My comments on posts 3-17-19 

Visual methodologies, evocation, analysis and audiencing

I sometimes feel we don’t talk enough about our images themselves – what they evoke, how we analyze them, and how we disseminate them.

Noor made an insightful comment about the four women standing in front of the statue of Marion Sims in Aderinsola’s image. She highlighted the pride, power and attitude conveyed by their stance, one evoking not only a defiance and a countervisualiy but also a historical narrative about injustice, rebellion, refusal and the 400-year long oppression of people of color in the US. I thought we didn’t give enough time and analysis to that image, but it’s something I hope, Aderinsola, that you think about as you continue with your collage. Did you consciously put that image in the center of your collage?

I’m hoping we get a chance to look together at the images that Gregory, Luis and Lamar uploaded to the Commons site. Notice, in Gregory’s images, the differences in body gestures, settings, and clothes. What do these images evoke for you? How is agency and care (themes central to all your posts today) manifested in those images. What role did Gregory play in their content and the decisions made by the participants? Are these artworks of self-reflection, of pride, of defiance, of advocacy (all of the above?)? How should Gregory and his participants think about curating and audiencing these photos? Do the participants expect a curated exhibition of some sort? Why did they agree to participate?

I was so pleased to see the many drawings that Luis linked to our Commons site. Most of them are, maybe unsurprisingly, pretty literal (and despairing), but there were some energetic scribble-dense images and a few surprising cartoons. Many of these also included text, and we should talk about the role of text in the images themselves. I am curious to hear, Luis, if you think these drawings were successful self-reflective tools or/and if you think they were messages to you – calls for help and understanding (and caring). What are your next steps?

The one image Lamar uploaded was striking for its starkness and clarity. Notice how the diagonal line goes behind the gun not in front of it. The text, too, is blunt. So Lamar, are you going to discuss the drawing with JJ and/or with others? Will you float it in water? As with Luis’s drawings, we need to think about if the drawing helps JJ know his own thoughts and work through them? Is it a cry for help? For action? For advocacy? And how do our answers (and the student’s thoughts) on these questions mediate how we think about audiencing? What are your goals for the drawings?

Comments on your posts re: Wendy’s projects

The central themes of this week’s posts that seemed to revolve around research ethics. These ethics embraced the ethos of care and the demand that research participants be able to exercise the greatest possible degree of agency in all aspects of the research process. We have discussed these ideas in class in relationship to our own work and that of others, and they are explicitly central to Wendy’s projects and I think she would be pleased that her articles sparked discussions about them.

Luis wonders whether researchers “have the right to probe,” but if they do then he finds Wendy’s approach, “respectful of the lives of children,” an admirable way to proceed. Like Luis, Dahlia admires the agency that Wendy facilitates for her participants and the importance Wendy places on the researchers responsibility to make, as she states, “a self-conscious effort to incorporate them [the participants] as producers, interpreters, circulators, exhibitors and social analysts of their own and each other’s images.” Dahlia implicitly sees this effort as central to the very idea of caring for one’s participants, for seeing them as full individuals with their own thoughts and interpretations. If I interpret Dahlia’s post correctly, she also recognizes that the care-demand of recognizing the full humanity of research participants is not always easy to fulfill. This is especially the case when one’s participants are children, who are “vulnerable” and “dependent on adults for survival.” What caring can mean with vulnerable populations is very complicated, and how it is enacted is also not as straightforward as one might hope. Greg is also concerned with facilitating participant-agency as an ethical demand. The participants in his study, in contrast to the youth Wendy works with, are mature women, and so the care and vulnerability embedded in the research process are necessarily different in some ways. Greg, in his pursuit of having his participants be in control of how they are seen by others, writes that “simply placing the camera in the hands of the subject offers a complete liberation of control and possibility.” He also poignantly addressed the deficit of care that marks our educational system and that visual methodolgies might address by noting that one of his participants took her self-portrait at her alma mater saying that the school provided her an education but “did not value her presence and place at the time.” Was her setting then chosen to convey her success despite the school’s expectations of her? Lamar, feeling a kinship with Wendy’s ethical-methodological stance and process during her research thinks 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.”

