Re-visualizing Care: Teachers\u27 Invisible Labor in Neoliberal Times

Re-visualizing care: Teachers’ invisible labor in neoliberal times takes up the topic of teacher evaluation in a moment of moral panic about “bad teachers,” public controversy over Value- Added Measures (VAM) of teacher work, and the widespread implementation of new assessment policies under Race to the Top (RTTT). Working with a group of ten progressive New York City public school teachers in the first year of one such policy (known as “Advance”), my multimodal study engages a wide variety of qualitative and arts-based research methods to explore teachers’ experiences of “Advance,” their broader reflections on practice, and the substantial work they do that is not captured by evaluation metrics. My research shines a light on teachers’ invisible carework expanding our imagination of teacher labor, and calling out the mismatch between white, middle-class expectations and the actual demands placed on urban teachers. Bringing forward the unequal distribution of teachers’ caring burdens and responsibilities across race/ class/ gender/ culture/ and language in urban schools, this research highlights teachers’ carework as a significant (and under-researched) site for the social reproduction of school inequality. And my use of digital and visual methodologies in the print document and companion digital assemblage, works to record and make visible the invisible work of teaching, thereby breaking through currently accepted quantitative images to see students, teachers and schools in their full humanity

A Place to be Together:: Cultivating Spaces of Discomfort and Not Knowing in Visual Analysis. The Collaborative Seeing Studio.

This article describes our transmethodological practice and the affective space of making and making sense of visual research in community. We purposefully embrace complexity and richness in visual data analysis, rather than seeking to reductively avoid doubt and uncertainty. To do this, we bring multiple ways of seeing together into a collaborative, poly-vocal construction. Our ‘studio’ is designed to be a safe space for risk and creativity. We are at different levels of experience and confidence, but we all learn from each other. Seeing collaboratively depends on translating our ways of reading visual material “out of our heads” and “into our shared space.” In the sense that we love what we are doing, we revel at opening ourselves to new possibilities. In-Progress: Victoria Restler Narrates a Collaborative Seeing Studio Session. Wendy Luttrell leads us into collaging as both metaphor and tools of Collaborative Seeing. We end with a brief reflection

Rubbing the room: Tactile epistemologies of teacher work

This article describes a visual ethnographic intervention at a New York City public school. The intervention and the images that resulted—a series of life-size red wax rubbings on paper—work in relation to visual discourses and dynamics of contemporary school accountability. In the article, the author situates the images and image-making in the context of her broader multimodal qualitative study on teachers’ invisible labor in urban schools. The author makes sense of this visual ethnographic intervention through a series of three conceptual dyads: witnessing/ evidence; positionality/ art; and intimacy/ “tactile epistemology,” (Marks 2000). &nbsp