Walk with me

[The following excerpt is taken from my research journal, May 9, 2008]

Walk with me down the streets of Pinetown and Durban, KwaZulu Natal, a province more impacted by the AIDS epidemic than any other in the world, and you will see rolling hills, lush foliage, birds, monkeys and other wildlife unimaginable to American or Canadian suburban life. In a small suburb of Durban, Pinetown houses the University of KwaZulu Natal’s Edgewood campus, which is dedicated entirely to the Faculty of Education. Here, pre-service teachers linger around the scenic sidewalks, resting places, dining areas and classrooms. Students are predominately black, Indian, and a few whites of European descent. The Centre for Visual Methodologies is one room housed in the Department of Language, Literacies, Media and Drama Education in Wing 5, 2nd floor. With a back view of campus, a conference table, part-time administrator/ coordinator, and three available computer stations, the centre serves as a quasi-storage facility of media collected by researchers/students/professors involved in the projects, programs, and publications that have resulted from years of arts-based methodologies addressing the HIV/AIDS crises confronting their community, the communities of their students, and the greater region of KwaZulu Natal. Additionally, this space provides the forum for impromptu meetings, workshops, and important student advisement.

As I walk the hallways in between work sessions, I am confronted by waves of discourse reentering my mind from prior discussions with my colleagues here. I hear them saying: "...one out of four students in the rural schools are infected with HIV;" "...infection statistics of university students are unknown, though we’ve lost students every semester to AIDS;" "...violence affects all of us (professors, students, staff, and community members")"...my son was nearly beaten to death...my son was carjacked, but managed to escape...my son was mugged and forced to go to an ATM and withdrawal 1000Rand (about $125US)" "...carjackings, muggings, physical and sexual assaults are prevalent;" "...the violence here is just apart of everyday life." Their messages and urgent inflections resonate within me after my first few days here. Just as AIDS affects all of us, my new friends tell me, we are all affected by violent crime. Obfuscated by this living history of criminality, I inquire as to what or who they believe to be the driving forces, upon which many hesitantly reveal the culprits: the poor, the desperate, and the angered who lack education and social mobility.

Though many western countries share similar racial and class disparities, South Africa faces a political economy of contradictions. Despite the rise of a post-apartheid black government and the implementation of radical affirmative action policies, unemployment rates primarily affecting black males remain a staggering 23%, down 7.4% in the prior five years as of the government’s September 2007 Labor Force Survey (See page 10 of: http://www.statssa.gov.za/PublicationsHTML/P0210September2007/html/P0210September2007.html). All of this I am learning behind cement brick walls - some lined with electrified wiring, barbwire, motorized gates, caged windows, and two or more guard dogs peering through the spaces in between. These are the uncertain realities of a culture of fear walking with me down the streets and university hallways of KwaZulu Natal.

Why are you becoming a teacher?

Dear Knowledge Producers:

One of the first questions I ask a group of education students is about their intentions. Please review the questions below and post your response on this blog:

1. Why are you becoming a teacher? When did you first know that you will become a teacher? What grade level(s) do you want to teach? Why? Where do you want to teach? Why?

2. Why did you get involved with Dr. Stuart's project, "Youth as Knowledge Producers"? How has your involvement in this program helped you achieve your goals of becoming a teacher?

UNICEF Outreach to Zimbabwe children orphaned by HIV AIDS

Sojourn to South Africa

Next month, I will have the privilege of joining Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jean Stewart in South Africa to work with their students at the University of KwaZulu Natal. Just below this paragraph is an open letter to the students. I invite you to post commentary and get involved in what I hope to be one of many online community forums that result from this project and sojourn.

To read more about the Centre for Visual Methodologies and Social Change, please visit their website: http://cvm.za.org/


Dear Knowledge Producers:

Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Stewart have told me many great things about your group and I have had the privilege of viewing your photos and videos brought to Canada, where I study with Dr. Mitchell. I am very excited to have the opportunity to meet all of you and share my teaching experience and ideas about creating an online community.

One way we can build an online community is by creating blogs. Blogs are online journals. Researchers that have written about blogs say "Bloggers are driven to document their lives, provide commentary and opinions, express deeply felt emotions, articulate ideas through writing, and form and maintain community forums" (Nardi et al, 2004, p. 41). One of the most important strategies of becoming a reflective and intentional teacher involves documenting our lives as teachers, expressing our opinions, emotions, and ideas through writing.

Blogs offer a unique online format that allows us to create our own personal online space with the ability to limit who can access and read our blog, post comments on our blog, and network other resources and information that may be beneficial to our ever-evolving teaching practices. Perhaps most importantly, blogging offers us teachers and soon-to-be teachers a communal outlet to network and develop existing relationships with our colleagues as well as build new relationships with educators in our own school districts, universities, and other world communities. With access to the Internet, we can adopt and utilize this free online space from websites like Blogger.com, WordPress.com, and LiveJournal.com. Using our own experiences of blogging, we can create the same learning experiences for our students as online access and computers are made available to them.

