witnessing/ evidence
witnessing
This work is, in part, a document (through fieldnotes, memories, in my body) of the activities, conversations, sounds and textures that took place with and around me as I produced the rubbings (and in the three days of preparatory field observation that I made the week prior). They are about the events and dialogues that I witnessed (as observer and participant) over the course of those four days. Discussions with teacher-participants, conversations that I overheard, interactions that I caught out of the corner of my eye standing propped on a chair rubbing the bulbous rusted hinge of Betty’s heavy classroom door. Here is a partial list, excerpted from fieldnotes, of some of what I witnessed in my days at Bronx Humanities:
-Walking the hallway-length of the school with Michelle on my first visit. Ducking into each classroom so that she could introduce me to teachers and school staff.
-Whispered conversations with Betty as she recounted a difficult year at the school. She explained that the principal had had a baby in January and while she had previously announced an 8-week maternity leave, she stayed home for five months without any formal communication to the faculty. The assistant principal had also been absent for several months due to illness and a death in the family. Betty told me that she would come home crying most nights. That she was often miserable and that it was probably really hard for her partner to be around her. She said that after next year—what would be her 5th year at a “Title 1” school (a requirement for graduate school loan remission), she wasn’t sure she would continue. She said she wasn’t sure she could be a mother and a teacher or a wife and a teacher or just a happy person and a teacher too.
-Chatting with school faculty and staff as they paused to inquire about what I was doing up on desks, on the floor, wrapping objects with paper. I tried out different answers throughout the day: I’m an artist and I am making artwork as part of my dissertation project. OR I am a researcher studying teacher evaluation and I wanted to spend some time in a school. OR I am making these drawings to show that schools and classrooms are real places with real people in a human scale as opposed number or letter scores, which are abstract, sanitized, and identical, one to the next.
-Kirk, a 30ish straight white male teacher roamed the halls and entered each classroom with tears in his eyes reporting on the supreme court decision, “marriage is legal!”
-Walking with Michelle, Betty, and Aquiles to Dunkin Donuts for lunch on the last day of school. Michelle had a glassy look on her face and wasn’t saying much. After we ordered she turned to us and said “I’m here but I’m really not here.”
-Sarah told me that she had informed the principal that morning that she had accepted a position at another school and would be leaving Bronx Humanities. Over a few hours of cleaning and talking in her classroom, she explained personal circumstances that had made the year challenging—a suicidal friend and the death of her grandfather. She said she had had negative evaluations in the beginning of the year and admitted that her work had suffered due to these life events. But, she said, “The good news is that I really turned things around in the second semester. That’s the good thing and the bad thing, because it makes it hard to leave.”
-Sarah wasn’t the only teacher leaving. I met five other teachers who were all leaving next year (more than 1/3 of the 15 person faculty). The prolonged absence of the principal had made for a particularly difficult year and the teacher exodus seemed to be contagious (Sarah told me for example, that Sue decided to leave after she found out that both Sarah and Taylor were leaving). Learning of all the turnover, the principal had canceled the day’s meetings which were geared towards planning for fall. So everyone was sort of listlessly wandering around—cleaning classrooms, taking down bulletin boards, surveying the empty spaces, passing the time.
-Around 2:30 as Michelle was getting ready to go home, she sat with me and Aquiles in Betty’s room on top of the two teacher desks. Betty came in, joined our huddle and whispered, “Dickie was excessed” (laid off) and started tearing up. I was introduced to Dickie, a man with light brown skin and good jokes on my first day at Bronx Humanities as one of two people who “really keep the school going.” I’m not sure of his title, some kind of dean or attendance counselor. They whispered quietly for a few minutes and then all sat silently, dejected. Michelle said, “You know Betty, you’re going out to celebrate your birthday tonight and don’t let all of this ruin it. I’m going to get my wedding dress fitted tomorrow, and these are good, exciting things. We have lives outside of this place and we’re going to be OK.” After a couple of beats I said, “I can only imagine what an emotional day this is. And I want to say thank you for welcoming me in during this time and at the same time apologize for invading your space while you all have so much on your minds.” Aquiles said, “Actually, I think it’s been good for me. It’s kind of a distraction and it’s also affirming. Like you are coming from the outside and you get what we’re saying, we’re not crazy!” Then Michelle turned to me and said, “I think maybe it’s good you’re here and that you’re seeing all of this.” And it sounded to me like what someone in the midst of a humanitarian crisis might say to a photographer or journalist—bear witness to this and share it! Testify to the fact that this all really happened. Tell our story. It was a brief moment but I felt a trust between us and a great sense of responsibility—being let in to the world of their school and into the thick of messy emotions. Not the anger or righteousness of critiquing the school/ system/ policies from a distance, but the sad confusion of sitting in the middle of the muck, before you can even make sense.
