As the researcher and teacher in this project, I have had a struggle with the power that comes with each of these roles. Pushing my own interpretations, biases, and knowledge on the viewers of this website makes me feel uncomfortable. Based in this discomfort, two questions emerge for me applicable to my role as researched and teacher. Who am I to decide how data should be understood? Who I am to decide what the viewers/learners should know?

My role in the classroom community is as a head teacher. Several people work with me since this is lab school. In addition to a co-teacher, the community includes graduate assistants, practicum students, fieldwork students, and work study students. Again, I struggle with the power that comes with my role. I often ask myself, how can I interrupt the hierarchy and rethink the relationship between all of us as a community of learners. Through my lens, the development of these relationships cannot exist without the presence of trust and power shifts within the community. Also, within the preschool community, fifteen young children share their thoughts, conflicts, and insights. I believe that the same trust that is between the adults in the community is necessary between the children and adults. In this belief, I am again attempting to challenge the hierarchy and traditional construct of school that exists in the understanding of the social conception of school.

Choosing to describe the context of the Rita Gold Center through the words of my teachers is one decision I made to challenge the usual power dynamic of the head teacher being the first and, sometimes only, voice heard. Both Hema and Anton have worked in the classroom for the past two years. Beginning next year, Hema will be a co-head teacher with me. I believe that by using Hema's and Anton's voices, along with the clips of the community, challenges the traditional poisitoning of the head teacher, placing trust and value in everyone present in the community. My voice appears on this website through writing. I am hoping that I am not at the center; just part of the description. I share my own struggles and discomfort as a means for the viewer to not notice the absence of my video but to understand my choice to rethink the power in teaching and research.

When beginning this research, I instantly considered the audience, assuming that the engagement with the data was most important. To me, this allowed my interpretations, my power, to fall to the wayside. Yet, at the same time, this was an obvious error on my part. The choice of the data presented, how it is edited, the positioning of the photos, choice of words, and sequence of web pages, are all related to my own personal beliefs, assumptions, and understandings. So whether I present the interpretation directly or indirectly through my choice, it exists.

Although I am attempting to rethink how research is presented as well as include the experience of the all the viewers, who I am to assume my data is important enough to spend time with it and learn from it? As I have come to reconcile this inner struggle, I began to realize that the data should just exist. If the viewer chooses to engage with the data, it is through his or her own entry points, experiences, and challenges. In accepting this conception, I believe I became more engaged with the research and all its possibilities.