My objective as I work with you is to extend the activities and purposes of your work with Dr. Jean Stewart and Dr. Claudia Mitchell by helping you upload your photos, video productions, and reflections to a community blog that we'll create together. As we create this blog, you may also create your own blogs and continue to build upon the group experiences we share. Additionally, we will explore other social networking websites, video blogs, online games, and so on. I am very excited to meet all of you and look forward to our time together!

Yours truly,
John


Reference:
Nardi, B. A., Schiano, D. J., Gumbrecht, M. and Swartz, L. (2004, December). Why we blog. Communications of the ACM, 47 (12). pp. 41-46.

How can we live?

"How can we live?" is composed and performed by spoken word poet Award, whose profile can be viewed on Poetryclick.com. Award is depicted here.



Marcus Banks (2001) writes in his chapter "Encountering the visual" that "social researchers need to be aware of their own influences and orientations before they attempt to do research on the visual and visible aspects of culture and social life" (p. 13). As I have encountered and reproduced the visual images, still and moving, in this blog - Award's performance is among the most visually saturated with animated graphics, audio effects such as layering his own voice in the lyrical refrains of "How can we live?", and what Banks names "wallpaper shots" of posters, magazine covers, photo stills of AIDS victims, concept maps, demographic maps, charts illustrating statistics and awareness posters. Banks calls wallpaper shots "images that are largely or even completely redundant, either because they merely illustrate what is being said by the reporter or journalist, or because they are simply pleasant but bland images of location providing low-key visual interest as a background to a verbal presentation that is either abstract in nature or temporally remote" (p. 17). Applying Banks textual methods of analysis, online viewers are obligated to question both the mode of production the artist employs and the connotative intentionality of the producer. Assuming the artist and the producer are the same person, further examination is needed. Banks asserts:

"...from the standpoint of the overt intentionality of the images - the very ephemerality of the production as a whole may undercut most if not all attempts to seek deeper meaning. These images are highly contingent upon the circumstances of their production, and are often beamed live or almost live to the viewer, with very little time to consider image content or subsequent editing. Consequently, readings of the internal narrative - that is readings of the text of the image alone, uninformed by any ethnographic investigation into the social relations of such production - are largely unverifiable" (p. 17).

In order to spotlight the driving points - motifs of his lyrics - Award leaves most questions of intentionality up to the viewer - Why was a photograph taken and displayed at a particular point in the video? When? Under what circumstances? Who are the people depicted in certain photographs? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? How else might one represent the theme and motifs of Award's lyrics? (Banks, pp. 15-16). Especially notable are the tables and diagrams that Award presents as scientific representations of knowledge. Banks writes about these particular representations:

"These are techniques used to present information, both concrete and abstract, where spatial arrangement and non-linear order are necessitated and where the inevitable linear sequencing of words is insufficient. Non-indexical and often non-figurative visual representations such as these (that is, images that are not mechanical representations of reality, such as photographs) are common in social science texts and form a sub-category of the overall designissues surrounding the production of academic texts" (p. 23).

While his message is saturated by the symbolic realm of his chosen scientific depictions, the literal meanings are lost to the viewer who cannot determine much of the information displayed in the corresponding graphs and charts, nor are we able to identify the origins, original creators, or further identify a denotative meaning other than that of questioning ourselves: What do we know already regarding the motifs and theme of Award's poem/performance? How can we investigate the scientific information being depicted and referenced in this production? What conscious and unconscious experiences do we connote with the images? What conscious and unconscious experiences does the artist bring to his production? These questions frame a discussion of visual methods, but also questions imbued by media literacy studies that seek to empower viewers, users, and learners to problematize the media they/we encounter. Just as the artist may be problematizing his audience's perspectives on a topic in which there is much information available, but little or not enough concern. Yet, unfortunately, the epilogue/closing credits of Award's YouTube production lists the artist's copyright, website, an image of himself, and a promotion of his book available on Amazon.com and free booklet available for downloading on his personal website. These final frames, while self-promoting, are valued unfortunate by me due to what's missing: more information about his stated cause - How Can We Live with world AIDS issues? Where can we learn more about the visual images and scientific information the artist chose to represent in his production? What web resources does the artist find to be the most useful? What non-profit organizations does the artist support and does he encourage his viewers to support?

