“To preserve multiple meanings and diverse perspectives including those of the teacher participants, dominant educational discourses, and my own. And through these many-sided jumbles, I work to bring forward (conceptual, visual, and bodily) themes of relationality in teacher work.”

   I appreciate Victoria Restler’s use of the college, or jumbled methodology, to disrupt and dismantle the oversimplification of the narratives embedded within data-driven

algorithms measuring a teacher’s work and school life. As the Audre Lorde once stated “ There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single–issue lives,”  Collage as a methodology, lends a researcher an analytic lens allows more room for nuances and contradictions to be documented.  

     My work focuses on the development of learning communities cultivated through storytelling and mentorship. In both my personal and professional life, I combine collage and storytelling. That is, I create stories by way of collage.  One of my projects explores the origination stories of the development of STE(A)M identities for Black and Brown women. Drawing from my personal narrative and a legacy of hidden narratives, I toggle between the formal and informal learning spaces that have shaped both past, current, and aspiring and scientists.

To locate my own positionality in the research (acknowledging my voice/ mark/ eye as a white woman, artist, mother, researcher, etc.) and to make the often hidden work of analysis and interpretation, visible.

Going back and forth between Restler’s dissertation and the digital assemblage webpage, I was taken back the layers of teachers work and school life and the ways in which Restler choose to document these realities. In many ways Reslter’s use of collage to highlight and expand our understanding and imagination of teachers’ invisible care work, resonated with the ways in which I intend to utilized collage as a method in my dissertation. I am extremely curious to know/learn more about what her creation process entailed in the development of her outline/research proposal.

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