Dahlia’s comments made me think again about the role of advocacy in research. Many of us, for reasons related to social justice, work with vulnerable populations and populations that are oppressed and marginalized. We want to make the world better and more just, a place that prioritizes caring for the mental, spiritual and physical health of all. In some ways we are advocating with and for our research participants. What is the relationship between care work and advocacy? Between participant agency and advocacy? Is advocacy by definition something one does for others and is it thus necessarily disrespectful and destructive? How do we think about Wendy’s goals for the projects she conducted with her participants and her goals for the publication of that research (the audiencing of the research)? We can ask the same question of my article and Victoria’s dissertation, and of course about all the work we are doing in this class. I sense a strong advocacy thread in Lamar’s project and Gregory’s project, so these issues may confront them more severely than others, but the micro-meso-macro dimensions of everyone’s work, and your positionality within your own work, needs to be discussed. Good educators are necessarily, I think, advocates for their students.

Issues of empowerment, advocacy and research authenticy are often complicated by contingent events. Remember how, in our last class, Noor profoundly stated that Alysha’s decision to withdraw her name and image from the article I was writing about her may have been empowering even though it emerged from despair rather than from a conscious decision to refuse the right of others to see her (even in ways she had previously affirmed). It was certainly powerful in that I then withdrew my article for consideration.

I think we should all be careful about the claims we make for agency. Agency, even under the most optimal conditions, is always socially and historically mediated and subject to contingency. We might look to Karl Marx, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, William Sewell, Dionne Brand and Sadiya Hartman for thinking about how agency is enacted, freed, and transformed.

Luis made some important points about Wendy’s methodology- the meticulous and “rigorous” way that she designed and analyzed her research. These are worth noting and thinking about as we do our own projects. Do you, for example, want to consider a system of coding for the artifacts and conversations your research produces?

Luttrell, W. (2010). A camera is a big responsibility: a lens for analysing children’s visual voices. Viusal Studies, 25(3), 224–237. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2010.523274

Luttrell, W. (2016). Children framing Childhoods. In J. Moss & B. Pini (Eds.), Visual research methods in educational research (pp. 172–188). Palgrave, Macmillan. Retrieved from http://www.wendyluttrell.org/framing-childhoods/

In “Children framing Childhoods,” Luttrell introduces the concept of “collaborative seeing,” the practice of looking and contextualizing with others what they wish to express as salient in their lives (181):

“Theoretically speaking, collaborative seeing allows us to engage what Weis and Fine (2012) call ‘critical bifocality’, which links individual meaning making to larger discourses, public policies and conditions that ‘come to be woven into community relationships and metabolized by individuals’ “(Weis & Fine 2012, p. 174)(p.181)

This innovative use of photography, and later digital and video methods, in a sociological research methodology enlarges the potential and scope for the co-researcher paradigm, and the opportunity for authenticity for participant emotional self-development and growth. This visual method of childhood photography situates adults more properly as respectful of the full lives of children, lives that are equally worthy of adult attention, curiosity and emulation, a curious converse to the way it is often presumed that children should emulate the lives of adults.

Luttrell reaffirms the importance of an effective design and systematic analysis.  I like her careful attention to the use of prompts throughout the course of the longitudinal study.  For children participants, the prompt was “You have a cousin moving to Worcester and attending your school. Take pictures that will help him/her know what to expect…, “ and, for the adolescent middle schooler, “Take pictures of what matters to you” (Children, p.175), and so forth as they aged.  However, what was most apparent to me is the intensity of analysis that is necessary in order to both effectively engage participants in follow-up interviews and systematically sift through large amounts of data in order to draw appropriate inferences.  The latter need for systematicity is reflected by the detailed coding that was part of a comprehensive picture analysis (A camera, 229). Evidently, and even counterintuitively, an arts-based qualitative study analysis, despite one in which control of content is ceded to children too, still requires specificity and comprehensiveness in design and analysis. In fact, I get the distinct impression that qualitative analysis can be more arduous and rigorous than quantitative analysis—more complexity is in play.