Perhaps strikingly different from media productions only a short decade ago contrasted with those today is that the power of new media allows viewers to not merely view the production on a video web posting site such as Youtube.com, but also view its statistics. As of 15:22 EST, the video has been viewed 2,503 times (including 3 times by me). It has been rated 13 times by viewers, all thirteen have rated it 5 out of 5 stars. 7 comments have been posted and 5 links (prior to my linking, which will appear upon this blog posting) have been posted on outside websites. Viewers can also see how many times the links posted on the outside sites have been clicked on to view the film directly from the site. For example, the top clicks the video received was 35 from a Zine site: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/. Viewers also have the option of nominating the video for Honors or adding the video to their "favorites list" from which the friends of viewers can have access to depending on the viewer's personal settings and/or the viewer her/himself can access repeated viewings of the video without conducting a search each log-in. A closer look at the seven comments posted reveals ephemeral nature of the video and its online audience; Comments are limited to 500 characters, limiting comments from longwinded exegeses: Username "intendingtoburn" wrote one year ago "A very challenging poem, it certainly left me with a lot to think about." Username "TLHoward" also wrote one year ago "This is a very moving poem, I have never got so emotional over a poem before. This has made me think." Another user, "callady30," writes one year ago "This poem really touched me deeply... How can we live?" User "Halmtier" asked 11 months ago "Want to change the world? Join our community today! It's fast, friendly, and free! www.rainesrevolution.com 'Average people conquering average problems'." The poet/video producer/Youtube user never responds to his audience, though his future audiences are also able to view prior reactions, respond, add their own or engage in dialogue with each other, which in effect is a video-blog. Treating this video as a case study, further efforts may be made to contact the artist and conduct online, over the phone, or in-person interviews to unpack the overt and subverted intentions of the artist's production, reactions to his viewers' comments and possible location of his larger goals for the work.


Reference:

Banks, Marcus. (2001). Encountering the visual. In Banks, M., Visual Methods in Social Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. pp. 13-48.

Impact of HIV/AIDS on children in Uganda

I think that perhaps the driving question of this short documentary created by "Plan" and addressed by one of its interviewees is how can communication about HIV/AIDS prevention education be developed between adults and children? What are the hurdles that stand between these two groups in local communities and what can organizations like plan do to facilitate this communication?

As I further examine the video, several documentary film methods are evident, such as the inflection/tone of the translator/reporter's voice as she 'gives voice' to the Ugandan children and adults interviewed, reflecting a sympathetic and borderline pitiful expression that connotes the severity of this social issue. Her inflection is corroborated by the music layered in at particular transitions between scenes, interviews and turning points. But distinctly noticeable is the tone of the adult and many of the children interviewees that required no translation, which is one of resolution that seems to connote a collective statement - we have accepted our losses; we are moving forward; Plan has helped pay for schooling, mosquito netting, and medicine; we are grateful; please support this organization. The difficulty of this analysis is critiquing the film methods without connoting value judgments upon the organization(s) that create these films to gain donations and outside support as well as present material evidence of their efforts to support communities struggling against the AIDS epidemic.

Where I see great potential is providing children and adults with the tools to create their own expressions, network within their own communities in the larger country they call home to re-empower themselves by having a greater role in that process. Below are two examples of performances by children, presumably African. Both are produced by non-profits, connoting that little participation beyond performing the poetry involved the children.

Two poems

Mapping the HIV & AIDS Strategic Plan for South Africa

The image displayed here is an excerpted page from the HIV & AIDS and STI Strategic Plan for South Africa, a 159 page document available in PDF to download from the South African government by following this link: http://www.info.gov.za/otherdocs/2007/aidsplan2007/index.html

Unlike the Google Map of South Africa geography, the concept map displayed here denotes the topography of South African policy on addressing HIV/AIDS infection in its region. While the majority of the plan is a series of charts, statistics, diagrams, graphs and graphic organizers, I chose one of two concept maps presented in the work - this particular one appearing on p. 129 entitled Figure 8: Structural Organization [of the "Implementing Agencies"]. Under "10.7 Implementing Agencies," the policy authors write:

"These are mainly provinces, districts, and local authorities. The private sector and NGOs augment the services that are provided by government. The structures for different government departments are designed to suit the specific needs of the departments, but the principle of intergovernmental relations are the same. It is envisaged that at provincial and district level, the same national level structures will be replicated so that the critical mass of human resources for effective programme implementation is in place."

