Photography in Educational Research

Critical reflections from diverse contexts

Susie Miles, Andy Howes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135009168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Photography in education involves the use of photographs to engage research participants in representing and reflecting upon their own experiences. This book explores how photographic images can be used in a range of educational settings in different cultural contexts, as a method of facilitating communication and reflection on significant issues in people's lives. It considers the opportunities that are created through the use of photography as a visual research method, and addresses fundamental issues about identity, representation, participation and power which underlie participatory practice.

Bringing together a variety of international contributors, chapters describe and reflect on experiences of using photography, situating them in a critical framework to provoke informed applications of these processes. The collection adopts a broad view of education, considering voices of people of different ages who are at various stages on their educational journey, or who have diverse perspectives on their educational experience: young British Muslims, trainee science teachers, audiologists, teachers of deaf children, mobile teacher educators working in conflict zones, young people with disabilities, community workers and school students, in countries as diverse as Australia, Burma, Cyprus, England, Ethiopia, Kenya, the United States and Sudan.

Photography in Educational Research will be key reading for educational researchers, postgraduate students studying research methods and ethics, tutors working in higher education, and individual practitioners and teams within schools interested in young people's voices, ethnicity, mental health, global citizenship and school development.

1 Representation and exploitation Using photography to explore education

Andy Howes

Susie Miles

DOI: 10.4324/9780203740316-1

Photographic images are increasingly present in everyday life, as a medium of social interaction and commentary. It is, therefore, unsurprising that they are now widely taken up in the field of education and educational research. In relation to social policy and practice, there has been an increasing tendency towards more consultation and broader engagement, and in the justification of local, national and international social policy initiatives through voice, participation and service user involvement. Images are frequently drawn upon within such processes.

This book is an exploration of the opportunity, and the messiness, that this exciting methodological development has created. It addresses fundamental issues about identity, representation, participation and power which underlie participatory practice, and more broadly, educational practice. All of this work is new, with the authors describing and reflecting critically on their experience in a wide range of contexts, involving people at different stages on their educational journey, differently located in relation to educational systems and institutions. We aim to situate these reflections in a useful framework which will serve to provoke other informed, considered applications of these powerful processes.

In a long tradition of participative research, work with images in education problematizes traditional divisions and distinctions between researchers and ‘the researched’, by reorienting the ‘subjects’ of research as active research agents in their own right. The critical accounts included here represent a variety of fields and disciplines, including indigenous studies, international development, health, deafness, disability, teacher education, educational research, and school-based enquiry. Some of the accounts represent interconnections between different disciplines, including anthropology, visual arts, geography, and sociology.

In this introduction, we offer a framework and a language which will be helpful to other researchers and educators as they explore and critically engage with photography. The research presented here is innovative, exploratory and potentially ground-breaking, and none of the accounts have been published in any other format before. We have deliberately sought to present a series of fresh accounts, building on earlier approaches to participatory photography, and in order to provide a platform on which others can build. Some of the accounts are by authors experienced in image-based research methodologies, while others represent the learning journeys of researchers experimenting with these approaches in their own professional or research context. Each of them engages with one or more of the research questions which guided the construction of this text:

• How can photography be used to engage with power and difference in educational research?
• How can photography be used to explore places, spaces and relationships in education/educational settings?
• How can photography be used to enquire into educational experiences?

Underpinning each of the accounts, however, is an educational purpose. The purpose of this book as a whole is educational: we aim to stimulate critical reflection on the issues involved in work with images. In addition, each author is giving an account of an educational process; but the accounts are differently positioned within the field of education, and the educational purpose in each is different. In order to think more clearly about these differences, and to draw some conclusions from the diversity represented, it is important to consider the many and various meanings that attach to the idea of education. As with many aspects of social life, the lens we look through very much influences what we see. We identify four possible educational lenses, each informed by and linked with a body of educational theory and practice:

1. Education as a personal project: In this view, education is about personal growth and development, through induction into the forms of knowledge that are valued and utilized in society, producing persons that are able to take part in society. It is about the formation of persons, or citizens, and in many contemporary contexts it is seen to flow from the Enlightenment: reason’s challenge to tradition and received wisdom in whatever form. Schooling is seen as a mechanism through which this induction, or training, or learning occurs, with the intention and hope that better educated persons will make a better society. Many new teachers hold this hopeful perspective. This is a widespread view, often taken for granted, and linked to the idea of education as a human right – as if education is a good, independent of context or the form it takes (Rogers and Freiberg, 1994).
2. Education as a market: another dominant view addresses education as a huge industry, with schools, colleges and universities providing a service which is a commodity like any other, the possession of which enables participation in economic and social activity. This education is bought and paid for, whether by the state or by individuals, and the outcomes of education are measureable and comparable. Schools can be held accountable for their performance on these outcomes, and those with interests in the outcomes are seen as having responsibility for making decisions as consumers. In this view, parents’ decisions on the provision of education for their children, for example, is the main mechanism for driving change in the system as a whole. This is a neo-liberal view, resting on the agency of the individual or family to shape the educational market. Many people in schools work on a day-to-day basis within a reality that is heavily shaped by this view (Chubb and Moe, 1998).
3. Education as exploitation: Others see education not as a route to changing society, but rather leading to the reproduction of society from generation to generation, and ask how this can be, if education entails transformation and development. They may point to the dominance of knowledge transfer as a mode of education, which places the person to be educated metaphorically at the feet of the teacher, the one who knows and whose knowledge is to be shared. They notice that this is a relationship of power, so that schools represent an exercise of power. They notice that those who are most favoured in society are in the best position to benefit from schooling, and see schooling as a sorting mechanism, passing a few and failing many, but essentially highly conservative in the effect it has in society. Exclusion and marginalization are intrinsic to the educational process, but that fact is deliberately obscured from view (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990).
4. Education as liberation: There is another view of education, which foregrounds community and society, rather than the individual. In this view, education is about expanding awareness and understanding in community, and it contains the possibilities of transformation of community. Education is not about sorting or allocation of persons to appropriate trajectories, in this view, but about the possibilities of growth at the level of communities; it involves the growth of critical engagement with existing realities, by people acting collaboratively. Education is concerned with acknowledgement of the knowledge and practice which exists in community, and with connecting that practice into broader networks of social action and change (González et al., 2013).

Two dimensions run through these four accounts: reproduction-transformation, and individual-community (see Figure 1.1).

The problem of social justice in education stems from the fact that in practice, systems of schooling are far more effective at reproducing existing inequity than they are at transforming societies. Reading from the community-transformative perspective, education in practice is often essentially a mechanism of exploitation. The enlightenment model of education as a personal transformative project, so neutral at first glance, is also stolidly individualist, and within it lies the seed of an individualistic, competitive process. This competition has found a mechanism in the market, in the industrialization of the education sector, and in the construction of education as commodity through a focus on measurability. Exploitation is sustained by power over representation and through relations of domination, and as Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) have shown, through misrecognition of these relations by people who are subject to that exploitation.

Figure 1.1 The purposes of education: Four perspectives

If education is a process of reproduction sustained by misrecognition, then it is small wonder that photography has come to be understood as a potentially powerful and critical approach to researching education. For photography begs many questions about images and representations: who constructs them, how they are constructed, and how they are distributed and interpreted.

Various elements of this structural critique are apparent in the chapters that follow, because being involved in the complex social, economic practice of education for most people involves naïve hope, pragmatism, critical theory and a commitment to social justice, in various measures and at different times. This relates to another view on the possibilities for engagement in education, espoused by Gerald Grace (1994): the concept of ‘complex hope’. The aspiration of the authors in this book, not always fully accounted for or lived out, is towards an ethical, lived educational process, both within the research with which they are involved, and as an end towards which that research is directed. They express the need for two directions of engagement: on the one hand, towards deconstruction and critical pedagogy, and on the other, towards relationships of transformation and the revaluing of community. The three sections of the book each represent a different emphasis on these directions.

From a social justice perspective, considerations of the purpose and approach to research constitute a fundamental framework for work with photography; we find this more helpful than a narrow consideration of ethics, and we pursue this in the next section, with reference to some of our previous work, and that of others in the field. Then it is useful briefly to trace the roots of photography in education, referencing also some of our own involvement in related research, practice and teaching. To complete this introduction, we outline the shape of the book, and the sections around which the book is organized, in order to connect, compare and complement the work of different authors in different contexts.

Ethics, power and image-based research

To the extent that issues of social justice are at the heart of education, then they address the educational researcher too, and the purposes of her or his research. What is needed is a framework for engaging critically with processes and outcomes of educational research in a way that stimulates reflection on how these are positioned and how they contribute to or challenge injustices, and therefore on what the subsequent actions might be. As a starting point, we borrow a list of ‘tasks in which critical analysis (and the critical analyst) in education must engage’ framed by Apple et al. (2010, pp. 5–6). A test of any educational research process concerns its contribution to such engagement.

First, critical analysis must ‘bear witness to negativity. That is, one of its primary functions is to illuminate the ways in which educational institutions, policies and practices are connected to the relations of exploitation and domination – and to struggles against such relations – in the larger society’ (p. 5). Apple’s use of the terms exploitation and domination points to ‘structures and processes that Nancy Fraser (1997) refers to as a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition’ (p. 5). Redistribution is concerned with injustice rooted in exploitation, whereas recognition addresses the injustice that arises through domination.

Working with photography in education can be situated within this analysis, though it is rarely framed in this way. The more usual approach is by way of the notion of ‘participation’. Images are seen as a way of closing the gap between the researcher and the researched, by facilitating participation in the production, or perhaps the analysis of data. This is the main sense of the intr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Representation and exploitation: Using photography to explore education—ANDY HOWES AND SUSIE MILES
• PART I Seeing the invisible
• PART II Reflecting on pedagogy
• PART III Articulating experience and challenging assumptions
• Index