Readings:

1. Looking Through the Learning Disability lens: inclusive education and the learning disability embodiment by Athena Goodfellow
2. (Re) Visualizing women who use drugs by Jade Boyd

The two readings provided this week was eye opening.  What I got from the Boyd (2017) reading was the process of the community participatory research is just as important as the artistic and research product or outcome. I think about the visual work that I do with my students, and I have to really take a step back and really enjoy the actual process, not just what they produce after the timer goes off. When I do my final collaborative collage project with my students, I am going to live in the moment with them,  be present with the joy of collaborative art making, document the process, be human with them, be me while they be them. bell hooks was quoted in this article saying, “That joy needs to be documented. For if we only focus on the pain, the difficulties which are surely real in any process of transformation, we only show a partial picture.” Best quote from the article, “Visual sociologists and other social researchers have argued that ‘art is capable of something which academic work is not’.

Goodfellow (2012) article had my neurons firing in different ways.  This quote really resonated with me in thinking about my art project on freedom dreams and hope with my students is, “It important to recognize here is that the participant’s imaginary world is centered upon the enhancement of physical attributes such as being ‘huge’ possibly as a means to redefine him outside of his perceived intellectual attributes.” Imagining is beautiful, it’s freeing, it’s liberating, it’s something that no one can take away from anyone. When we imagine, we are finally in a space where we are free to think and free to live a world without domination and colonization. This reading made me think of the non-binary  inclusion and exclusion of Black and Brown children within education. Which brown/black children are accepted and affirmed, and which ones are not, and why? Inclusion and exclusion is not always as obvious and clear as day as gifted classes vs. special education 12 to 1 classes. I wonder in ways which my students feel labeled both negatively and positively, and if that is expressed in any of the art work they’ve drawn so far.

Side post: Natural History Museum #TeamBlueWhales

Attached you will see an affirmation of my transgenderism that I found in the Ocean Life meditation walk we did at the museum and also a picture of my sketches that we did for our visual thinking activity.

Wendy’s work is absolutely beautiful. Reading her work has me thinking many things about my students, my positionality as a researcher, my research methodology and just life in general.

Though my students’ work that I’ve collected are drawings (crayons, markers and pencils)  and not photographs, a lot of what Wendy wrote about photography applies to the drawings of my students. In Wendy’s work, “A Camera is a Big Responsibility,” she writes about a “photovoice” which she says, “puts cameras in the hands of people who have been left out of policy, decision-making, or denied access to and participation in matters that concern their daily lives,” (Luttrell, 2010), and it made me think of flipping, “photovoice” to “drawing-voice” where my students are given the opportunity to use drawings to represent their point of view and experiences to adults both in and outside of school who make decisions. Like Wendy, the purpose of me collecting students’ drawings around freedom dreams, racism and hope (new drawings I collected this past week) is to have students, “speak back to dominant or stereotypical images” and/or ways of being, knowing, living, and existing in America.  

Like Wendy’s, I believe that the drawings of students will allow me to gain insight into my students’ social worlds and how class, race, and gendered meanings of selfhood are developed, understood, defined, redefined, framed, and reframed. . In chapter 3 of Wendy’s (2003)  book, “Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race, and the School of pregnant teens,” there were so many words and phrases that I want to use in my lens when collecting and analyzing the drawings of my students. Such as the notion of, “inside story,” “innocent, cute, and small,” “holds multiple truths and express mixed feelings about growing up hard and fast,” “express a sense of loss of power,” “model of the self as a ‘barricade’ against the world” vs “middle-class model of the self as ‘flower’ opening up to the world and a sense of ‘soft’ individualism born of a life of comfort,” “standing alone,” “making it on my own,” “facing the world by myself,” “being the object of others’ gaze,” and “them-me formulation.”

