What Do You Do That Can’t Be Measured?

Book excerpt: What do you do that can’t be measured? In this innovative debut on both the practice and study of critical educators, Restler answers back with radical care. Radical care in teaching and research; radical care as embodied and affective; radical care as justice work up against real and imagined deficits and racial capitalist scarcities. Drawing on a collaborative visual study with New York City public school teachers and her own art-research practice, Victoria Restler offers up a framework for radical care as relational, liberatory and fundamentally immeasurable. Slipping between genres and styles—personal narrative, poetic prose, empirical study, and three multimodal artworks—this book brings old and new traditions in arts-based research into dialogue with scholarship on care, affect studies, and Black Feminisms. The volume is essential reading for scholars and practitioners interested in the study of care, qualitative and arts-based research methodologies, as well as teacher practice and assessment.