both bring peace and breakthroughs? Can it, in other words, be used as a contemplative and healing method to learn math? Whereas Dahlia, Greg, and I think Noor as well are seeking to evoke conditions, situations and experiences, Lamar, Luis and probably Aderinsola are trying to find the bridge between evocation and transformation within their particular focus.

It is a rainy Sunday morning and I chose to try out drawing with the non-dominant hand mindfulness activity from the Townsend piece. It was my first instinct upon reading as I was also asking myself, “when was the last time I drew with my left hand?” The activity proved to be calming and also very amusing as I tried to recreate our class.  As you can see my memory is less on the specific but more the overall situation. The table and the wine bottle were the first on the page.  While drawing,  I was wondering if our fluid experiences in the class (sharing space)  can act as a sort of diorama? I was also thinking about Lamar’s post throughout, (I am sending prayers out to you and your students and their families) which also connects to the part of the piece were she writes how teachers are seeking “refuge from the realities of the public schools”. It is powerful that so many folks were trained on mindfulness but I also wonder when funds and policies will go to support communities and families to improve the quality of life for targeted populations? It reflects a real tension I have with mindfulness as a band-aid and in some ways making stress an individual issue versus something that is structurally imposed historically for specific populations. I also know how important it is to build up our toolkit of practices to individually process and heal.  I am curious about the power of carving out spaces of refuge for people facing intersectional oppressions – where refuge is denied systematically and what are our next steps in our roles working with diverse populations along various levels of power?  I wonder about the feeling of freedom dreams and what they can teach us about the importance of an imaginary refuge in the process towards liberatory actions that meet the realities faced by targeted populations. Given that some public schools are differently and similarly violent, to all the people who inhabit them and particularly burdensome on the youngest and most vulnerable, how might we draw upon art based practices to make shifts on a structural and individual level?

This piece also offered a way for me to think about the different levels of decision making  necessary for building a space of learning with diverse perspectives and experiences. She offers the following capabilities;; 1) focusing attention on what is happening in the classroom 2) questioning what is happening in their own emotions 3) teaching objectives reflect students’ needs, 4)questioning what behaviors teachers choose to achieve their objectives. (180) I see these as all a part of intention setting on an individual level but really a good model for structuring school as a collective staff and student community. What if each person drew out their answers to these questions – taking away the element of power and having each person reflect on what they need to learn in a highly oppressive society/school system?

A few powerful quotes:

“In looking at the diorama, with its focus on phenomena of the natural world, the viewer is looking and thinking, and is in the position of the discoverer, rather than the a passive recipient of knowledge transmitted by others.”  How does this shift when moving from the natural world to an unnatural public school structure?  In this way, does drawing offer us a form of praxis that is not available just through verbal dialogue?

“objects and words can be generative” – Freire

“mindful learning is the continuous creation of categories, openness, to new information, and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective.” Do drawings also offer color, detail emphasis, ways of seeing of the creator?

“drawing is at the root of everything’ – Van Gogh

“Seeing comes before words” – John Berger. Will freedom dreams and art offer us new words to curve liberatory life/educational experiences?

Then I started listening to music – this came on as I was about to post so I will share:

Trowbridge C.A. (2017) Drawing Attention. In: Powietrzyńska M., Tobin K. (eds) Weaving Complementary Knowledge Systems and Mindfulness to Educate a Literate Citizenry for Sustainable and Healthy Lives. Bold Visions in Educational Research. Sense Publishers: Rotterdam.

Cristina’s insightful sketching methodology inspired me to examine my own sketching reflection method I am exploring.  I wonder what I can employ as an object for students to see and to contemplate upon.  In my current sketching exploration, I encourage students to reflect on their impressions or on their stance towards the experience of learning math, but I provide no particular image for them upon which to reflect.  This may be fine, but I wonder if I can aid a further evolution of their process of self-reflection ( into perhaps a deeper contemplation) by offering specific images as objects of contemplation, in the method that Cristina does here.

I wondered if the dioramas of natural history and science, which Cristina uses as objects of sketching and contemplation, had particular resonance because of their related subject matter for science teachers and students, i.e. if the chosen content was salient for the impact of this arts-based methodology because of its relation to this particular audience.  But I don’t think so.  I think there is something more universal in play here.  Would dioramas from scenes related to science or nature have provided a comparable catalyst for reflection and contemplation for a different audience? I think so.  I suspect that the form of Cristina’s methodological approach was what mattered most— in her modified protocol of Housen’s Visual Thinking Strategy, she still employed his specific question prompts to direct the practice of focused sketching contemplation, but she then created spaces of silence and of mindful contemplation where participants could also have the time “…to  look before verbalizing observations and inferences”(174).  The methodology provides affordances for each participant’s unique way of seeing, the “plurality” of interpretations possible as evidenced by what each participant views, as the different mountain lion diorama sketches by each participant illustrated (176). Participant teachers also shared the therapeutic benefits to their health and wellness of this methodology by finding such times of “silence and peace” healthful and, unlike most classroom environments, a space where renewed attention could be given to details, and where they did not feel compelled to impose learning perspectives or content upon students (178).  However, I cannot discount the universal connection we have to nature, and that this choice in theme may be integral to this methodology, wherever it is applied.  I am motivated to consider this thematic as well but also to consider other potential images to catalyze such contemplation in my field of mathematical content.