With the use of diffuse language - policy jargon - I'm left wondering whether this paragraph serves as an interpretation of the concept map below it as positioned on the original document as no direct introduction is ever made of the graphic, nor is it clear how one should interpret the map as no rules of engagement are provided either. The map is simply displayed, the authors overt intention of demanding its readers to "make sense of it" including the many acronyms describing the implementing agencies that are defined earlier in the document. In the center of the map is SANAC written in white letters within a red colored box outlined with a thin black border and connecting the majority of other text boxes together. At the top of the map is the only other text box that is filled in by a color other than white, again the type is written in white and centered, "President and Deputy President; Cabinet." Certain boxes remain disconnected, such as "Cabinet Committee Meeting" written in black, white background, black outline - like the major of text boxes are formatted. Located tot he bottom left of black presidential box, the connotative meaning may be that cabinet committee meetings must occur under the direction of the President, Deputy President and Cabinet. Why this text box is floating below, rather than connected to, the presidential box is indeterminable. Connected directly below and bridging the black presidential box to the SANAC red box is the "Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) on AIDS." One possible denotative meaning of the connection bridging red and black boxes is that members of the black box report to the IMC, which reports to the SANAC, having no direct relations with SANAC. While several other examples throughout the map demonstrate the visual ambiguity of a concept map that seeks to denote a structural organization, when interpreting policy documents - the connotative meaning of such work lies in locating its intended audience - other policymakers.

Exploring textual methods in South Africa

View Larger Map


When I first searched for KwaZulu-Natal on Google Maps, I realized how necessary mapping was to my socio-cultural construction of reality. In order to envision this place, I needed to identify its location as the google map interactive image embedded above denotes for this blog's viewers. By clicking on the "Ter" option, I'm able to view the topographical landscape of the area, further imagining its climate, possible vegetation and animal populations. The connotative meanings are plentiful for me as I link my experiences in similar climates and terrains which are limited to North America and Europe and my interactions with animals from this region of Africa, which I have only viewed in captivity in North American zoological parks. But had the map been denotative of demographic information, such as cultural and ethnic groups, gender groups, or populations infected by HIV/AIDs, the connotative meanings I would assign and add to my construction of this micro-world prior to actually having experienced it would differ greatly.

What is it that I seek to know and how are those particular questions born of an instinct of self-preservation? At its roots, I wonder to myself, are my assumptions emerging as they once did visiting inner city high schools during my pre-service teacher experiences? Am I unfolding the imaginary red cape and re-assuming some quasi-white man's burden? What are the details of my intentions in extending my research agenda, applying my teaching experience, and offering support to the research team at the Centre for Visual Methodologies and Social Change?

Below is an excerpt from my research proposal, which outlines the driving questions and research objectives. Though Dr. Mitchell has already read this proposal, those of you who are learning about this project for the first time may benefit from understanding the purpose, activities, and intended outcomes of my journey:

