and into audio
While reading, and re-reading the texts, it occurred to me that many of the tasks noted in the maps take place in conjunction with/ on top of/ right next to/ while doing one or more other things. For example, when Sarah is “lecturing” she may also be “gesturing” as Phoebe writes, “surveying, counting, and scanning” as Nisha notes and “translating” as Lee suggests. The necessarily linear sequence of text fell short of the dense, relational, and coinciding practices depicted by the teachers. I decided to record the texts as audio files and to layer the audio in order to highlight the ways in which teacher work, thoughts, feelings, and physicalities intersect and overlap.
I began by creating a draft that combined texts from seven of the teacher maps[i] into a single braided script. I organized it thinking about the movement of time across different responsibilities and by imagining the teacher tasks that take place simultaneously. In particular what kinds of thought/ reflection/ questioning/ wondering occur while a teacher moves about, facilitates, grades, etc.? The script is broken up into sixteen stanzas that begin with research and preparation—lesson planning and “trying to reread text from the point of view of an English language learner of various backgrounds.” The loosely-structured narrative continues through the day—greeting, lecturing, checking in with students, moving around, loaded with teaching supplies, connecting with colleagues, doing physical classroom maintenance, grading and reflecting at day’s end. I grouped coincident tasks/ thoughts/ feelings together, planning to layer voices on top of each other to approximate simultaneous practices.
I re-apportioned the text into seven scripts (each representing the text of an individual teacher’s map) and I invited the teacher participants along with some friends to create smartphone audio recordings. Ultimately, two of the teachers (V and Phoebe) recorded their own map texts and the rest were completed by friends and colleagues[ii]. I wanted to have a range of women’s voices representing the gender and racial dynamics of ItAG participants and the broader demographics of the teaching laborforce. All together recordings were made by nine women (two of the maps were recorded by two different people[iii]) ranging in age from 26-42, one black, one Latina, one Asian, and six white. The registers of their voices are low and raspy, wavy, direct, over-eager, round and smooth, rhythmically paced, carefully articulated, hurried, high, and rounding up with question marks.
In this work I hear tangles of sound and energy punctuated with small open breaths like the space between contractions in early labor. I hear a wide range of practices and feelings—love and intellectual work, physical labor, boredom, mastery, self-doubt and reflection. I hear emotional investment in the work, and the weight of teaching’s “too-muchness” in the words and density of sound. When voices speak at once, the listener must strain to catch it all with barely enough time to make sense of one stanza before the next begins. And it feels a bit like the pace and energy of school schedules with little-to-no time for reflection or quiet between classes (interaction, performance). Or the soundscape of a classroom full of 20+ students with distinct, competing voices (perspectives, experiences, needs, capacities)—a sense of scarcity, not having enough time/ attention/ patience/ resources for them all.
The variety of voices and tones captures some slice of the range of a single teacher’s (or many teachers’) experience over the course of a lesson, day, semester, or career. The piece conveys the layered density of collage and preserves the “perspectival multiplicity” of different teacher voices and kinds of work. And in some places, with particular voices, it also feels scripted and overly-dramatized. The phrase “so many activity guides,” sounds like feigned exasperation and “air high-fives for great answers and thoughts,” comes through in a kind of staged enthusiasm. While in other parts like “moving from room to room to bus in the cold,” I hear the slow solemnity of a “poetry reading voice.” These stilted interpretations bothered me at first—they felt aurally discordant and inauthentic to the teacher participants’ earnest contributions. But I have come to see them as another layer in the “disjunctive narrative,” symbolic of the performativity of teaching; social ideas about “teacher voice” and “persona” that teachers alternately take up and reject in their own practice. Like the sing-songy tone that many people and teachers adopt to communicate with children. Expectations placed on female teachers to appear animated and eager, voices of authority, to smile a lot, to be serious, unflappable.
Later, I re-recorded the piece myself. I added one small section (a series of overlapping “ing” verbs) but otherwise used the same script and the same approximate pacing. I wanted to hear the totality of the work held within a single voice—the individual teacher’s experience as deeply collective. And I wanted to speak out the words, feel them coming out of my mouth, and hear them in my tone and pronunciation. As with other works where I created rubbings of all the objects and surfaces in one teacher’s classroom or re-traced the lines of the participants’ drawings, I wanted to know the works in my body like spoken tracings and to cultivate intimacy with the teachers and their words.
I hear the piece differently in this one voice (mine). My reading communicates all that a single teacher does and thinks about and is faced with. The energy—due in large part to the consistent pace of speech, sound quality and my fairly slow, croaky voice—feels almost meditative. Hearing the text all in one voice highlights internal and emotional teacher practices, as though the overlapping dialogue represent different voices in her head. Listening to the pieces together makes me think of these two (and more) dimensions of teacher work—the energetic, weary, frenetic, in the moment, and the meditative, reflective, lingering after life of everyday teaching. They bring to mind Betty’s reflection during our interview (affirmed and echoed by many participants) that “at the end of the day, I can’t talk to anyone. Sometimes I just have to stare at the wall.” The sense of deep exhaustion that she and others described and the need for counterbalance to the density of sound and thought, the jumble of emotion and interaction taking place all around her, and also inside her. I don’t see these two versions of the audio piece as either/or representations of teacher work, but as interwoven component parts.
[i] Two of the remaining maps contained no text and the third, very little.
[ii] Because I was doing this during the middle-end of June (at the busy and exhausted end of the school year, when I was also spending time at Sarah, Betty, and Michelle’s school), I didn’t feel that I could ask all of the teachers to record their own maps. All of the friends who read and recorded the texts were also teachers, although they taught in higher education.
[iii] Because of poor sound quality