Another Brick in the Wall: Working the Physical Borders of Schooling

• In Event: Visual Inquiries Into Borders and Perimeters of Learning

Abstract

“Concentrate on the tension in the muscles, pain where the bones meet, fleshy deformations that occur under pressure” (Nauman, 1974, n.p.). In his piece “Body Pressure” the artist Bruce Nauman (1974) offers instructions on how to engage a wall: “Press as much of the front surface of your body (palms in or out, left or right cheek) against the wall as possible. Press very hard and concentrate” (n.p.). As the instructions unfold, they focus increasingly on the sensation of the body touching the wall and the different ways an action like pressing can create intense e/affects.

Extending from Nauman’s (1974) work, we physically engage school walls’ exteriors-- the sides that live in public view and that delineate an educational space-- as a mode of theorizing and researching the relationships between school wall and place. Our engagements with these school walls sprang from the following questions: As educators, what can we learn from this physical border that “contains” an educational space? What can the wall tell us about educational practices? What are the educational politics of the wall in this particular place? What possibilities for visual methodologies does the wall incite? What are the processes that make this wall a school wall? Who does the wall contain, prevent, secure, cut off, invite? What else does its body do (Deleuze,1988) that we haven’t yet imagined?

We follow our own made-up list of instructions that, unlike Nauman’s (1974), foreground visual methodology in educational research. These are some of our instructions: 1. Stand close to the wall and visually document its smallest marks. 2. Touch the wall. Respond visually. 3. Photograph the view from the wall with your back against the wall. 4. Leave an invisible mark on the wall. Document that mark. 5. Give the wall a new materiality through a different visual mode of working (photography, performance, drawing, collage, etc.). 6. Re-theorize this public border of schooling in this local place.

We see these instructions triggering unexpected ways of re-seeing an often overlooked part of schooling’s palpable body. The instructions enable us to theorize the school wall in experimental ways that also open up possibilities for visual methodology in educational research. In this study, each of us works with a school wall in New York City and in Berlin, Germany, enacting parallel gestures in these different places. In our interactive presentation, we perform our actions in response to (and generated with and from) the school walls and share our theorizations-in-progress with conference participants.

Authors

• Maya R. Pindyck, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Alyssa D. Niccolini, Teachers College, Columbia University