In my research I will explore the possibilities of blogging as a mode of learner praxis, which offers instructors and students a vehicle of reflection, critical cognition, and self-empowerment—one that “approaches individual growth as an active, cooperative, and social process” (Shor, 1992, p. 15). In this way, my research will investigate whether or not blogging transcends formal power dynamics within traditional classroom meetings, which may prevent students from articulating a more comprehensive critical response in class discussions or if their blog postings actually aid their class responses. My research will further examine blogging in this light, questioning the traditional roles of instructor and student in and beyond the university classroom in order to determine if blogs may provide students with substantive, interactive, and critically discursive learning experiences (Farrell, 2005; Harper, 2005; Kellner & Share, 2005; Penrod, 2007; Stiler & Philleo, 2003; West et al, 2006). This study aims to add to a knowledge-base regarding the potential of new media in higher education and, in particular, the uses of blogs as a form of learner praxis, as well as suggest a framework of evaluating and implementing forms of blogging in and beyond the university classroom in order to propose a grounded educational theory incorporating the uses of blogs in higher education.
The proposed project will investigate the effectiveness (as indicated below) of blog constructions and blog postings as an arts-based participatory methodology in collaboration with researchers Dr. Jean Stewart and Dr. Claudia Mitchell, who are currently carrying out their study, “Youth as knowledge producers: Arts-based approaches to HIV and AIDS prevention and education in rural KwaZuLu Natal, South Africa.” Overall, this collaboration will involve scaffolding the current objectives of Dr. Stewart and Dr. Mitchell’s study to engage in “research as social change through an in-depth study of a set of arts-based interventions involving a cohort of beginning teachers, who are themselves young people, and a group of learners and practicing teachers and principals in several rural schools…” Their research objectives are based on three driving questions:
1. How can arts-based methodologies be used with young people in rural schools to create a more youth-focused and learner-centered approach to knowledge production and behavior change in the context of HIV and AIDS?
2. How can a Faculty of Education effectively set up a partnership to work with a cohort of young people who are beginning teachers and a cohort of practicing rural teachers and principals and community health workers to contribute to the support of learner-centered arts-based approaches to addressing HIV and AIDS?
3. What tools and approaches can we use to study the impact of these various arts-based approaches within HIV and AIDS education and prevention interventions?
As a co-investigator and collaborator, my study will extend my previous experience as a teacher educator in the areas of literacy, critical thinking, communication, and cultural studies as well as contribute to my prior study of an undergraduate teacher education course, EDEC 248: Multicultural Education, completed in fall 2007 at McGill University. As the primary instructor of the course, I introduced, implemented and reviewed the construction of student blogs and student blog postings periodically throughout the semester. The objectives of this study (still in progress) include:
• Determining (by method of textual analysis of the questions/prompts posed by the instructor and the written responses posted by students on their individual blogs) clear indicators of critical thinking skills evident in the language of student postings otherwise not communicated in the classroom or other modes of assessment produced in order to meet the course learning objectives;
• Analyzing the articulation of student voices within their blogs by examining the multi-modal elements of student blog constructions that aided their written postings (such as YouTube videos, links to other blogs and/or websites, posting of personal or public photographs, etc.) in order to further empower or negate their informed responses to critical thinking questions posed by the instructor in class discussions;
• Comparing and contrasting the effectiveness and outcomes (quality and quantity of student writing; level of student literacy and critical thinking skills) of traditional course assessments (including an auto-ethnographic essay, a unit plan, and other various in-class smaller assessments) with the effectiveness and outcomes of student blogs. The “effectiveness” and “outcomes” will be qualitatively determined by examining what happens pedagogically, cognitively, and politically to students as they engage in blog construction and creating blog postings that does not appear in their other course assessments.
These objectives reflect an urgent call to educators posed by researchers in new literacy and media studies (Penrod, 2007; Lankshear & Knobel, 2006; Jenkins et al, 2006; Kellner & Share, 2005; Kellner, 1998, 2004; Stiler & Philleo, 2003) to redevelop pedagogical practices that address the activity of teens actively involve in what Jenkins and his team of researchers at MIT name participatory cultures (2006, p. 3). According to their report “Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century,” several elements of participatory culture qualify participatory engagement through uses of new media (Excerpted from Jenkins, p. 3):
• Affiliations: memberships, formal and informal, in online communities centered around various forms of media (such as Friendster, Facebook, message boards, metagaming, game clans, or MySpace)
• Expressions: producing new creative forms (such as digital sampling, skinning and modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction writing, zines, mash-ups)
• Collaborative Problem-solving: working together in teams, formal and informal to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming, spoiling)
• Circulations: shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging)
The four elements noted above contribute to the manifestation of my research objectives, which collectively seek to explore the uses of web blogs in and beyond teacher education classrooms. Due to the participatory and community-based learning skills required by participants related to affiliations, expressions, collaborations, and circulations in online media environments, productions, and digital practices, several distinct possibilities are available to this co-investigation in order to coordinate with Drs. Mitchell and Stewart in their efforts at arts-based methodologies at the Univesrity of KwaZulu-Natal in Edgewood and the Centre for Visual Methodologies and Social Change from which they are affectively engaging their participants—pre-service teachers.

[References cited above available upon request]

If you're unfamiliar with the work of Dr. Henry Jenkins and his work on digital media and learning for the MacArthur Foundation, please take a gander at his recent paper available free online: http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/{7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E}/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Theorizing Dress Stories

On March 6, I had the opportunity to attend Sandra Weber's talk at the McCord Museum, which largely incorporated excerpts from her and Mitchell's chapter on Theorizing Dress Stories from their book, Not just any dress: Narratives of dress, body and identity. Though I was disappointed that new themes and points of discussion were not raised in the talk, I was happy to have had the opportunity to view the photos missing from my copy of the chapter and displayed on PowerPoint slides throughout her presentation. Similar to my earlier posting discussing Mitchell & Weber's work on undressing the teacher, a point of the pedagogy of clothes is made early on this work, highlighting "...clothing is not only a means of identifying oneself as teacher, but is also a pedagogical strategy in itself, a means of commanding respect and order, of establishing a serious working atmosphere, and of exerting control."  The authors further call attention to the significance of clothes:

"Clothes thus mediate the personal and idiosyncratic ways we construct and express and live, in relation to community, as individuals. How we dress provides clues to detailed aspects of ourselves that can be read by people who know u in our particular context - things like personality traits, how we may be feeling that day, how much of a hurry we were in when we got dressed, how much weight we are trying to conceal, what concerns we may have about fitting in or standing out, whether we have an important meeting, who we are trying to impress, and so forth. And always, whatever else they represent, dresses express extensions and connections to the body, and are, we contend, themselves a mode of embodiment."

