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RE-VISUALIZING CARE: the digital assemblage

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excesses and inattentions: the jumble as teacher care

After Lee and I laid out the prompt for the teacher practice maps, I added a second layer of instruction,
If you get your maps done early, you can start to go over them and analyze what you’ve made. Go through what you have drawn or written and think about what is valuable about the work. Why is it important? And who is it important to? There are stickers here or post-its and you can add these notations directly to your map.
The words felt funny coming out of my mouth, and I realized even as I was saying them, that it was too much to follow. The map was already a demanding project—a lot to recall and think about in relation to the body—and, as many of the unfinished maps attest, it might have benefited from more time. This was too many directives, and fortunately, it largely slipped through the cracks. Only Rebecca and Sarah began the process and their annotations were never picked up meaningfully in group conversations or interviews[i].

But it was many months of analysis later before I began to see the logical and theoretical flaws of my framing. Riffing on the language of “value added,” reading in and around human capital theory and analyses of neoliberal school accountability, I had been caught for some years in an effort to think outside of/ interrupt this tautological loop. I wanted so much to know how these critical teacher-activists might articulate the mattering in their work beyond the language of assessments and human capital. But even in my attempts to think (and feel and make and theorize) outside of this narrow version of value, I was calling it up. Why importance? Why not joy? Why not ask, “what is hard about this work?” Or loud? Or hopeful? I could have framed the question in many ways, and “importance” also served as a limiting frame. I still think the project of imagining and articulating systems of value outside of neoliberal schooling has merit. But the question of importance automatically bars other frames and ways of seeing/ feeling from coming forward. And importance may be beside the point.

The teachers’ maps reject an ordered hierarchy of value. Their maps are precisely about the ways that all kinds of work from the mundane to the theoretical to the activist, are linked—like an interwoven plane of yarns and strings. A tangle, a jumble. Furthermore, in the ways that their words and images shine light on quotidian and unglamorous parts of teaching—Lee’s “updating Google Drives,” or Nisha’s “bringing a 100^th pen to a student who’s never had one”—and to the feminized work of care, they are intentionally drawing our eyes outside of the frame of “importance,” to consider “excessive moments” in teaching practice.

I take the concept of “excessive moments” from Orner, Miller, and Ellsworth’s (1996) article on “Excessive moments and educational discourses that try to contain them.” They introduce the theory this way,
By excessive moments of teaching, research, and writing, we do not refer to the banal truism that all discourses fail to account fully for all aspects of a phenomenon or experience. We do not mean, merely, that the educational discourses that frame each of our moments are exceeded by historical events; unknowable and changing subjectivities of students, teachers, and researchers; the politics of representation and performance; the unexpected. Rather, we want to use the concept of “excess” to call attention to the relation between particular educational discourses and repression: what becomes contained by an educational discourse and what becomes excess or excessive to it is no accident. Excess is a symptom of histories of repression and of the interests associated with these histories (p. 111).
Here, Orner, Miller and Ellsworth not only draw our attention to excesses—those narratives, theories, experiences, and feelings on the edges of educational discourse, but to the situated “histories of repression” that contain some moments and excise others. “What becomes contained by an educational discourse and what becomes…excessive to it is no accident.” In other words, what we see and don’t see in educational spaces, and in teacher work, what we notice, what we deem “un/important” is shaped by dominant social structures.

In the assemblage and in the following videos, I put the notion of “excessive moments” in conversation with Boler’s (1999) “inscribed habits of inattention,” a concept that she articulates to theorize emotion and rethink the unconscious. Writing with Zorn (2007, p. 143), Boler explains,
[As a theory,] Inscribed habits of inattention offers a dimension missing in the notion of emotional understanding, namely that the question of how we do or do not understand the ‘other’ has centrally to do with how we have internalized and, hence, enact culturally learned modes of attention and inattention.
The concepts, activities, and emotions that command and escape our attention are no accident either. Supporting this theory with Frye’s (1983) notion of social uptake (the way our emotions are socially reflected/ validated/ ignored), “inscribed habits…” insists that the water we swim in, what is in/visible (as in the unconscious) is situated in social dynamics, power relations, and particular histories. Significantly, while attentions and inattentions may be experienced individually and in the body, these inscribed habits are collective and collaboratively formed. Like “excessive moments,” they too grow out of social histories. These evocative phrases are both inverse and mirror images, working from different angles towards an overlapping central point. What we don’t see/know/perceive because it is, on the one hand, too much (excessive), or because it is not enough, habitually hidden (inattentions). Likewise, both of these theories reflect a commitment to reclaiming the extras and the overlooked, to shine light in dark corners.

