I enjoyed the readings for this week and they provided a powerful through line to my interest in collage and the relational and affective process of making art and narrating intergenerational experiences of black women and girls. Reading the article on photovoice and the collaging of young pregnant women left me wondering what it would like to place those processes in dialogue with each other for my class project? What if the girls and women took photos of their worlds while inserting the imaginary, natural, media images? How might this shift the dialogue in the space and on the paper? While thinking of the origin of photography and bodies specifically in the historical lives of black women and girls, I think of photos as violent exploitation, specifically pornographic voyeurism of white male social scientists. Further, I am reminded of Sara Baartman, and how black women and girl’s bodies were placed on display for inspection, exploitation and economic gain. I am brought back to this when thinking of the “immense danger associated with changing bodies and blossoming female sexuality” (54) and Anne Cheng’s assertion that “we don’t know enough about how racialized people as complex psychical beings deal with the objecthood thrust upon them…within the reductive notion of “internalization” lies a world of relations that is as much about surviving grief as embodying it.”(20) I wonder about this as I read the dialogue of the girls as they focus in and question each other’s physical characteristics and representation at various levels. I wonder about the interplay of time space in collaborative seeing? I wonder about how “the complex evocation of the children’s images and their context-dependent meaning can be preserved” within a photo, conversation, in the emotive registers and “embodied practices” (182) in the process of viewing and creating within intersectional black girlhoods? In this, I am also drawn to the “unknown girl.” I am curious about taking a critical bifocal lens and asking what part of her being unknown and thus separating herself is also a matter of social scientific research machine (Moynihan and others) that profits from the invention of a blackness and femaleness that represents and creates pathologies of poverty, pregnancy and violence while silencing the broader experience of poor white Americans? How white hegemony continues to obscure the material realities of generations of poor white folks and is also complicit in differing forms of racial exclusion inside and out of schools?

I also was thinking about how my own collage processing, where my human shape is never present but always reflected in a flow of ideas, colors and words. These readings also spoke to my role as an educator, who employs collage work regularly, and had me pause on the importance of prompts in art making. I am drawn back to Carol Gilligan’s push on the importance of offering an interviewee a real question, that is simple in its humanity and from a deeply mined place. A prompt must hold such complex simplicity as they provide a landscape for a certain type of exploration. I would love to learn more about the development of prompts for art-based research. For example, I am processing what it means to create a self-portrait versus a prompt to build a collage where you ask who am I? I loved the critical approach to collage making and centering the psychological associative logic that offers several pathways to interpretation and reinterpretation. I continued to think about the balance of being “glamourous” and that of a social justice art-based researcher and the constant anxieties that are produced in the process of trying to intercept hegemony, socially and psychologically and also create a space to be respected and safe. I appreciated how Luttrell weaves in her own narrative and emotionality in the process alongside the students. I am curious about, moments that she didn’t share in the article.  If so, what were the other moments and how did she make the choice as to what to include? I am reminded of Kaela’s decision to paste a bright sun over her visit to the store. Where she clips and adjust her experience and what will be told in a purposeful manner. I was most blown away by the power of reading and viewing the teen’s reflexivity, curiosity and chatter as a heuristic for dialogic research processes. It is not the final result but the learning and growing that holds my attention throughout. I see this also reflected in Luttrell’s language, while sharing openly that much has changed in her own research over time and I also notice how the writing leaves gaps for curiosity and questioning. I appreciated the critical attention to power in the lives of children/people in the process of research and how tools, photography in this case, no matter how well intentioned is complicit in various forms of oppression. In response, I saw Luttrell speak back against simple first impressions and research that stand to further misrepresent the children, young women and families just as we saw Gabriel and Kendra share counter narratives in their photovoice projects.

I was also drawn to the “emotional landscapes” and the children’s and teen’s desire for “comfort, sense of belonging and respect”. I am curious about how Luttrell built her art research space? What did it look like? What sensory dynamics were important for her? I noted the use of “contraband” light music upon the young women’s request. This process of “homeplace” making called me to reflect on last Friday where I took my students on visual tour of three different spaces at NYU, one specifically on spatial precarity and another on sanctuary. PELEA: Visual Responses to Spatial Precarity https://wp.nyu.edu/latinxproject/event/pelea-visual-responses-to-spatial-precarity/, We Imagine Sanctuary: A Mural and Sound Installation http://apa.nyu.edu/we-imagine-sanctuary-a-mural-and-sound-installation-monday-february-25-friday-may-10-2019/ and Fritz Ascher: expressionist| Metamorphoses: Ovid Accoring to Wally Reinhardt https://greyartgallery.nyu.edu/exhibition/fritz-ascher-and-wally-reinhardt/

The youth’s emotive responses in each space were powerful and very diverse. PELEA students had a sense of feeling welcomed by the curator artist, warm feelings of familiarity, curiosity of whether racism was happening, beauty, nervous laughter and silence. The Sanctuary space slowed our pace, as we heard the audio recording share that “home is where my mother is” and other dreams and critical push towards survival in highly oppressed social positions. We sat in relaxed positions on the ground in the dimly lit space and named the place a sanctuary and wrote different ideas of peace “felt like grass with no wind. Just sun.” Students asked about the cost and the originality of a painting in the Fritz Ascher gallery. One student recently migrating from Chicago reinterpreted his expressionist flowers as explosions. Another poured over a book of poetry on a chair and another took a picture next to a sunset with a smile, stating this was her favorite. I am still processing the experience – as a sensory editing and remaking of visual art space – that takes on a sensory and dialogic component.

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?