In addition, Cristina makes the important distinction between mindfulness and contemplation (173).  I now ponder that difference within the goal of my current work of authentic student self-reflection , and I consider whether that is different than contemplation. Merriam-Webster conspicuously qualifies the definition of contemplation as a thoughtful consideration that is practiced “…with attention,” or as the act of “regarding steadily.”  This quality of “steadiness” that I sense throughout in Cristina’s field notes reminds me of the frequent discussions I have had with students and exasperated parents, where a frequent culprit identified by both was the apparent inability of students to sustain concentration.  Perhaps more than my current exploration of student self-reflection for the purpose of emotional processing and healing, contemplation may be the next step of this process, where a strengthening of the ability to sustain concentration becomes a focus, a focus which is so crucial in any learning.

In practice, Cristina observes that “The drawing is about focusing attention to detail and not about the actual sketch” (174).  Ways in which fear of failure can be eliminated by sketching, such as Cristina’s later practice of having participants draw with their non-dominant hand, offers options in later reflection practice.  It at least raises consideration for other sketching tools I might employ in my sketching self-reflection explorations, such as a proscription that sketching must be related to this class or to this content.  How may I support freedom from judgment for my students, including from their own?

Hello.  I have been spending some time this week considering the subjects, the participants, the artists of this research-giving thought and exploring how they understand the (my) goals for the project and then, how the research project itself then informs their image and level of participation.

My arbitrary definition for my sample had started as women of color working within NYC public education. A small sample size was desired, and necessary given some obvious constraints of  time and resources.  This is not to say that the project could not be scaled; or that it is closed ended. The initial group of participants was a convenience sample; the women that I reached out to were drawn from a broad but specific group  of colleagues connected to High Schools within the NYC Department of Education.

In conversation explaining the goal of personal narrative through self portraiture; the style and historical context of James Van Der Zee and the African American experience,  the participants in many instances were able to recommend and enlist others to contribute. This nomination sampling has/will result in a group that  is broader than my initial sample, but contains shared standards of understanding and purpose to their created artwork.

I have three new self-portraits that were added this week. The individuality expressed and variety of composition continues to be inspired. All three of these subjects/artists nominated other participants.

Hello lovelies.  I landed upon this page  on African-American folk artists this week and while I have not fully immersed in all of it…it’s a very rich page on a very rich site, I had to share it before class!

Enjoy!

Hi all…here are a few things I have been playing with, trying to feel more comfortable with experimenting with the kids’ words and some images along with my own ideas and layers…

Playing with words and images

My photos are being naughty and not uploading properly so here they are in a google slide show…more boring, I know! I will put the pictures directly in this message once they upload properly!

For these two, I wanted to take the images the kids had either taken or chosen and place them with their words.  But as I studied them I realized that both the images and words lay atop historical contexts within and outside the community.

These images are historical and rooted in a specific place.

In the first one, the background is of a historical marker of Freedman’s Village where the Green Valley Pharmacy still lives.  

In the next slide, the image is not actually in Arlington but Joanie’s presence in the picture is carried with her across time and place to live in Arlington as F sees it.

Found Poem

While this is not visual…yet, I wanted to share where I am with this.  The jumps of time from her being in the present, thinking about the future based on her past…makes me really want to explore this visually.

T was in my first class at Patrick Henry Elementary School (PHES) in 2011-2012.  We have continued to chat and email over the years as she visited the school after she left and kept in contact once I moved to New York.  I conducted an interview with her about PHES and we discussed the possible transition of the school to a new location.  After transcribing the interview, I played the audio while reading the text and highlighted words and phrases that “stuck out” to me and seemed to resonate either on the page or because of the intonation of T’s voice.  I then lifted the highlighted parts and placed them on a new page…below is the new “cooked” poem.

My entire life from whatever I can remember…

I remember being there.

     one of my first memories

     was Patrick Henry…

     really good memories…

     being really comfortable

because I know every nook and cranny

     of Patrick Henry

          not just because of the building

               …because of the people there

But, still, I have a connection towards the actual building.

     there’s Patrick Henry that I can hold on to

     and then I will always remember how good Patrick Henry was.