Poignantly noted, the dresses and other garments on display were embodied by bodyless frames, which produced the appearance of a body wearing the dresses, but in fact were entirely empty save for the wire meshing constructing their pseudo-embodiments. Weber & Mitchell write, "Clothes walk that invisible and ambiguous line between body and not body, mediating our sense of embodiment, and helping us enact or perform our embodied identities, both to our own eyes and to others." Several aspects of the display and Weber's talk made me uncomfortable. My gender identity precluded significant modes of empathy many of the audience members verbally and nonverbally affirmed with the speaker during specific examples of dressing the female body, confronting the imagined sexualized gaze in wardrobe sessions. Though a limited discussion of upper class benefits of women's dresses contrasting middle class options was made, no discussion of working class or poor women was provided. Thus, my mixed class identity again distanced me from the speaker, the audience members and the exhibit. The personal cultural and class values related to materially what one has in order to create a particular image can be disconcerting to those who spent a significant portion of their lives having very little, and when later having acquired more, desires even less. As I walked through the exhibit, I wondered of these "embodiments:" Were they Canadian? Were they white? Were they middle class? Were they religious? Were submissive or dominant women? Were they constantly conscious of what others ascribed to their identity based on the embodiment of their dresses? How did they too ascribe to others particular judgments and conclusions? What dresses did they aspire to? Which did they dismiss, refuse to acknowledge, or could not consider because its perceived counternormative production? As I walked out of the exhibit, I remembered the museum attendant insisting that I pay the usual admission charge of $20, until confirming that I was Dr. Mitchell's student. Who gets to see this exhibit? How is a particular gender, class, and race identity preserved between these walls by a barrier fiscally embodied?

Undressing and redressing the teacher's body

In Chapter Four of Mitchell & Weber's book Beyond Nostalgia, the authors address the phenomena of teacher dress and her/his undressing by way of the student gaze, calling attention to the manner in which many teachers are constantly involved in a body project to construct a particular teacher identity. Mitchell & Weber cite Frigga Haug (1987), to whose work the idea "that the body can be a memory project in and of itself is central" (p. 132). Elaborating further, Mitchell & Weber propose the following arguments:

"Teaching necessarily occurs through the body. Although its presence is obvious, the teacher body is too often neglected, avoided, or taken for granted in an uncritical manner. There seems to be a social taboo that prohibits paying professional attention to the basic aspects of self that we all experience, teachers and non-teachers alike: appearance, dress, body shape, sensation, sensuality, sexuality, physical appearance, pain, desire, fantasy, em

otions. Those fundamentally important aspects of human existence cross the boundaries of race, religion, class, sex, age, and all the "isms" we use to identify ourselves in various milieus. However, the way the body and its various features are conceptualized, manifested, interpreted, and lived depends very much on prevailing cultural norms. Are teachers thought to be exempt from all of this? Is the body not essential to both our basic sense of self and our teaching identity and practice? Crucial to self-study, the body provides vital information on who we were and who we have become. In the words of theorist, Roland Barthes, "What I hide by my language, 

my body utters" (1978, p. 45). 

In the following passage, I will further examine these theories as the apply to my own experiences as a teacher by loosely following the guidelines for a teacher body-pho

to essay given in Box 4.3 on p. 141-142 of Mitchell & Weber's chapter. The first photo was taken after I had completed my student teaching practicum. To the student's right is her English teacher and my cooperating teacher, dressed in a black dress with pink and read floral designs, a red necklace, wearing round wire-rim glasses, a red designer necklace, hair cut short, gesturing with a proud smile toward the camera of her graduating student standing between us. We both are close to the student, with are arms around her back. The student also has one arm positioned a

round Ms. G's shoulder, and the other around my waste. All of us are in good spirits, celebrating this special occasion - dressed formally, scaffolding our already established mode of teacher dress. Wearing a silver tie and black shirt with matching slacks, I sought a style of dress that emulated the sophisticated taste in clothing many of our male students displayed at the Prom the month before graduation. I intended to fit in despite the race and class politics of my positionality that were often positioned as opposite from theirs when such discussions directly encountered those themes. My hair is cut short and my skin is quite pallid. I'm happy, but nervous in this photograph. This nervousness is shared by Richard Johnson (1997) who is later quoted in Mitchell & Weber's article:

"Children need the gift of touch, they need to feel wanted and most of all they need to feel valued. But I'

m male, and part of my teaching code prevents me from showing the care that I often want to show... Recently, while I was on practicum, a young boy came up to me and gave me a hug. I just froze, my mind racing a million miles an hour. Do I hug him back? If I do, is that taking the student-teacher relationship too far? Why shouldn't I be able to give him a hug? Why should I even have to think about all this stuff" (p. 103).

