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.
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.