How much I grew up there.

I can thank Patrick Henry for so many things that make me who I am.

     I thought that when I’m older and eventually if I end up having kids, then my kids are gonna go          here.

      They’re gonna to a place just like Patrick Henry.

      But…people aren’t going to be going to Patrick Henry anymore.

There isn’t going to be a Patrick Henry anymore.

      Like, I have to be okay.

I just didn’t realize it was gonna be a problem for me right now.

     There’s things like that I remember.

      But I think I have more connection towards like…

              just like everyday after school.

Things like that.

     I know everybody has those memories

           with their elementary school,

                     with their middle school

             or whatever.

It just feels like a lot right now.

It is really hard for me to post because it’s been a rough week. There were even cops and ambulances involved.

This week I have led several conflict circles, harm circles and healing circles with our young third graders.Students shared their pain and what makes their heart hurt.

They shared stories of daily domestic violence that they witness between parents, stories of missing their fathers, stories of being told they are stupid, stories of not always being able to eat “good” food, stories of cops being called constantly because of violence in the home, stories of feeling unwanted and unloved. I am emotionally drained, feeling a bit hopeless from these circles with students.

I collected more drawings and words of what hope means from other third graders in my school that i indirectly teach, yet see every day full of smiles, hugs and love. Reading their hopes today, is slowing uplifting my spirit. If you’re having a rough week, read some of their hopes, maybe it will uplift you.

I’m still thinking about my final project and trying to piece together something that can visually be shown for our potential exhibition next spring.

Click on the link below:

upenn hope drawings

This week, my aim is to build momentum in the incorporation of visual-based feedback in self-reflection from my freshman mathematics students. They appeared invested in the first exercise of this visual self-reflection, as reflected in these selections from that reflection I posted earlier:  Visual Self-Reflection Expression.

Here is the second prompt I plan to administer this week in follow-up:   Visual Self-reflection #2.

Any feedback appreciated.

See you all soon,

Luis

Gregory

I think the two photos that Gregory posted are spectacular and really made me consider the artistry of the photographer-subjects. The photographs are beautifully framed and posed, they each evoke pride and care though their flavors are very different and I will be curious to know how all of you see and feel them. I am taken by the high bar fence in the photo on the left that implies it is guarding a building of importance and yet the house seems a family house – old and modest, the basement doors (panels) clearly worn. The photographer-subject stands in front of the fence, removed from a building that most hold importance for her and indicating a separation that wasn’t always there. I can’t quite read her expression (does she have a trace of a smile? Is there a bitterness?), but the light pouring in on the right, shadowing the fence and reflecting of her glasses and bounding up the stairs also evokes the passing of time, maybe one of light and dark. It is interesting that her coat is almost all in dark except for opening that is lined in light; her coat is not closed, she is again inside and outside. Very beautiful photo that almost playfully is lined up with the very different photo on the right so that the light from one photo almost seeps into the next.

The photo on the right shows the subject at work, with craft, skill and beauty all central to her task-profession-desire, working with what might be lace- fragility. She is working with hands, paying careful attention. Again she’s framed the photo carefully, its center directly between her and her manikin. The lamp, off-center and tilted is also very beautiful. The light though comes not from that lamp but, briefly, from the window. I can’t quite tell if there are flowers on a distant table and if that is a door on the right. I need to see both these photos more clearly. There is a peace and contentment about this photo; it is not as tense for me as the one on the left. There is a quiet dignity and self-awareness, however, in both images.

Lamar

Picasso said that he spent all his adult life trying to learn how to draw like a child again, and we see in the drawings of Lamar’s students why this might be a goal. These drawings are so full of joy even though so many address tragedy. These students are not afraid of color, and they draw with abandon- people as big as the houses they are next to, pages filled with both scribble and renderings, no obvious needs for rendering perfection but the message is radiantly clear and perfect in its own right. Valerie, who writes that “I have a dream to end world hunger” drew an image that reminds me of Edvard Munch’s Scream; I imagine the text written as if it were a scream. I wonder if Valerie might think about doing that or if she even thinks of her image as screaming.

Some of the texts really stood out for me: Hope is when you never stop believing in someone; Hope is something you fight for; Hope is when you can achieve other things; Hope feasts like an eagle; Hope means drawing; Hope means happiness. These statements make me think of the work of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, and you might want to look at their work.

When one of the students includes within her incredible painting the call to “stop selling cigarettes” I couldn’t but help think of Eric Garner.