This photograph evokes much of Johnson's emotions for me. But unlike Johnson's description, on this particular evening, much of the physical expression offered by both students and teachers was exceptional in the sense of its occasion. The contextual aspects of this experience are important to note as the comfort level of most participants that evening was likely due to the fact that parents and administrators were present, secu

rity guards, school officials, and friends were there to support the students. Their culminating presence offered students and teachers and opportunity to feel at ease with each other in what would otherwise be an institutional space occupied by a lack of these forms of expression between student and teacher in the halls and spaces beyond the classroom. The regimented training-like character of the faculty and administrators prevented much of this kind expression from occurring on a daily basis in the school, except perhaps among the students themselves who shared close friendships. My cooperating teacher was exceptional in this regard as well, often hugging her students in class, offering "high-5s" and other physical gestures that pointed toward her radical teacher/maternal love for her students. Having a close-nit family, often wearing religious signifiers such as her crucifix, and alluding to her family relationships, 30+ years of marriage, and so on, positioned her body and discussions of body, sexuality, and identity in her advanced placement English classroom as normative, trusted, understood, expected, and/or affirmed. I, like most of her students, regarded this identity as an established but fading norm 

among adult role models in our lives. Like many of the students, I came from single-parent home, was not religious, was unmarried, was closer to their generation than Ms. G's, and shared many other common belief systems and values that counteracted those attached to her identity and reconstructed in her classroom. In this way, I felt more vulnerable to their judgments, not less. There was little distance between my age and theirs, often only six or seven years at most. My familial role might have been one of big brother or older cousin, not father or uncle. 

So when I arrived across town at the high school I was hired, I began to acquire the notion that I had to recreate an adult identity that reified a particular teacher identity - one that ascribed authority under the auspices of such claims as not being "your father, uncle, brother or cousin...I'm your teacher." I was an older leader, one with acquired subject knowledge and pedagogical training. But, I could not escape my body. I was young, skinny, and sensitive to the students' gaze. As students felt more comfortable in my classroom, around November I started getting questions like "what are you?" "Are you white?" "Do you have culture or a cultural background?" I was impressed by their directness and attributed some of the questions to my strong emphasis on works of literature commonly left out of the curriculum due to their racial or cultural themes. Discussions of identity were the first important discussions we had engaged in together. While most of those talks focused on their own identities and those of the literary characters we read about, it was time they address my body as well.  So I testified how I understood my cultural background, my mixed class identity, my geographical ubiquity growing up with a single-parent, and what it meant to be an army-brat. Along with those discussions later came topics of physicality. Always having struggled with genetically inherited back problems, some days were worse than others regarding physical pain as the result of energy, stress, and workload. "What's wrong with your back?" I was often asked. "Why are you hunched over?" Always embarrassed by this mild physical deformity and disability, I had often responded with anger when approached by peers growing up who typically were not as constructive in their questions and comments. But these were my students and behind their curiosity was often a concerned inflection. I realized that in some ways my body was a teachable moment. 

Working with albums

When I was hired for my first teaching job, I was working across town at another high school where I completed my student teaching experience prior to receiving my masters degree in teaching. In the two years prior, I had begun to take and compile photographs of the images that largely contained environments/settings, symbols such as homes, neighborhoods, cars - objects that archived and denoted existence. I think the impetus to photograph my grandparents' home, street signs on their block, etc., were examples of a time and place, but also symbols of things which had remained in place throughout my life despite having moved two dozen times in two dozen years. I needed to manufacture my own regime of truth by creating a discourse with these photographs that accepts and made function my existence as real and true. In a way, these photos sanctioned truth: I have roots; I have cohesion. It's important that I never appear in these photos, that my positioning remains behind the camera. When I review the photo in print or on the computer screen, I relive the experience of taking it; I subsume the rememory of the gaze and reproduce the emotions of sanctity and gratefulness.
Like I had begun photographing my world before teaching, I had started photographing the world in which I taught at University HS, then across town at Technology where I would teach the following two years. When I arrived at THS and began photographing the exterior of the building, hallways, and asked my new colleagues to photograph their empty classrooms, one teacher asked with a suspicious inflection, "why?" I wanted to anticipate the dimensions of my possible classroom assignment, I replied. But, the full truth of my motivation was to archive the world I was entering. Unbeknownst to my colleagues, I was engaging in visual research methods by documenting the setting as if I were making my own personal travel brochure to flip through and psychosocially prepare myself for this new life space. The classroom structures varied almost succinctly with the teachers' pedagogies. Some classrooms contained a traditional scene of student desks arranged in linear rows facing the chalkboard; other rooms split the rows down the center, arranged them horizontally to face each other with a large space down the vertical center of the room where the chalkboard appeared at the top. Some classrooms managed to arrange desks in arcs or concentrically. Equally notable was the placement of the teacher's desk - off to the side; in the back of the room facing the students or facing the wall; in the front of the room, centered; etc. These classroom settings, organizations, and objects compiled a menu of signifiers awaiting my hermeneutic inquiry.

