Yesterday we frosted and decorated cookies at the digital storytelling project. I was helping one of the kids learn how to use a digital camera that had various nonfunctioning components. One of the girls, a third grader, turned sideways in her chair and said "When is your last day?"
I was thrown off by her question, and so I asked, "What?" She repeated, "When is your last day?" Still looking at her, I paused. After a few seconds I said "...There is no last day." Unsatisfied, she pressed, "When are y'all gonna stop coming?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what the last day is."
And so, all of this raises some very interesting questions for me, as the project co-director and researcher. What I'm doing IS research, so it follows that there should be a conclusion to that research. But given what I'm doing there that is not research-oriented...it just seems strange to conceptualize that there would be a final day. Do the kids need a "last day" for some conceptual organization of what it is that we're doing? This particular girl was most likely asking because they are nearing the end of their school year....But its got me thinking about the nature of the relationships that we've established with each other, and how the kids see us within the larger landscape of their lives.
In terms of the way what I'm learning in this work has become a kind of artifact that I turn over again and again in my head...will there be a last day? I don't think I'll know the answer to that question for a long time.
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