Attached, you will find a drawing and words of JJ, a third grader in my class.  The guiding prompt for this drawing and writing activity was, “Write and/or draw about what hopes mean to you.” I am still processing his work, and the work of many of my students, who shared similar sentiments as JJ, at the age of 7, 8 and 9. So many of the words and phrases of Wendy’s work with the pregnant young women are deeply connected to the work of my elementary school students.

From Wendy’s work to my work of kids’ drawings,I want to know:

1. What “aesthetic” questions should I ask?
2. What “autobiographical” questions should I ask?

http://thosewhocanproject-blog.tumblr.com/

http://scalar.usc.edu/works/re-visualizing-care/interludes-intro?path=index

http://victoriarestler.org/

I spent numerous hours exploring the 3 sites that were assigned to us this past week. I am absolutely amazed, and enlightened to see “research” beyond the traditional academic format of words on paper.

“Re-visualizing Care: Teachers’ invisible Labor in Neoliberal times” by Victoria Restler-  to use art as a way to convey the invisible carework of urban teachers and bring to light the “unequal distribution of teachers’ caring  burdens and responsibilities across race/class/gender/culture/and language in urban schools” is socially conscious work. One, teaching is not just a job, teaching is an art. It is a craft. And when one becomes a teacher and goes through life as a teacher, you develop a certain aura and set of life experiences that can’t be  easily and clearly articulated. There is so much to capture in one’s experiences that can’t necessarily be captured exactly and precisely by just words.

The “Those Who Can” project was especially eye opening, thought provoking and inspiring to me.

• “I can’t teach in a police state”
• “How does one quantify self-discovery and purpose?”
• “15 minute informal observations don’t make me a better teacher, embedded support and reflection over the course of a career do.”

This project is connected to Victoria Restler’s work in which she explains that her collaging methodology is used in a way to “preserve multiple meanings and diverse perspectives” and “to make the often hidden work of analysis and interpretation, visible” (Restler, 2017).  

Browsing through all of this visuality  inspires me to explore the ways in which the freedom dreams, cultural identities, racial identities, family history & backgrounds, socio-emotional make-ups, and socio-political knowledge of my students  layer upon each other’s’ minds, bodies, voices, thoughts, feelings, sensibilities and positionality within the world both inside and outside of school.

What would the silence between the overlapping voices mean? How does meaning and interpretation change when the same word is repeated over and over again?

What would the bridge to from one freedom dream to the next be made out of? Something material? Something figurative? Or both?

What if two completely opposite dreams are juxtaposed? Would  they speak to each other or would they remain side by side in silence? Would they move closer, ensuring no extra space is between them or would it slowly crumble at the corners?

What if  I scanned and printed all the freedom dreams i’ve collected on the  same exact type of paper and placed them in a tub of water and recorded its movement? Which dreams would float? Which dreams would push other dreams? Which dreams drift away? Which dreams centers itself?

“What Does it Mean to Look at This” by Teju Cole

“Black Looks, Race and Representation: Intro & Chapter 7: Oppositional Gaze” by bell hooks

It was interesting to read both texts before heading to an a resort in  Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic this past Sunday to Thursday. I expected my vacation to be relaxing (partially was) and carefree, but it ended up being mentally, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually exhausting being on a resort with 95% (white people- mainly from Europe) that were unkind, rude, and disrespectful to the workers/native dominicans  of color at the resort. There were so many moments, where I wished I had taken candid photographs of the way the White people were treating the natives of color. Due to how natural these negative racialized experiences were, I was unable to pull out my phone camera in time so I mentally took snapshots of facial expressions, the way the workers held their head down when being yelled at (for no reason- literally for entitlement like not having a balcony seat to eat,  the ice was melting in their cups, their fork fell on the floor and wasn’t picked up fast enough, etc) and the countless times workers sighed, took a deep breath, and put on a “smile” before walking to a table of rude and entitled people, who many times mocked their accent and laughed because the workers couldn’t speak english, “properly” or “understand” what they were asking.

