“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.

I have been captivated by Victoria Restler’s dissertation from the moment it was introduced to me and made available. From the opening title and its politic challenge to quantified, metric driven evaluation of educators, I was immersed and ignited by a fresh investigation into  to this severely limited  and problematic attempt to measure and regulate the process of teaching; the process of learning.  It was and is more than just academic research. Dr Restler’s assemblage of media: leaping from the text, referring back to the printed words, or liberated from and definitive on its own without unrequited tether to the text, both answers questions of how art gives meaning to academic work and research, and how it provokes greater investigation into the qualitative aspects of learning and experience.

Even the collection and creation of art that will be purposed in research involves considerations of positionality. Restler invokes Luttrell’s comments on “training” those experiencing multimodal research to have a reflexivity not impeded or influenced by knowledge of the researcher (at first).  Those initial experiences with the work(s) and the meanings conveyed are important, to  be built out through further interaction discussion and reflection within the framework of the study.

One undeveloped thought I have is how we/I still have the paradigm of art and written text as dualities that can be (uneasily?) integrated into research, merely complimentary in their strengths and weaknesses towards a goal of enriching the work. But is that duality only because we are enculturated to  separate the two modalities?  That with greater experience and familiarity, our understanding and expectations will recognize research with a flowing and seamless interplay of art and text, qualification and emotion, towards a more perfect support of thesis?

Hello all:

It’s just after noon, and I am looking at the comments posted so far on our Commons site. I am so pleased that you all found Victoria’s project as provocative and evocative as I did and I look forward to you all discussing her work and your work tomorrow.

A few reflections. Lamar has spent a considerable amount of time collecting visual freedom dreams from his students in order to value, acknowledge, document and celebrate them. But now, Lamar, I sense that, partially inspired by Victoria, you are really beginning to embodying the artist’s place in your project. You are welcoming the messiness and unboundedness of all you are receiving from your students and finding away, through all sorts of artistic leaps, to reveal it, play with it, accept it and push it without knowing where it’s going. The questions you are asking – about silence and voice (which need each other to exist), the permeable and possibly non-existent frontiers between school and not school, between the multiple bodies, voices feelings or your students – takes you to a place beyond establishing findings and into an adventure based on interrogating experience and understanding in non-prescriptive and traditional ways. What happens when voices and experiences meet and how can you facilitate that experiment? What role can artistic play and exploration (placing the dreams in a tub of water) have in transforming our ideas about freedom? What happens when dreams of freedom collide and merge or not? How ill you involve your students in these adventures? I am very excited by these developments.

Luis’s comments about how the artist-role can give the researcher a gaze that is not experienced as judgmental is of great importance. Of course Victoria also spent a great deal of time being with the teachers whose care work she evoked, and so , trust was generated by the sense of community and common mission that they built together. Still, Victoria’s goal from the beginning was not to evaluate but to share in solidarity the daily care experience of teachers. Like Lamar, Luis emphasizes the vastness of experience and its “messiness,” and thus the impossibility to capture even any “infinitesimal moment” in its fullness. Your comment, Luis, reminded me of Cezanne who, tried as he did, could not capture the fullness of reality but tried, at least, to capture its nature, the constant motion and the infinite points from which it could be experienced. According to his wife, Cezanne tried “to forget everything he had ever learned from science and second, through these sciences, to recapture the structure of the landscape as an emerging organism [my italics]. To do this, all the partial views one catches sight of must be welded together” (Merleau‐Ponty Aesthetic Reader, 1993, p. 67).

What does it mean to have an epistemology of care? And what does it mean to “honor” the experience of those we research with in terms of how we go about conducting the research and then presenting and re-presenting it? I think Luis does us a great service by highlighting these questions.

Dahlia’s comments reminded me of the essay we read by Pink and the indivisibility of experience even though, as she points, out, we necessarily analyze experience through modes and categories when we speak though doing so distorts and is insufficient. This is the problem with applying words to experience. Collage, as Victoria, Dahlia and Lamar write theoretically honors the messiness (and rejects the “seamlessness) of life and research, it breaks with rigid borders and conclusive “results.” Other researchers have also made this point (Garoian comes to mind) but sometimes I feel this true more in theory than in the artifact itself. Some of this may have to do with the polish of many finished collages, or the fact that it is exhibited as art and as a commodity. I wonder about the relationship that presentation has to power of collage to disrupt seamlessness and evoke complexity and contradiction. For the maker of the collages, who may make for the purposes of self-care and as a way to rethink and make sense of one’s own experience, the power of collage is probably quite different. Also, I am thinking a great deal lately about the differences of making digital collages (as I have done) and the tactile hands-on materiality of non-digital collage making.

I do not know if I will be able to get back on to our Commons site before class tomorrow, but I hope those who have not yet posted will do so. I am very much looking forward to Victoria getting to know you and visa-versa.

Until tomorrow.

Gene

In thinking about Victoria’s work (work sounds too small to encompass what she has created/experiences/put forth) I kept coming back to the ideas of collage and assemblage and how they can be used to honor the full reality of the research experience.

