I would like to engage all students, faculty, staff and prospective students with these type of catchy themes.

The virtual advising place should be a space where students, faculty, staff can discuss their concerns, reflect and gain more tools to be successful.

Ordinary Lives; Extraordinary Acts

I found myself taken aback by Emily Dickinson’s quote found in Maya Pindyck’s website

“I’m nobody! Who are You?

Are you—Nobody—too?”

I am reminded of another quote that I hold dear to my heart because it brings memories of someone whom I loved dearly and who was instrumental in my life and the lives of so many but remains an unsung hero. This person is my paternal grandmother. This is the quote:

           “[F]or the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”(George Elliot, Middlemarch, 1872).

Maya Pindyck’s projects on her website spoke to me of ordinary lives that turn into not so ordinary ones by senseless acts of violence. Her project Out of Lezley: Elegy, brought to mind Shawn’s project. I found the eyes in the gouache portraits very telling. It reminded me of Shawn’s self-portrait with a noose around his neck while wearing on an American flag tie and looking straight at his audience with eyes that spoke of the tiredness that an African American male feels while trying to keep it together. The eyes spoke to me of unspeakable pain and hopelessness.

The intersectionality of the written word and images in her Water (Re)marks Reassemble brought a new dimension to a poem I had never read before but somehow these images open a visual image in which I can see the shimmering silvery river running through my fingers. The blue hue of two windows in one of the photographs made me think of a reflection on the water when the sun is low in the horizon and the bluest tinge is reflected back.

Maya Pindyck’s participatory projects, Today I Saw and Light on Sound, remind me of Gordon Matta-Clark’s integration of art and society. These projects revive my desire to make my project participatory by which my project is transformed by the participants.  I can see in Pindyck’s projects how art transforms communities and in turn communities transform art. My question is, do communities transform the artist?

The Language Matters Project calls to mind Amanda’s project and her desire of capturing childhood memories. How much can we capture the memories of those who came before us by the sense of touch? How much of what we communicate or say that is not verbal? How much of our memories are in our sense of touch?

Upon visiting Maya Pindyck’s website, I clicked on the About tab to orient myself before viewing the Projects.  The phrase “ordinary violence” immediately jumped out and shook me. I have never heard or seen this phrase before and the incongruity of it is so upsetting. The subtext of the phrase led me to reflect upon how any violence becomes ordinary. I imagine this happens through any combination of willful ignorance, a person’s refusal to be someone’s ally in humanity, and the self-imposed invisibility of oppression among society.

After looking through the Projects, it seems to me that Pindyck’s work evokes despair and hidden, multi-layered meanings. In her drawings, the many lines and shadows create depth for the human characters. I tend to interpret the animals as a representation of humanity’s less thoughtful, more reptilian-brain based actions, but I’m not sure if this is intended. I see overt violence in the way the red lines of the american flag drip and bleed downward, and I see hidden violence in the unbodied heads obscured with shadow and shading.

 The work entitled Language Matter/s Haptic Readings resonated with me on an emotional level. I thought back to my own map creation, where I am challenged with representing numerical information through visual ways, and I am struck how Pindyck can create movement, sorrow, and an urgency to look deeper by manipulating the paper through burns, paint, tears, and ink.  The poetry that has been heightened with “interference” speaks to individuals obscuring some meaning while highlighting others. Pindyck’s work also invites viewers to engage with the art through multi-sensory, and participatory ways. Some of her art has been created in a way that allows the viewer to engage with the art in a non-traditional sense (walking through a house fitted to feel like a river, community poetry projects, or participatory viewing/creating in Today I Saw). I felt a multi-sensory response when viewing the Governors Island Art Fair photographs. They blended poetry, architecture and visual art in a 3-dimensional participatory space. In some of the pieces, I could almost smell the burning of the paper, or feel the dirtiness of the street-trodden America sign. This “haptic” transformation of the source material informs the consumption of the artwork, encouraging the viewer to have a more visceral reaction then simply reading text or viewing a painted canvas.

Let me know if you can view this.
These are pictures that I think speak better than my voice as of now. I hope to invoke a mood to seek for advice.

Will send from the message board tonight.

Lisa

Victoria Restler was an awesome guest speaker. As a result of her presentation I am even more inspired with my visual arts advisement center.
Shawn, I think of your project and how you are resensitizing your emotions through art to send a message to educators that will view our pieces during Fall 2018 semester. My hope too is that audiences will look at the story that your telling that will bring about change in schools, our families (as parents) and  especially within our communities regardless of race.

