sensory red line
A pinky-grey rectangle of paper, held up with the pale blue stroke of scotch tape
A white (hues of yellow, pinks, and brown) hand meets the page with the felt tip of a fat red marker
Words come spoken then written. At first each phrase overlapping, slightly ahead of the next like a 3D image
Somewhere around 50 seconds, the marks begin to leave purplish-red trails then fade
A pile of words forms slightly up-right of center, brownish and oblong in the middle with the edges of letters sticking out all around like orange-red twigs or gangly limbs
Tiny shreds of paper ball up and pill.
The hand slows a bit, sticking to the textured surface
Listening for words, I try to find them in the zigzagging motion of the hand, like a kind of lip-reading. Mostly I can’t make them out
Red Line, (and the whole assemblage) is a sensory work, meant to evoke, to offer some sense of what it feels like to be inside of the teachers’ writings, work and care. Pressing play on the audio pieces (especially with loud volume or headphones or closed eyes) brings the listener into the rhythm of a teacher’s day. The quickly unfolding demands, activities, emotions, thoughts. The videos too get at something bodily and sensual, bringing forth feelings, in dialogue with the teachers’ words and experiences. The sense (in homeopathic dosages) of:
-The effort of the hand to keep up, of the words to be seen/heard, of the page to hold it all.
-The slight anxiety of catching (or missing) the words like the teacher’s strain to keep up, catch sight of the all the activities and words and feelings of the day
-Overwhelm- the density of sound, of words, of lines and letters on top of each other, like the density of school life. Words come forward like a pile of mandates—all that teachers must do, but also all the new and ever-changing regulations, procedures, curricula, standards.
-Invisibility- as words get lost in the jumble of speech, as the line then the page fills up and darkens, there is a tension and perhaps some melancholy in the erasure that mirrors the invisibility of teachers’ work and care.
-Being worn down like the paper disintegrating into wet, red pills, like the teachers’ weariness, Nisha’s “fighting through exhaustion.”
Part of what makes these works sensory is their emotional quality, the imprecision, the intentional jumble. They are also sensory in a bodily way—up-close materials and textures-of voices, paper, marks. And my own intimate inhabiting of the works—speaking the teachers’ words in my mouth, writing them out with my hand on screens and pages, feeling a stiff numbness in my hand as it tires, the top inner knuckle of my ring finger red and swollen from pressing hard with the pencil. This embodied practice is a form of “tactile epistemology” what Laura Marks (2000, p.190) calls, “thinking with your skin,” a way of “recognizing the intelligence of the perceiving body.” My embodied practice allowed for different ways of knowing the teachers’ words and works—layers of information about emotion and care that were not available to me in the maps alone.
The assemblage, the jumbling, and the videos in particular also engage viewers/ listeners/ readers in bodily ways. Marks theorizes a way of looking and certain kinds of (moving) images, that call forth tactile forms of engagement and sense-making. She calls this “haptic visuality,” a kind of vision in which “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (2000, p.162). Haptic visuality is a way of seeing in soft focus, emphasizing texture over form. She elaborates,
The blurry vision of white on white(ish); the tight focus of all the works, up close and zoomed-in; the textured teeth of paper; the intentional obscuring—inaudible sounds, scribbled out images—mark these as haptic works, pieces that suggest and maybe require, a bodily way of knowing them.Haptic visuality may “fasten” on its object, but it cannot pretend to fully know the thing seen. Instead, haptic visuality inspires an acute awareness that the thing seen evades vision and must be approached through other senses…At the same time that it acknowledges that it cannot know the other, haptic visuality attempts to bring it close, in a look that is so intensely involved with the presence of the other that it cannot take the step back to discern difference, say, to distinguish figure and ground (191).
The partiality of these pieces, their unknowability speaks to the gendered invisibility of teacher carework—the kinds of labor that goes unseen by teacher evaluation rubrics and popular discourses on teacher work because it is “women’s work” (aka not work), and because the public and policy imagination of teaching practice is normed to the Standard North American White Student (Smith 1999). It also references the almost existential challenge of representation, and in particular seeing and knowing what happens in a classroom, what teachers do, what learning looks like. If school accountability culture is predicated on measuring the measurable, what is not seeable or measurable and how might we perceive it?
Partly, this is what is and is not visible to an administrator observing teachers for fifteen-minute sessions (as per the stipulations of Danielson)—what is not seeable (hearable) when Lee’s monolingual principal sits in the back row of her Spanish class? What is not visible in the intimate olfactory cues that lead Betty to determine that one of her students was involved with sex work? The in/visibility of care and trust that lead Rebecca to provide meals and after-school support to former students. The in/visibility of learning and growth, the “moment when a student really gets it” as Phoebe describes or the kind of learning reflected in Michelle’s image of desktop graffiti--“we so hard-headed when we in love.”
The assemblage is an answer to Ellsworth’s call to theorize embodiment in teaching and learning and to challenge “those assumptions and practices whose histories have privileged language over sensation, objects of experience over subjects of experience, the rational over the affective, and knowledge as a tool for prediction” (2002, p.2). In the haptic visuality of the jumble, the up close textures and scratches, these works hold up gendered notions of experience and emotion, in conversation with embodied teacher work, and all that we cannot see. These works are a kind of “emotional imprint” – of things unseen, unvalued or undervalued, unspeakable, unknowable, or on the edges of knowing.