Working with connotative and denotative meanings

Eddie (pseudonym) is sitting in one of my classroom’s newer desks and positions my small digital camera in his right hand as if it were a baseball or a small globe into which he looks, and with the flick of his index finger captures the image of his classmates, teacher, and self. Half of Eddie’s open textbook is exposed along with part of his left leg. He is wearing white cotton sweatpants and a white T-shirt, though only a very small patch of his shirt is exposed on his left shoulder within the frame of the shot. Eddie gives a Mona Lisa smile—one in which his eyes and lips are positioned in a way that you’re not completely sure is an expression of happiness, pain, or torment. Janet sits behind Eddie's left side in a school desk much older and rickety than Eddie's. She grins and leans left against Mariah (who is also grinning), resting her left leg on her right knee, catching her balance on the desktop with her right hand resting on the left corner, poised with a pen in hand pointed directly at the camera. Janet and her classmates all wear blue jeans of similar shading. She stands out from my four other students, wearing a light pink ribbed cotton turtleneck sweater, posing behind her gigantic black leather designer handbag (the width of her torso), and in the closest proximity to another person (Kassandra) than any other people in the photo. Mariah sits to Janet's immediate left, leaning slightly right towards Janet, and slightly away from her teacher (me) who is squatting behind the seated students. Mariah is wearing a black T-shirt with crimson red tubular lining at the cuffs, neck and seams, and matching red writing on the front reading ¡Viva Puerto Rico! written as if it were painted on a wall with an artist’s excited brush strokes. Mariah's right arm reaches across her desktop and her right hand rests on Renee's right arm. Mr. Pascarella (me) grips the back of the desk seats to hold his balance behind the students, wearing a traditional light blue button down ironed cotton shirt and a necktie predominately maroon red with slate blue, ivory, and gray contemporary design. This photo was likely taken in November following a week vacation to Florida due to my unusually tan complexion, as I typically display pallid white skin tone, especially in the late fall and winter months. I am clean shaven, had a recent haircut, and smiling. Renee, just to my left, leans towards me and out from behind Paul who is squatting just in front of her and Mariah's desks, which form an arch facing away from the room’s corner where we are positioned toward the room’s center from which the camera is aimed. Renee wears a cherry red T-shirt and jean jacket, black wire-rim classes, large gold hoop earrings that match Mariah's and Janet's. Renee also wears a gold chain with round hoop in which her name is carved out of a flat gold sheet and hinged on two points in the hoop. Mariah wears an identical necklace with her own name, but the necklace is tucked in her T-shirt, rather than displayed as Renee's. Paul wears an army green long-sleeved cotton T-shirt, with his right sleeve rolled up, bearing his forearm, which faces the camera and is partially positioned on Mariah's desk. His left arm is tucked behind his right, with his left hand gripping the corner of the desk and largely out of sight. Paul wears a silver chain, much longer than Mariah's or Janet's, and completely different in style, with no trinkets or emblems attached. The chain’s links are wide and boxy, linked together in a kind of weave with various weaving patterns. Paul has a mustache, the only male of the three depicted wearing facial hair. Paul wears a Timex digital watch on his right arm facing the camera upside down. Paul's hair is cut short and brushed forward. His desk sits empty in front of him, papers and pen awaiting his use. Paul gives a slight closed lipped smile as opposed to his classmates and teacher, who all expose open lipped smiles bearing the white enamel of their front teeth. Skin tone ranges in shading from darker on the left to lighter on the right from the viewer’s standpoint. Hair color varies little, but color dominates brown to blue, 5:1, the teacher bearing the blue eyes. Behind Paul's head and Renee's left shoulder sits one of two computers that are ten or more years old on a conference table against the adjacent wall. To the left of the computer, adjacent to its left side is the conjoining wall and chalkboard listing class objectives and homework assignments for three different courses I taught in that room. The photo is mounted in a wooden matte black box frame, with matching wooden black matting that funnels forward toward the print. The frame hangs next the front door of my apartment, a signifier of my ephemeral career as a high school English teacher in Newark, NJ, the history of experiences attached to my first year teaching during which this photo was taken, the relationships with the students pictured and not—relationships continued or not since their graduation and my departure from their school. This picture and its positioning in co-location with the front door is an esteem object, highlighting and understating the world it represents from my past and its influence on the daily and long term career decisions I make and have made since leaving that world. This photo is an esteem object because it reminds me of the professional I was in times that I felt de-professionalized by assuming academics and colleagues in my present university experience. It is a collective object, representing ties outside of my family, representative a social, professional, and teaching identity. For this reason, it is also an occupational object and time indicator and is positioned adjacent to a photo in a similar frame of my supervising professor and mentor, Joe.

This form of research may apply to the aesthetic and functional construction of student blogs. My research involves said construction and emanates from the uses of blogs in pedagogical practice with pre-service teachers/undergraduate education majors. If one considers the blog a digital living room, then the position of objects, links, photos, videos, music and so on may reveal denotative and connotative meanings left otherwise unexamined.