What Do You Do That Can't Be Measured? Visualizing "Excessive Moments" in Teacher Practice

• In Event: Pleasure Is Political: Implications of Embodied Making and Teaching for Arts-Based Research

Abstract

In 2013-14, the first year of “Advance,” a New York state teacher assessment policy (linking teacher evaluations to student test scores), I worked with a group of ten radical New York City public school teachers to chart their reflections on practice both inside and outside the contours of Advance. After learning and collaborating together over three months, we set out to produce an activist-art piece—a way of sharing out our collective insights, educating others, and working to challenge dominant discourses and visual representations of teachers. Together we developed a participatory Tumblr site and called it, “Those Who Can” (a retort to the old adage, “those who can, do, those who can’t, teach”). The multimedia blog asks a broader public of educators, “What do you do that can’t be measured?” and invites them to answer back with videos, images, or text.

This paper focuses on public contributions to the Tumblr, especially a series of twelve short (one minute) videos. Taking up the work of contemporary artist, Ramiro Gomez, I position these teacher-made images as countervisualities (Mirzoeff 2011), representations that disrupt dominant ideas about teachers and teacher work. In the way that Gomez paints Chicanx domestic workers into the scenes of advertisements for luxury homes and home goods (cleaning pools, gardening, caring for children), these teachers work to make their own “behind the scenes” labor visible (or palpable) through their video narratives.

In the videos teachers talk about a wide range of practices and orientations that elude the frameworks of evaluation rubrics. They reference the work of close observation, watching their students “change from moment to moment and day to day,” nurturing student reflexivity, and especially about the work of love and care—developing relationships in classrooms and “informal spaces,” and helping students navigate “the poverty-induced stressors” that they face in their homes and communities. In the words and faces of these teachers who are predominantly people of color, queer and gender-nonconforming (eight/ twelve), the videos challenge viewers to call up and question what Weber & Mitchell (1995) call “the cumulative cultural text of teacher.”

This presentation details a multimodal process of analysis that combines traditional qualitative approaches such as narrative analysis with arts-based methods including a series of hand-drawn video animations meant to trouble notions of in/visibility, representation, and measurement. Through the teachers’ videos and my own layered animations, this paper seeks to challenge, draw, erase, and redraw the boundaries and definitions of teacher labor and “excessive” practices (Orner, Miller, & Ellsworth 1996) in the context of diverse urban schools.   

Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality. Durham: Duke University Press.

Orner, M., Miller, J. L., & Ellsworth, E. (1996). Excessive moments and educational discourses that try to contain them. Educational Theory, 46(1), 71-91.

Weber, S., & Mitchell, C. (1995). That's funny, you don't look like a teacher!: Interrogating images and identity in popular culture. London: Falmer Press.

Author

• Victoria G Restler, Rhode Island College