These vignettes and phrases of recorded dialogue, like the rubbings, are textured and bumpy, and in particular and evocative ways, they shape the stakes of my multimodal data. They add shade and depth to other teacher stories about managing school relationships and emotional work, about the face of exhaustion, and their personal and professional commitments.
Some of these notes are like the color of the day—the passage of marriage equality, Sarah’s personal issues. But other parts, like the wave of staff resignations and Betty’s questions about her future career, have thick and particular backstories. The teacher exodus is woven with the broader problem of teacher attrition and the social location of Bronx Humanities, a transfer school designed to serve students who are labeled “over-age and under-credited” by the state (a designation which is highly raced, cultured, classed, and condescending). The social location of the student body—(98%) of whom are Students of Color, most of whom are poor (85%) and only 20% of whom graduate in four years, combined with the lack of school resources (Sarah explained during our interview that the school began rationing printer paper in April), and the mismatch of expectations and supports for both students and teachers working within a system that is normed to the White, middle-class family[i], are all part of a specific backstory to the significant rates of teacher attrition and turnover, which are disproportionately high at high-poverty schools[ii]. Furthermore, this event in the life of Bronx Humanities suggests multi-layered and enduring after-effects including: the emotional loss of colleagues, friends, mentors, and institutional knowledge; a sense of being “left behind,” for those remaining and some loss of hope about the project of the school; the logistics of hiring and training new teachers, building a new community, trust, and ways of working together. And these consequences demand all kinds of work, time, and resources from administrators, teachers, and students who are already stretched thin.
The rubbings tell some piece of this story:
-The fragility of the thin paper like the tenuous ecosystem of community, especially those shaped by the destructive forces of poverty, racism, and systemic disinvestment
-The lines and creases like wrinkled testimony to the hardships that the school/ teachers/ students/ community have faced and will continue to face
-The act of rubbing imbued with a melancholic nostalgia. The (impossible) effort to preserve “the thing” as it was, while knowing it would change/ is changing/ has already changed
-The play of in/visibility all throughout the artwork and its making—covering over, highlighting small quotidian moments, hard to read marks, the translucent surface—talking to the teachers’ invisible work. All the issues in and around the staff turnover which are invisible to teacher evaluation frames, and the value Michelle attributed to me “being here…and seeing all of this,” which was perhaps another way of saying, “this (tumult, turnover, toll) feels invisible to the world outside the school,” or “I’m glad you’re here and experiencing it, because there’s no way to put this into words,” or “you/ we must make something of this, get it noticed, make it visible.”
evidence
As scaled representations of Betty’s scissors and rulers, bulletin board and desk chairs, the drawings are a catalogue of the composition of one teacher’s classroom at the close of the 2015 school year. They form an index, like the manifest of a cargo plane—all the items on such and such date. In the de-contextualized a public discourse on schools and teacher work, these images are a form of evidence, proof of what was there (that I was there, and that the objects and spaces were there too). If we can’t quite trust the spectacular display of school letter grades[iii], student test scores[iv], or teacher rankings[v], then perhaps we can at least believe in these drawings as a catalogue of objects. Pinning down their presence—their hard copy crinkles and snags refuting the chance of behind-the-scenes (digital or political) manipulation. And they convey a different sort of information than the typewritten list—for we can imagine our fingers into the slightly shrunken oblong handles of her scissors—the drawings locate shape, scale and texture.
The images overlap in intentions and aesthetics with other genres of rubbings—the nostalgic imprints of the gravestone rubbings of family historians; the documentary drives of 19th century Japanese fisherman recording their catch with Gyotaku or hand-pressed monoprints; the indexical quality of artist, Simryn Gill’s, Caress (2010)—her graphite-rubbed depictions searching out the form of her “Royal Quiet Deluxe,” typewriter from three different angles. In the moments where coarse abstractions meet referential line, the images call to mind surrealist frottage, the “automatic” drawing technique developed by Max Ernst in 1925 to combine textured tracings with hand-drawn marks.