“Taking photographs is sometimes a terrible thing to do, but often, not taking the necessary photo, not bearing witness or not being allowed to do so, can be worse,” (Cole, 2018).  This quote has sat with me throughout my vacation and I am still pondering over it. I failed at sharing what I witnessed. It left me to think and reflect on this quote: “What have we done,’ they ask us, ‘to create the conditions in which others, our fellow citizenship, undergo these unspeakable experiences?’” (Cole, 2018).  I am so angry to have witnessed  the ways in which White Domination still exists, and manifests itself  so oppressively in other countries of color. This leads me to my reflection on bell hooks’ reading.

“It is only as we collectively change the way we look at ourselves and the world that we can change how we are seen. In this process, we seek to create a world where everyone can look at blackness and black people, with new eyes,” (hooks, 1992) .

How can I enhance my freedom dreams project to join this process in which people will see our Black and Brown children with new eyes, eyes of love, care, beauty, and humanity?

“What can the future hold if our present entertainment is the spectacle of contemporary colonization, dehumanization, and disempowerment where the image serves as a murder weapon,” (hooks, 1992).

How do we disassemble this “murder weapon”, a weapon that literally and figuratively contributes to the school to prison pipeline for our black and brown boys of color?

“Cultural identity…is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historial, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject ot the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past,” (quoted by hooks, 1992,  from “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” by Stuart Hall).

Do/Can freedom dreams convey parts of our cultural identities? Our history of struggles? Are elementary school children too young to have identities that are names to give to the different ways they are positioned by, and positioned themselves within? How can we visually capture these different ways identities are positioned by and within?

Attached are some random photographs I took at DR:

“Directing Energy: Gordon Matta- Clark’s Pursuit of Social Sculpture” by Cara M. Jordan

“Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception” by Sarah Pink

Mind blown: our use of determining and casting judgement on environments,objects and people  based on our five senses is a modern western construct!The use of five senses is not necessarily applicable in other cultures.  Due to the fact that the fives sense have been normalized in my life, it is so hard for to imagine a way of looking at the world without necessarily relying on the five senses. In my freedom dreams project, students were asked to answer, “What does freedom look like, smell like, feel like and sound like?” I wonder what other questions I can ask to children  to elicit another part of their imagination to express what freedom means for them beyond the five senses.

For my personal knowledge in keeping track of concepts I learned for reading, the part of the reading that was illuminating to me was: “ …affordances are not fixed in objects or events to be perceived uniformly. Rather they are determined through the nature of the ‘action’ in which the perceiver is currently engaged’ (Ingold, 2000: 166). Paul Priors’s (2005) critical essay offers a way to think about the differences between Ingold’s and Kress’s approach through the notion of ‘affordances’. Prior identities ‘… Kress’ treatment of “affor-dances” as highly determinative, mutually exclusive, and binary.’ By contrast, he points out that ‘Gibson’s (1979) basic notion of affordances was, in fact, intended to avoid turning objective properties of things into such hard categories’ and ‘stressed that affordances are relational, ecological, and tendential (not determinative)’ and recognized the ‘fuzziness of categories.’ (p. 267).

What I appreciated about the Gordon-Matta- Clark article is the recognition and, “belief that art could include the entire process of living-thoughts, actions, dialogue, and objects- and therefore could be enacted by a wide range of people who were not professional artists,” (p. 42; Jordan, 2017).  I think about my beautiful black and brown children and imagine a world that values their potential and possibilities. I imagine a time and place where  black and brown children are given the time, space, resources, but most importantly the inspiration to direct their energy toward bringing about positive changes in their daily lives through art. . My 7, 8 and 9 year old students are deeply aware and conscious of their social surroundings and the oppression that is physically manifested in their neighborhoods. How do we push our students beyond awareness? How do we push their awareness into to social action- in using art and creativity to give back to the community, reshape/rebuild their surroundings, attend to the needs of their own  community, and inspire the uninspired. Imagine the imagination of change of children of color, imagination of plans, structures, and art that would clash, mesh, blend, connect, disconnect, uphold, let go, inspire, and make the world a better place.

