making and making sense of the jumble
This section presents a collage of image-text-audio-video created in dialogue with a series of drawings called, “teacher practice maps,” made by each of the participants. I will describe in chronological order: the drawings/ texts made by teachers, the audio pieces I developed from the teachers’ texts, and a series of video works in multiple iterations that I created with and from the audio. My aim with this text is first to present the works and explain them—what materials did I use? What decisions did I make and how did I arrive at them? In the second section, I will locate these artworks theoretically in terms of research practice, sensory epistemologies, and teachers’ largely invisible caring labor.
teacher practice maps
At one of our meeting sessions, Lee (my co-facilitator) and I, invited the teachers to draw pictures of themselves and write/ draw about their practice. Through this activity, the teachers drew and depicted specific tasks, thoughts and emotions connected to their daily teaching work in relationship to their bodies. The drawings that followed from this prompt are diverse in scale, aesthetic, and content. However, most of the participants (7/10) drew a full body self-portrait (ranging from stick figure to caricature to outlined silhouette to multi-limbed Hindu deity) ringed with small bits of text annotating aspects of their teaching practice in relationship to specific body parts. They wrote about how they use their eyes as tools of classroom discipline, their thought processes while leading discussions, and the kinds of supplies they carry in each arm. In word and image, the maps reflect a broad cross-section of teacher work—intellectual, physical, emotional, analytical, and activist.
As one (among several) approaches to analyzing the maps, I transcribed the teachers’ texts into individual documents (later coding each task/ thought/ action across categories of work). And as texts, I “saw” the maps anew[i]. Maybe it was the aesthetic translation from marker sketch to the clean lines and negative space of Microsoft Word, or the organization of text into stanzas, or the legibility of electronic type, but they read to me like poems. Evocative, descriptive, and many-layered, they seemed to capture something ineffable about the scope and pace of teaching work—about the deep emotional labor, the middle-management quality, the day-in-and-day-out-ness, the physicality, and intellectual demands. For example, in Nisha’s map, she lists off the actions of her “face, mind, mouth, eyes, this arm, that arm, this hand, and that hand,” (she runs out of time before she can complete “this leg, that leg, this foot, that foot, or heart”), overfilling each gridded box with a stream of black marker text. The following excerpt gives a flavor for the range of tasks, feelings, and language conveyed across the maps:
This arm:
holding a student’s bag while they look for an assignment
juggling boxes
carrying a pile of books
draped with bags of supplies for holiday celebration
pushing on a table leg while it’s screwed back together
That arm:
clutching piles of student papers to my chest when my hands are full
blanketed with a tangle of charger cords
around a crying kid’s shoulders
bracing my team roommate while she balances precariously to fix a broken-yet again window blind…
Nisha’s phrases—their particularity and real-life detail—bring us into the thoughts, duties, and rhythms of teaching work, the heft of holiday supplies, the not-quite-contained overflow of spaces, boxes, needs. These works capture some of what Carla Washburne Resenbrink (2001) was getting at in her description of the elementary school milieu and the three teachers she followed:
Nisha’s text references the fullness of classroom life, the “overwhelming number of details,” and the thick range of energies, emotions, and purposes. Significantly, in Nisha’s map and all the others, these different responsibilities are smushed up together—the physical and emotional work of comforting a crying kid up against the quotidian maintenance of fixing a window blind.Their classrooms are full of energy, noise, humor, pain, love, purpose, and confusion. There is always a lot more going on than any teacher can possibly know, and even with the extra eyes of the researcher, only a small part of this intricate, microcosmic world can be recorded and examined.
[i] Erasing the figures was another way of seeing the maps anew. Digitally excising the drawn self-portraits worked to both highlight their shapes, emphasize the texts, and by bringing portions of the blank page of the document into the drawings, to weave a relationship between the maps and the pages of the Microsoft word document.
