beyond rubbings
The rubbings are also abstract and partial. For despite several preparatory studies, I understood only moments into my first rubbing—a stack of four blue metal-legged student chairs—that I had miscalculated the effort (a feeling and practice not unlike the daily work of teaching—re-evaluating a prepared lesson when, for any number of reasons, it doesn’t work in the moment). I hadn’t anticipated the awkwardness of meeting three-dimensional in-situ objects two-dimensionally. And the set up—wrangling large sails of translucent paper, wrapping the objects like form-fitting presents, dragging over chairs and tables to stand on—took much longer than the mark-making. I knew by 8:15 that I would only be able to cover a fraction of the space. So I aimed for a representational selection and set about, moving methodically from one station to the next, working hurriedly against the clock for by end of day, the school would be locked, objects removed for summer storage, and classrooms scrubbed clean of the year. The chart below contains a catalogue of the objects and surfaces that I rubbed and didn’t rub:
Doing the project was in some way an attempt to pin something down. Like, I can tell you that this is true. That these objects were there. That this is how big they are and how much space they take up and the side curves around just so. It’s a little like the evaluations themselves. Measuring the measurable. Even if I were able to cover every inch and curve, every object and plane of Betty’s classroom, the project could only ever be half done. Rubbing out the shape of the bookshelf ultimately says very little about the books that are on it. About who reads them and the pedagogy that shapes their discussion and analysis. About how the school or teacher decided to purchase them and use them in her class. About what happens in front of or next to or in the presence of that bookcase from 8:30AM-3:00PM Monday through Friday September through June. And yet, these images don’t aim or claim to measure. They are (and I am) interested in feeling and telling. And as sites of feeling and telling (however incomplete), they are valuable.
The teacher evaluations, relying largely on student test scores[i], can also only measure (and thus value) a tiny sliver of school life. As a result, what is valued in school is what is measured—the way a collection of students responds to a particular series of standardized test questions on a particular day at a particular time. This project asks questions about how to value what goes on in classrooms that doesn’t leave a visible trace. How to see and convey all the learning that happens outside of those test questions, students’ and teachers’ personal lives and experiences—race, class, culture, and community, or the school’s administrative dynamics. How to represent and recognize teachers’ emotional, physical, or pedagogical carework.
conclusion
In their stray marks, wobbly lines, and the labored translation of three dimensions into two, the rubbings also tell a story about the challenge (impossibility?) of representation. Even the certainty of holding an object in one’s hands, delineating it inch by inch beneath the onion skin paper surface, is awkward and not as simple as it seems and some objects don’t really come through and sometimes the results are difficult to make out. Limited as they are, the rubbings function as a rich tool of visual ethnography making space to witness, reflexively locate, and engage modes of sensuous knowledge. I could make a long list of all that the rubbings leave out in terms of the physical space as well as the relational, emotional, social and pedagogical qualities/ feelings/ sounds/ activities of the room. However, in their depth and dimensions, the specificity of the work, and their very partiality, they draw our eye to the magic of the situated and local (referencing Phelan 1993 in Mackler & Santoro, 2002, p.116). They tell the story of both the very particular spaces and things and social locations of Betty’s math classroom, as they remind us of all that can’t be seen and known about the ever-changing, relational, and ephemeral pedagogical moment. As Orner, Miller, and Ellsworth write (2005, p.126),
In this way, in all that the rubbings do not convey, in their subjectivity and partiality, they call attention to the irreducibility of teaching work, the limitations of our vision and the value of the invisible (Mackler & Santoro, 2002, p.114). The rubbings trace the teachers’ spaces and their care for students and community with and through those spaces, as they mark invisibility—delineating the shapes of all that we can’t see and know about teaching work and care.Situated pedagogy under current regimes of efficiency and accountability, is vulnerable to charges of valuelessness because it honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value that leaves no visible trace afterward and cannot be reproduced.
[i] Although the Advance teacher evaluation system is based on a rubric where 40% of a teacher’s grade is determined by their value-added rating (students’ yearly progress on test scores), the test scores are weighted more heavily. Thus, as the progressive caucus, Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) explains, “teachers who are measured ineffective on the test-based component of the evaluation must be labeled ineffective overall, no matter what they receive from their principal based on the observation of their teaching. The test-based component, 40% of teachers’ evaluations, outweighs the observation component, which is 60% (2013, emphasis in original).
