Data also included drawings and completed crafts as well as journal entries recording the thoughts and emotions resulting from those activities. Music was a wonderful source of both fun and emotional release, and again, activities and results were recorded in my journal. When memories surfaced I'd feel the emotions that went with them all over again—rage, fear, anxiety. This took me by surprise and I'd have to take what was happening to me and write about it in my journal until I could understand it.

Besides keeping the journal, I returned to notes I had taken during the VALTA course. We had been guided to make observations on our work with students: on emotions present in the program, ways the students or I seemed to be comfortable or uncomfortable in our bodies, ways emotions were expressed or rejected, evidence of the effects of violence on learning. We were also to observe ourselves and our reactions. We were challenged to look and reflect on what we saw and what that meant to our programs, ourselves and our students.

My course notes showed plenty of emotion: frustration on the part of a tutor when a student failed to show up for planned tutoring sessions, humiliation felt by an adult referred to the program, relief when intake procedures focused on what participants could do, and shock, on my part, when a student lifted his t-shirt to show horrific scars.

Unwanted Data: Falling Apart and Driving Dangerously

The activities and journaling process seemed to help ground me during my research, and everything was going well—amazingly well—until it came time to complete the writing phase of the work. Suddenly, nothing worked. As I began writing about the gains I'd made from my research, they seemed to be slipping away. Events in both my work and my personal life took time intended for writing. Two weeks after I'd planned to put my material together, I finally began, but lost many hours of work through a computer glitch. My health took a nosedive, first with an infection, then flu.