When I thnk of an advising center I see a safe place where students, staff, faculty, prospective and readmit students go to discuss issues, concerns, and passions about career and major choices. The faculty go to discuss creative ways to engages students in the class especially those that are struggling with coursework or visually don’t appear to be engaged with the content. These types of students seek for advise about their families, parents, teachers and the school administration that pressure them about completion of a specific career choice and want to know why? This virtual advisement center is a place where students can seek realignment of their career and academic life long goals without influence from others. This place can be for those that just want to hear themselves reason with academic choices they have made.
More to come…

Hello all:

I got confused on my dates. Maya Pindyck is not going to be with us next week; she will be with us the following week, May 2nd. Please look at her website (on syllabus) before our get together with her. I will be speaking with Maya on Monday when she may also suggest some other relevant readings.

Next week, then, we will have our working/discussion session. It’s a bit of an experiment, but this is what I have in mind, riffing a bit off of Amanda’s suggestion a number of weeks ago. You should bring in with you some of the work you’ve been doing (collages, sketches, images etc) and actually think about doing work while we’re in the space together. I thought you could spend the first 45 minutes to an hour actually working on your projects and discussing aspects of those projects with others as the need arises. Then, for the second half of the class, we will meet in small rotating groups of twos and threes to discuss the projects.

How does that sound?

Then Maya will join us on May 2nd. Much like our session with Victoria last Wednesday, Maya will present about her own work during the first 45 min – 1 hour, and then you will discuss your work with her. I hope we can start with those class members who didn’t have a chance to share their work with Victoria.

On May 9th, I will share some of my work with you for the first half of our class, and then we will discuss your projects. On the 16th and the 23rd, we will present our final projects so far, evaluate our course together, and make plans to continue our discussions over the summer and make concrete our plans for our exhibition in the fall.

I wanted to share a few images from my school. Several artist volunteered time to create a mini 5 pointz

school. Enjoy.

Professor Fellner
Arts-based Research
Shawn Brown
4/16/18

Hear Me, See Me, Feel Me
By Shawn Brown
This article brought me to a place of clarity regarding my work. Previously, Professor Fellner made a passing statement saying that “I should think about including art into my dissertation.” After reading this article, it’s imperative that I include the arts into my research interests. In fact, the absence of the arts would be a disservice when sharing counter-narratives of Black males in education. Victoria Restler individualizes the importance and influence of art-based research. She states, “Alongside traditional methods of qualitative research analysis, I created four “bodies of (art)work” as part of making and making sense of my dissertation data and research.” Restler posits that art-based research demands equity within the realm of research methodologies/paradigms. The infusion of art-based research is a core value I have started to develop in my practice. Art was/is considered a less substantive discipline throughout my schooling. I had a hierarchical subconscious valuation of art. My insecurity about this conduit of expression and exploration halted my pursuit of art at a young age. I presently contend with having time for inner reflection and artistic expression. Restler makes a poignant statement that art should “count” just like any other form of research. I must become intentional about the way I structure my research to give voice in different modalities. Regarding my interested in telling counter-narratives of Balck males in education, I consider the stories that I have already heard. I think about how our voices whether through speech or written word have been devalued and created the need for creative alternatives. As Restler states, there are many messages that we must share that are “seeable but not sayable.” Art has a distinct way of giving a person voice power like no other medium. I think of hip-hop and how this genre which now saturates the world was created. It stems from young men of color wanted to share their stories passionately using their own vernacular. They reported the happenings of their time with rhythm and cadence. Within hip-hop culture are the MC (Master of Ceremonies), DJ (Disc Jockey), B-boy (dancer) and Graffiti artist. These are the main components, but there are others. I fell within the artistic component of graffiti art, tagging my name to get a reputation and obtain respect from my peers. Later on becoming intrigued with deejaying, cutting, mixing, and scratching. Each component of hip-hop has a specific job to do regarding conveying a message. Restler speaks of the artwork not explaining the text or vice versa, but having a “job to do.” This task is to evoke, create, or express or subdue something. As I look at the pieces or art and the teacher ratings I am forced to see the humanity in the teachers. I am forced to see them as something more than people with ratings. In my position, I can become consumed with the numerical value that is placed on people and forget their humanity. Stories of teachers struggling with identity, death, and the burdens of life make me consider their humanity before their performance. This verbiage and frame of mind have less value than traditional models of leadership. As much as I would like to assume that I see people first and not numbers, this is not true. The pressures of leadership, especially in a time of privatized schooling, makes this endeavor almost impossible. Public school reductions and the growth of charter schools conflates the pressures a leader must navigate.
I face the daunting task of career ascension or valuing human life. Being seen as a strong leader or being perceived as over-sensitive. I remember a first-year teacher on the brink of imploding. He had left his classroom to cry on a nearby staircase because students had stolen a couple of laptops from his room and he was being held accountable. I was at a crossroads, do I give him a break or write him up for leaving the classroom unattended. Human life or write a disciplinary letter. I had to write it up, but the letter never made it to his file. I never want to be the reason a person takes their life or causes harm to others. The article spoke of a “Teacher, Rigoberto Ruelas who committed suicide following the publication of teachers’ value-added scores in the L.A Times where he was graded, “below average.” Teachers internalize ratings as their entire identity. This gentleman believed this person’s criticisms to be final and true. This is the human side of education that isn’t taught in leadership programs throughout the USA. The soft skills of knowing when feedback may need to be held back. The importance of grace, forgiveness, and unconditional positive reinforcement of teachers. I am not perfect at this, but I understand the place and importance of such training. Though it is 2018, a person’s sexual preference is still used to define a person’s character. Teachers must deal with such challenges in real time, in front of children. Restler recall when, “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.” If his students were to ask him why he was so emotional, could he share why? Openly? If he did, would there be any repercussions in the court of public opinion? Narratives like the two previously mentioned are all too common and listening to these stories through written word will never suffice. The rubbing creates a texture that tells a much stronger story. Restler gives clear expectations about the process and goal of these vignettes. She states, “These 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.” As researchers and educators, we must be willing to deal with the smooth and rough surfaces within education.