The video opens on three horizontal screens in slightly different shades of white—yellow, pale pink, and blue. In succession—right, left, and center—the same hand, holding the same marker meets the page, writing left to right in the same blocky, all-caps handwriting. Same hand, same black marker, same close-in shots.

No voices this time. Only the stage-whispery scratch of marker on paper, lapsing into occasional squeaks, high pitched, a little like nails on the board. And in one recording, the loud hum of background, a big open space, people talking in the distance.

My eyes hunt for repetition across the screens: research, draped, eyes

And then, the video on the right stops, freezing the frame in an all-over pattern of blurry type and all the big-space ambient sound quiets.

The middle piece slows and stops, page filled, text getting lighter and smaller as it travels down the page.

There is a kind of absurdity to the hand on the left, still marking even when the other two have stopped (music turned off, party over), when the page is dark with black. But also a sense of commitment, and actually, I can see the words if only fleetingly. The wet surface of each newly-written word catches the light, visible for fractions of a second before fading into the dense ground.

In this play of invisibility—the way the work calls attention to what we can’t see—this piece works with inattentions. In the substance of the words, the teachers’ emphases on care, physical work, and feminized tasks like cleaning or worrying, they call out in/visibility—work invisible to the frames of the Danielson rubric, thoughts and actions that may not be seeable in the space of a fifteen-minute observation. Nisha spoke to her own habits of inattention in our group discussion of the maps. Reflecting across the drawings, she remarked,

There’s so much stuff about teaching that one is so daily and so regular, that we forget we do it and that apparently the public thinks is not a thing we do. Like, I forgot that I spend three hours a day on activity guides until I saw V’s laptop on hers. And I was like, right, that’s a thing I spend all my time doing that interferes with my other life. And that in all these conversations about teachers and the idea that we work a 2-hour day, it’s not even taken into consideration. It’s just gone from consciousness. Until I’m living it. It’s gone from everyone’s consciousness.

Here Nisha reflects on the ways that her work is invisible even to herself, and on the interplay between her own perception of her practice and popular portrayals of teachers and teaching. Her forgetting that she spends three hours a day on activity guides (a form of inattention), is linked with the public opinion that teachers “work a 2-hour day.” And at the end of the excerpt, she shifts pronouns between “it”, “I”, and “everyone”, suggesting some slippage between a collective consciousness, her own experience of “living it,” and public perception.

These works play on aesthetics of excess too. The excess of my instructions (during the initial activity), the excess of three channels, all doing more or less the same thing, the iterative and repetitive processes of their making, filling up the page, writing over and over, blacking it out. An echo of the teachers’ overfilled maps. Like Betty’s surprised reflection on all that she thinks about each day. During our interview she held the map in her hands and exclaimed, “I see all these things that go through my head and all these things I have to think about, it’s no wonder I’m exhausted…People [who aren’t teachers] can just hop out of work and it’s not a big deal. And I don’t know what other people do at work, but look at what is coming out of my head! No wonder I need to go home and not talk to anybody.” Betty’s words reflect the excess of all the stuff she must think about and consider, feel and do. But her sense of surprise, speaks to habits of inattention. In dialogue with the habits and perceptions of non-teacher people, she seems to interpret her map as a form of proof that her work is demanding (worthy of exhaustion). When she repeats “no wonder,” twice, I wonder who she imagines wondering. Herself? Particular publics? Or perhaps both.

Excess and inattention in teacher practice are socially and historically constructed in the alignment of teaching with women’s work and the private/ public split that framed women’s work as less (demanding, important, skilled, etc.). They are situated in the White-normed models of student and teacher, that can’t anticipate the incessant requests of Lee’s colleagues for her to translate letters and call Spanish-speaking parents. They are rooted in long histories, policies, and discourses that mark both women, and people of color as simultaneously, too much—too loud, too wild, too demanding, too emotional—and not enough—invisible and overlooked.

In the ways that school accountability culture and evaluation policies seek to control and repress these inattentions and excesses, the assemblage resists containment. The jumbles—layered, bodily, emotional, excessive—are a sort of inverse of evaluation metrics. Taking account of precisely all that isn’t measurable. A basket for excessive meanings, feelings, and inattentions. A graph so dense with points that it is no longer legible. And yet, in that erasure, in the haptic up-close, another way of seeing emerges.

[i] Sarah’s notes seem to talk to purpose. In reference to “listen to student chatter,” she writes, “1. Maintain classroom; 2. Maintain students’ emotional wellbeing.” While Rebecca writes, sandwiched between, “Talking to parents,” and “Loving,” “Important because with the new evaluation system, teachers must remember the students who need so much more than test prep.”