I still experience a velleity of the ethical quandaries I have raised earlier from Luttrell’s work as well, but to a lesser degree than I have felt in methods of community arts-based research articles we recently studied.  Perhaps it is because the students are the sole creators of the art in her photography method.  Yet, she herself acknowledges that the quandary still exists.  In her other article, “A camera is a big responsibility,” she states that the “..persistent conundrum in this mode of research is finding the line between children’s voices and those of adult researchers,” a conundrum she concedes she does not resolve but at least wishes to acknowledge.  In “Children’s Voices,” she indeed took great care to involve participants (children) in the research authentically and transparently. I do feel that children were afforded the respect and the space to exercise independent volition and control over the form and nature of their participation.  In fact, the research here allowed students a means for meaningful self-reflection and growth, including that of examining the central aspect of the influence of family and the wider community on the formation and negotiation of childhood identity.  Any understanding gleaned by researchers is thus not initiated from an imposition, but rather by a researcher’s intention to…”…listen carefully and systematically” (Camera, 226).

Luttrell expands on child-centered methodologies in “A camera is a big responsibility,” where a closer look at the theoretical framework undergirding the concept of voice is examined, and where the method offers a means to unlock the “hidden transcripts of power expressed in children’s photography” that often can be unduly influenced by dominant ways of seeing (225).  She makes the entwinement of photography and narrative salient, in that the lack of linearity and logic endemic to both can be the very form and value that is characteristic of this type of research. This observation encourages me to persist in my visual qualitative work, despite doubts about the “unscientific” and “free form” expression afforded to and generated by students in my visual self-reflection investigation.

Students’ work in “A Camera..” also serves, perhaps more importantly, as a catalyst to potentially more comprehensive exploration and dialogue afterward.  For instance, Luttrell engenders a multiplicity of perspectives in a student’s voice through multiple “audiencings” of the work they produced (227).  Through this design, she gleans the salience of the “work of care” as a primary expression across students’ work.  I also wonder what might be the other salient themes observed, the others that she insinuates were “beyond the scope of the article” (230).

“While ‘voice’ should not be conflated with language, language does allow for some expression of ‘voice’ that is beyond words” (A Camera, 233).  And the camera can be one visual method that “affords voice” to those who otherwise may not have one in “the body politic”(233), and one method I hope of many others that can transform the often unexamined asymmetric relation between researcher and subject into one of parity between adults and children as co-researchers.

This is the first time that I have ventured to encourage students to reflect freely and, in particular, visually, on their recent conceptual challenges and victories in their experience thus far in elementary calculus.

AIM:  I want students to reveal their thinking to me, and to examine affect and emotional stances, although through their own volition and on their own terms.  Thus, I aim to cede to students the necessary creativity in reflection that need not conform to conventional math reflection practice.

Rationale:  In setting the expectation, I wanted to bring attention to what students’ previous experience has been in the past with reflection, or with self-reflection.  Would they feel comfortable trying things “outside the box,” including other modes of attempting to reflect and to express what they sense and what they feel?

Methods:  In order to give some sense of structure to this reflection, I provided the attached  Visual Self-Reflection Prompt, but with encouragement that “any expression need not make sense to anyone else.  It only has to make sense to you, or it could be only an impulse that seems to feel right, and that may (or may not) lead to what you wish to express.”

The prompt initially included typical written reflection too, just to provide some familiarity in order to ease the bridging to other creative modes;  it then added the suggestion for reflection using any other chosen expression, particularly visual.  Again, only to provide some focus, I articulated recent seminal calculus concepts developed in the course upon which they might reflect, if they wish, and suggested that they could examine their inward stance towards these concepts in visual modes….

Student work:  Some excerpted anonymized reflections are posted here:  Visual Self-Reflection Expression.  These only show visual portions of their reflections, not the written format portion.

My reflection:    I view this as a starting step in an expanding dialogue that I may be fortunate to have with students.  Although some student reflections may appear antic, they may mean much more.  Some were revealing to me and insightful.  For instance, students  who outwardly do not appear committed or hardworking expressed the centrality of will-power; ironically, some high performing students expressed macabre disaffection.  Some visual representations were cryptic and abstract.  I wonder if I should ask more, or if I have the right to probe. Maybe. Furthermore, some students asked to take the reflection prompts home to reflect more deeply on them before sharing with me.  Thus I will make more observations, and I may share more later, especially in an attempt to further refine, support and appraise the possible development in students of visual representation and expression as a tool in self-reflection practice.

Luis

“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!