I love the way, Lamar, you are pursuing this project. I think your questions for your students are good questions, and recording their answers would be great too. I wonder if it might be a good idea to set aside a time for a “reading circle” in which the students would read (and show) what they wrote (and drew) and talk about it. This would be less formal than asking them specific questions but might give you something a bit different. You could also have a performance circle. What would happen if you created collages based on everyone’s images and text, or posters with the images demanding action that were put around the school (or community)? You could invite parents to the reading circles. Your questions and any of these activities would keep pushing on self-reflection while also evoking, for others, what these very young students are grappling with.

I don’t want you to forget about floating copies of these drawings as an exhibition possibility. How would you do that?

It’s been a long time since I’ve used imovie, but it probably is the best program to use since it is very accessible. It will take some work to get used to it, but I am very excited by the possibilities it offers.

Dahlia:

I love this quote from Toni Cade Bambara that Dahlia offers. It reminds me of Emma Goldman, one of our greatest activists and anarchist extraordinaire who wrote that a revolution without dancing isn’t a revolution that’s worth having. As artists and revolutionaries, this might be one of the most important considerations to keep in mind.

Aderinsola

Part of the reason why I wished I had recorded our last class was because the questions that Aderinsola was posing to Wendy, and the prosody of her voice as she posed them, were not only richly critical and direct but also could have been used as voice-overs in her own work. Also they could have been used, in manipulated forms, as separate voice files that challenge the role of the researcher, and in particular the white researcher (though the questions Aderinsola poses have pertinence for all researchers). Why is it that so many progressive white researchers choose to spotlight young people of color? Is this a progressive act, an act of solidarity? Is it undertaken from a sense of guilt or responsibility? Is it exploitative? Who benefits from the research and how do the benefits and costs balance out? Does a balancing in favor of benefit negate the cost? Who decides? Is there a savior-sense to the undertaking? A sense of self-satisfaction? Is it the best that a white researcher can do? Do these same questions plague researchers of color albeit with variation? Is there something else that we think researchers and white researchers should do if the social justice that Anderinsola writes about and that Lamar’s students draw and write about is our primary goal. Where does joy fit in? Is the job of a researcher to make sure that the research participants speak for themselves (as Lamar wants his students to do) and does Wendy’s whiteness, per se, preclude that possibility? Is curation a bad idea? What does Aderinsola mean by a “collective voice?”

From the first time I met Aderinsola a number of years ago I was struck by her refusal to just ride the waves of graduate school. I was also impressed by her persistent challenge of whiteness within the Academy. Her questions posted here are a continued problematizing of positionality and the right (legitimacy) of white researchers to study others. These questions do not have easy or simple answers, but we all need to continue to think about them.

I was attending a panel discussion on whiteness in the Academy. Asilia Franklin-Phipps, who will be visiting us toward the end of the semester, was one of the panelists. One of her co-panelists stated that if you are white and want to be in solidarity with communities of color you need to do so as an “accomplice.” I do not think that unpacking that concept is easy. What does it mean to be a researcher-accomplice? Do researchers of color not struggle with this issue as well though clearly from a different position?

Aderinsola- I am looking forward to the next iteration of your project and curious if any of these issues will infiltrate it.

Noor

 Noor’s post and that of Aderinsola grapple with some of the same issues though move in different directions. Images (Wendy’s photos, my drawings and collages) can be viewed as exploitative and voyeuristic like historic photos of black women and girls but Noor emphasizes the reflexivity of the girls and Wendy’s self-reflexivity as a qualitative difference from those older photographs that has potential for generating (evoking?) insight that is non-reductive though issues of curating and complicity still remain troublesome. Mirzoeff’s The right to look addresses Noor’s efforts to challenge white hegemony, but hegemony – obviously – is a formidable force and combating it demands constant awareness and self-scrutiny. I think Noor’s emphasis on the process, on creating spaces where reflexivity and curiosity bloom, is central to the countervisual and to counter narratives.. Creating what Noor is calling a “real question” helps facilitate that ambiance, and it is something for all of us to consider (I am thinking specifically right now about Lamar’s project though Dahlia’s is prominent in my mind at the moment).

I listend to the Sanctuary sound track that Noor provided the link to and they reminded me of Lamar’s freedom dreams. I’ve always thought of sanctuaries as being, by definition, counter-spaces, escapes from unfreedom and yet many of those who discussed sanctuary envisoned it as the dominant space, without borders, a space infused with love and in which displacement contradicts its very essence. Did Wendy help create sanctuary spaces for those she worked with, are we doing that in our projects? Can arts-based research, infused with the awareness that both Noor and Aderinsola discuss, help create a revolutionary space that is irresistible as Toni Cade Bambara demands?

Noor is running the marathon today. I look forward to hearing, Noor, how it all went. I’m rooting for you.

Gene