It was a fascinating to go through her written dissertation and the website, to move back and forth, sit with one for a while and then move again…I tried to pull myself away from the content and consider how each mode allowed me to see, to feel, to connect with the teachers, to reflect on my own practice and more. I realized I couldn’t actually separate out the ways different modes worked and that I was totally okay with that because taking it all in in a “random” way reflected how I experienced life in general.

I appreciated Victoria’s comments on the way collage refuses seamlessness – that it honors the messy, seemingly haphazard way that our research (and life) is experienced. Returning to our comments on the piece by Wang, categories are helpful in distilling out some ideas but they can create a false notion of neatness and order that seem to be valued so much in academic writing, even in our beloved qualitative world…which still wrestles with its century old inferiority complex of not being “scientific” enough…In fully honoring teachers and the work they do in caring, Victoria does not shy away from the “darker” more difficult sides of work teachers do – because to honor someone or something, we have to see it in its full dimensions, not just romanticize the “positive” traits.

I was moved by the rubbings in Betty’s class. The physicality of the work – getting dirty, being directly connected to the classroom albeit separated by thin paper, honoring the everyday pieces that often go unnoticed – and then putting that into conversation with her own thoughts and feelings made me emotional as I experience that section of her site. I was not prepared for that…at all. But there was such a sense of honor and care in tending to different parts of the classroom. It brought me back to my teaching years. To scouring every thrift shop in the area for the best lamps and cozy tables. To creating cleaning products with essential oils that helped to calm or energize. To spending many hours with kids – and alone – in the classroom cleaning it and refreshing it and reimagining it.

I was thrilled to see the next page addressed these affective parts of such physical work and brought the two ideas together. ” Pressing tenderly—hard enough to get a clear line, but not too hard so as not to rip the paper. This kind of touch tells stories—about the smooth edges of the particleboard shelves, about the bits of grit under foot, about the rust on the doorframe and hinge.”

I wonder how many stories go untold because we gloss over the furniture in the room without a second glance. We ignore the crack in the sidewalk, the caress of the breeze from the air conditioning unit…how does attending to these moments, to objects shift us into being more attentive, caring researchers with the people with whom we work as well?

Clearly my thoughts today are their own collage of memories, reflections, observations and fleeting thoughts!

Restler, V. (2017). Re-visualizing Care: Teachers’ Invisible Labor in Neoliberal Times (the digital assemblage)

Although I understand this digital assemblage may be only a portion of the dissertation research, the work appears to push the parameters of the practice of collage to a scope more generally encompassing that of evocative ethnography. The content of the images of artefacts produced by rubbings are dictated by what exists contiguously in the space, and return the viewer to a “haptic seeing” of that space.  While the juxtapositions may in fact appear to be disjointed at times, like collage, they may also appear complementary and whole.

The insightful way that the author exploits her role as “artist” allowed her to position herself as an adjunct to the other participants of her research, rather than as  an outside observer, in order to subvert the perceived “criticality” of the gaze upon teachers by a “researcher.”  It seems to effectively minimize the natural barriers that those observed erect against “outsiders” whose presence is often judgmental. “Claiming ‘artist,’ was a form of release, an acceptable excuse for my odd objectives” (Restler, positionality/art, p.1).

The final dyad, care/tactile epistemology, does serve to express the care demonstrated both by the researcher in the tactile sensitivity in creating representations of the life in a classroom, and by the teacher in the myriad details of preparing a clean, inclusive environment for students.  However, the connection of this methodology to new and expanded epistemologies is not clear to me.

What is beyond doubt is the impossibility to capture any comprehensive image of a reality, even of any infinitesimal moment.  She states in reference to the particularity and the locality of the rubbings that, “…they remind us of all that can’t be seen and known about the ever-changing, relational, and ephemeral pedagogical moment” ( Restler, Beyond Rubbings, conclusion).  We are finite in capability, thus necessarily incapable of attending to the infinity of infinitudes present in each moment that passes.  The dissertation encapsulates this humility, not only in the practical limitations of being able to rub only a selected number of items, or of rubbing 3 dimensional figures into 2-dimensional representations, but also in the fact that any means of showing aspects of care can only be partial, of only one perspective of a moment that has passed, and thus an incomplete visual testament of the true breadth and depth of teachers’ work.

Perspectives or aspects of teacher care evoked by the work will be not only be different for each viewer, but perhaps even ultimately ineffable.  Like a visually tactile Scheffer stroke, Restler’s descriptions of the work thus also makes evident to me the inadequacy of trying to articulate its precise objectives for practice or pedagogy through the use of language, which is itself inadequate to the task.  Despite the specificity of the work, “These images don’t aim or claim to measure,” (Restler, Beyond Rubbings, conclusion).  Though it may be difficult to put into words exactly what the images do aim or claim to express, it does evoke a means to honor the work of teachers, although I believe it to be a testament that would be valid for both neoliberal or classical liberal times.

http://scalar.usc.edu/works/re-visualizing-care/positioning-art?path=rubbing-every-object-and-surface-in-bettys-high-school-math-classroom–engaging-tools-of-visual-

Some questions that came to mind…

Was there practical limitations for scheduling the visit on the last day of school?  About getting student participation (although it may not be  a central objective of this research focused on teachers).

How did you get permission to enter the school for this work?

What is the platform host site of this work?  Is scalar the blog publisher?  How did you choose the format and resources to publish your work?