The images conceptually echo other forms of visual evidence as well. In their edited volume on anthropological cinema, Visualizing Anthropology (2005), Grimshaw and Ravetz highlight a modernist split in the ways that anthropologists have engaged with images. Before the roles of fieldworker and theorist were joined, the camera, as they tell it, held prominent place among a greater scientific apparatus employed in the “laboratory of the field.” However, with the Malinowskian revolution[vi] of “modern anthropology,” visual tools were progressively marginalized. “Emphasis was increasingly laid upon direct observation. What the ethnographer saw himself or herself in the field became an ultimate standard of proof. They had after all, uniquely ‘been there.’ (20-21)” The ethnographic directive “to go and see for oneself” located knowledge in the ethnographer’s body and encircled visual representations in a kind of suspicion associated with earlier outmoded forms of anthropology, and a taint of the popular.
The rubbings draw conceptually on both sides of this split. They record the visual conditions and compositions of the field site. They are proof of what was there—the objectivity of the objects lying in three dimensions under glassine. And they are intimately tied up with me, my hands on the crayon- paper- materials, my physical relationship to the classroom artifacts, and my having been there. The imperfections and stray marks, the soft outline that traces the strain of my arms to reach the ceiling-mounted smartboard projector highlight my presence.
As “evidence,” the images also reference an element of the Advance Teacher Evaluation rubric. Accounting for 5% of their “overall rating” (from “ineffective,” to “highly effective”), teachers are invited to submit “artifacts,” of their teaching practice which the United Federation of Teachers (2014) explains to their members as, “items that you as a teacher gather over the course of the school year to illustrate and provide tangible evidence of your best teaching practices.” Seen in this way, the rubbings reference the multiple modes of surveillance that govern school spaces and teacher work in the form of metal detectors, “school safety” personnel, surveillance cameras, the massive documentation of student and teacher data, and policies such as the “Advance Teacher Evaluation System,” that support the exercise of these disciplinary tools[vii]. They are also the product of an outsider’s scrutinizing eye, looking closely at the granular details of teacher space and practice. From this angle of vision, the images (as representative of teacher artifacts) reference the defensive posture of teachers in this moment of neoliberal accountability, the need to document and continually prove their worth and trustworthiness.
[i] These mismatches show up all over the teachers’ images and narratives: in the extra hours of weekly home phone calls that Betty makes to absent student families; in Michelle’s descriptions of students’ home lives coping with demands such as work, parenting, and parole; and in her financial investment in providing snacks for students who can’t stay awake.
[ii] A 2014 school brief from New York City’s Independent Budget Office reports that 68% of teachers at high-poverty schools leave their first post within five years, while only 52% of teachers at low poverty schools do the same. The numbers regarding attrition reflect a similar spread: 47% of teachers at high-poverty schools leave the system altogether within five years, as opposed to teachers at low-poverty schools, where 34% defect in the same time period.
Retrieved from: http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014teacherdemographics.pdf.
Retrieved from: http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/2014teacherdemographics.pdf.
[iii] Beginning in 2007, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein established a controversial school grading system, where institutions were graded annually from A-F based largely on student test scores. The school grades were heavily critiqued as too simplistic, and largely meaningless. Mayor Bill DeBlasio and Chancellor, Carmen Fariña abolished the letter grades in 2014.
[iv] Test scores in New York City and elsewhere have famously been inflated with easier more predictable tests or made more difficult with new standards and “cut-scores.” The lack of stability in standards, tests, and methods of scoring from year to year make reliable analysis at the individual or population level impossible to track over time.
[v] The validity and reliability of value-added measurement has been substantively challenged by: Amrein-Beardsley 2014; Darling-Hammond et al. 2012; Rothstein 2010; Rothstein 2011 among others.
[vi] Grimshaw (2001, 21) shares credit for this disciplinary shift with British anthropologist, Alfred Cort Haddon and his 1898 Torres Straits Expedition.
[vii] Teachers who are rated “ineffective” for two consecutive years may be subject to an expedited tenure hearing. As the United Federation of Teachers writes in their 2015-16 guide, Advance Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), “At the hearing, teachers will face a presumption of incompetence which they shall have the burden to disprove. Failure to disprove the presumption may lead to the teacher’s termination, absent extraordinary circumstances.”
