Countervisualities of care: re-visualizing teacher labor

ABSTRACT

Images of teacher evaluation (and teacher value) represented through scores, which are plotted on charts and widely reported, have had a profound impact on how society views teachers’ contributions, capacities, and worth and have, in turn, influenced school policies and practices. Drawing on a broader multimodal study, this article opens up a conversation about teachers’ caring labor in dialogue with contemporary policies and controlling images (Collins, P. H. 1991. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.) of neoliberal accountability. Working with a group of New York City public school teacher/activists, my research explores teachers’ experiences of value-added assessment policies and the substantial work they do that remains invisible to evaluation metrics, policies, and wider publics.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical pedagogies
• teachers/educators
• intersectionality
• hypermedia and visual methods
• neoliberalism
• embodiment

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Victoria Restler is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, educator and Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at Rhode Island College where she Directs the Youth Development Master’s Program. Her multimodal study, Re-visualizing Care: Teachers’ Invisible Labor in Neoliberal Times received the 2018 Outstanding Dissertation Award from AERA’s Arts Based Educational Research group.

Notes

1 In this article I use labels such as ‘low wealth,’ and ‘poor and working class,’ often in conjunction with racial descriptors such as ‘Black and Brown’ to describe young people who have limited financial resources. And yet, in conducting research that seeks to disrupt the stigma these youth face, I realize that these terms are themselves stigmatizing. A primary objective of my work is to write against labels and offer new, more complex angles of vision onto the images and worlds of these young people. We need new, better words for describing and contextualizing interlocking systems of prejudice, racism, and poverty.

2 Following Ginwright (2016), I refer to the participants as ‘teacher/activists’ to highlight their multifaceted work and ‘blur boundaries’ between these professional activities.

3 I use the descriptor ‘radical’ because of the teachers’ affiliations with the New York Collective of Radical Educators. The word is meant to broadly connote the teachers’ critical stances towards education policy and practice.

4 I capitalize the racial descriptors ‘Black’ and ‘Brown’ while printing ‘white’ in lower case in an effort to raise up marginalized racial groups while de-centering whiteness.

5 I have written elsewhere about a ‘spectrum of participation’ in regard to visual research with youth that ranges from Participatory Action Research in which participants are positioned as ‘co-researchers,’ to adult-led studies with ‘adult researchers doing the editing, coding and interpreting.’ This study falls somewhere along the middle of the spectrum. Given the de-centralized and co-constructed organization of ItAGs, all the teacher participants shaped the course of our group inquiry— editing the ‘syllabus’ at our first meeting, sharing out readings and websites, and designing our final arts-based action. And Lee’s role in particular shifted over the course of the study, so that she was sometimes a participant, and at other times a co-researcher.