Arts- Based Methods in Socially Engaged Research Practice: A Classification Framework by Qingchun Wang, Sara Coemans, and Richards Siegesmund

“ABR also fulfills our desire for surprise. It provides opportunities to see new portraits of phenomena, diversifies our perspectives, and emancipates the gaze through which we approach the world around us (Barone & Eisner, 2011). It may also raise our awareness of important social, political, or educational issues, and offer a starting point for further inquiry and actions. ABR often challenges ways of conducting research, and the fundamental nature and purpose of research itself (Saven-Baden & Major, 2013).”

When I read  this article, the quote above really resonated with me. I am working on a project called, “Freedom Dreams” where I am actively collecting  both writing and drawings from children and adults that express what they believe and imagine freedom to look like, feel like, and sound like. The visuals by my young elementary school children, really fulfills my  desire to show the world, that our young children are very much aware of the social, political, and educational issues within our country.

Visual Methodologies (4th ed.) Chapter 2: Towards A Critical Visual Methodology by G. Rose (2016)

“Another aspect of the social production of an image is the social and/or political identities that are mobilised in its making.”

“…there are those who insist that the most important site which the meaning of an image is made is not its author, or indeed its production or itself, but its audiences, who bring their own ways of seeing and other knowledges to bear on an image and in the process make their own meanings from it.”

Is the most important site which the meaning of an image is made its audiences? For me, I still am conflicted about that. Right now, in looking at some of the freedom dreams produced by children, I feel their way of seeing, what they have put on paper their unique yet many common  perspectives, is way more important, meaningful, telling, purposeful, and significant than of its audiences who are viewing them.

Concerns and aspirations for qualitative research in the new millennium by Elliot W. Eisner

“Another feature of the visual arts is that they are used to communicate the way something feels, that is, its emotional character.”

“Yet we live in a culture that is predicated upon comparison: we rate people, we rank them, we assign them to league tables, we put them into stanines, quartiles, we apply cut-off levels, we run them down the same track and see who wins. All of these practices depend upon comparison. We are a meritocracy (or aspire to be one) and we determine mert comparatively. In the process, as my colleague Ray McDermott points out, we not only create successes, we produce failures (Varenne and McDermott, 1998)”

The beauty of art for me, is when we move away from ranking. The true beauty of art is when we look at each piece of art, each piece of freedom dream created, and look at all of its being and creation for what it is expressing and conveying both literally and metaphorically. We actively listen with our eyes, and should ask  more questions than in creating conclusions. Each piece of art has an emotional character, and I’m not sure if we should determine what that feeling but just allow us so sit in that feeling when it evokes.

Arts based research. Chapter 1: What Is and What Is Not Arts Based Research by Barone T. & Eisner, E.W. (2012)

“Arts based research emphasizes the generation of forms of feeling that have something to do with understanding some person, place, or situation. It is not simply a quantitative disclosure of an array variables. It is the conscious pursuit of expressive form in the service of understanding.”

“…the arts are vehicles designed to reveal what someone can feel about some aspects of life…arts based research is not a literal description of a state of affairs; it is an evocative and emotionally drenched expression that makes it possible to know how others feel.”

These quotes are everything. We cannot always quantify the way we understand people, places and situations with traditional ways of collecting data (“hard” science). When you truly want to understand the complex way humans exist in the world in relations to other humans, situations, and systems, we have to honor  and accept other complex ways, such as ABR, in “collecting data,” such as emotions, feelings and internal motives and intentionality. Freedom Dreams is a vehicle to reveal what black and brown children and adults feel about their social location within the world. It is a way to tap into the beauty minds of children, and genuinely ask them how they feel about who they are and their position in the world and the way they feel the world treats them.