Rubbing the room

Victoria Restler

doi:10.7577/rerm.4113

Abstract

This article describes a visual ethnographic intervention at a New York City public school. The intervention and the images that resulted—a series of life-size red wax rubbings on paper—work in relation to visual discourses and dynamics of contemporary school accountability. In the article, the author situates the images and image-making in the context of her broader multimodal qualitative study on teachers’ invisible labor in urban schools. The author makes sense of this visual ethnographic intervention through a series of three conceptual dyads: witnessing/ evidence; positionality/ art; and intimacy/ “tactile epistemology,” (Marks 2000).

Highlights

I stood perched atop the shiny surface of a student desk—left foot planted on the chair, right leg bent on the attached table, a curl of blue painter’s tape fixing the edge of glassine paper to the flat top of Betty’s seven-foot particle board bookshelf
I wanted to touch and be in touch with the teachers and the spaces and the objects that shape them and shape the stakes of this work. This gut desire for intimacy came in part from the distance I had traveled in the year between
Images like the value-added teacher ratings that were published amid great controversy by media outlets including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal beginning in 2010

Summary

Introduction

I stood perched atop the shiny surface of a student desk—left foot planted on the chair, right leg bent on the attached table, a curl of blue painter’s tape fixing the edge of glassine paper (a translucent tracing paper) to the flat top of Betty’s seven-foot particle board bookshelf. I understand both the project and the rubbings as an assemblage—a relational jumble (Restler, 2017) of human and more-than-human matter—the school spaces and objects, the images, the sensory experience of making them, people and conversations, fieldnotes, later writings and digital collage.

Results

Conclusion