I found Victoria Restler’s dissertation and accompanying website incredibly informative and inspiring. I found myself reading her dissertation with fervor because it was so interesting and relevant to me; I was about seventy or eighty pages in before I remembered that I should be exploring the website she created while taking this class last semester.  Obviously, the subject matter of her research resonates with me personally as I am a teacher whose care-work frequently goes unnoticed.

What felt so compelling about Restler’s writing was how personal it felt.  Usually academic writing feels distant and unrelatable.  Hers was honest, understandable, and even creative.  My favorite parts were in “The Digital Assemblage”, the first few paragraphs of each page.  They feel like memoir or even poetry.  For example, the beginning of the “research in helvetica” page is so beautiful and evocative:

The pale gray surface like molded glass, tight cross-hatches and the vaguest sense of a prism—pale pinks and blues if you let your eyes soften. The vertical “I” of the cursor blinking in time, waiting as if tapping toes, and then almost at once—sounds and letters. The soundtrack of fingers on keys, the emphatic note of the space bar. Words seem to appear magically on the screen, and as I watch, I find myself keeping pace, willing the type to keep up with the sound. A sense of relief in the moments where the visual and aural words are in sync—so many, perspectives, study, and a bit of agitation when the cursor falls behind or when the red underline announces a typo—gflancing, direcytions, obliques, extanding. There’s a game in the watching, a competition between eye and ear. My two pointer fingers hunting and pecking for the keys, not quite fast enough.

This type of writing does not just exist in Restler’s website–it is also sprinkled throughout her dissertation. (Specifically it can be seen on pages 24 – 26 when she describes “some of the perspectives and experiences that orient [her] to this work”.) I find this procedural, experiential type of reflection very inspiring, in that I wonder how I could apply it to my own work for this class.  I have been filming myself making collages, but I wonder if I could “transcribe” what I “see” in those videos as a method of reflection on the creation process.  Restler even used this description technique when the piece wasn’t a video. She described (and coded/catalogued) what she saw in each art piece to find overarching themes.  That is also something I could try with my project–describe what I see in each of my collages.  I like the idea of presenting my work (and writing?) in website format, as well.

Overall, the biggest source of inspiration I took from Restler’s work wasn’t methodological, but conceptual.  In the first chapter of her dissertation she laid out every aspect of her project, her conceptual frameworks, and her research questions. And while I assume this is a specific requirement for the dissertation, I do think knowing those things are important. For instance, have I really asked myself why I am doing this collage project? What do I hope to accomplish? What are my specific research methods? What frameworks am I using?  What questions am I hoping to answer?

And the last, most important, question of all: Is this project about Jack, or is it about me?