Visual Research Methods in Educational Research

Julianne Moss, Barbara Pini, Julianne Moss, Barbara Pini

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137447357
• Argomento: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoria: Soziologie

Have you noticed there is a burgeoning take up of visual research in education? Are you considering using visual research as part of your next research project or revitalising your research methods course? For researchers who are new to the field of VRMs in education there is little critical literature on the subject. This book addresses the gap in the literature and brings together some of the leading educational researchers engaging and reflecting on the visual from Australia, the UK and Canada. Encapsulated in a single volume, this book sets out theoretically grounded discussions of the possibilities and challenges of the approach for educational researchers around four key themes: images of schooling, performing pedagogy, power and representation and ethical issues in educational research.

1

Introduction

Julianne Moss and Barbara Pini

One more book on visual research

In recent years there has been a burgeoning uptake of visual research in the social sciences. The interest is also highly visible in the field of education. In 2011, Margolis and Pauwels published the first handbook on visual methods. The handbook articulated both the growth of the field in recent years and also the diversity of disciplines that are engaged in the production of research that loosely falls under the signature of visual research. So the question we ask is why another book on visual research and why a focus on education? Is there anything new? Or is this the same old? How can a critical focus and a new contribution to visual research methods be established in a single volume?

Overall, there is very little academic literature on the subject of visual research methods in education. In particular, there is an absence of theoretically grounded discussions of the possibilities and challenges of the approach for educational researchers. This book addresses the gap in the literature and brings together some of the leading educational researchers writing on the subject. Rather than offering a ‘how to’ approach to the method, the authors will use their own experience of engaging visual sources to address some of the complex epistemological and methodological questions which may come to the fore in visual research.

One of the key issues for the uptake of visual research methods (VRMs) in educational research is the way that the field of education has both embraced VRMs yet uses multiple and diverse theoretical perspectives. Education by its very nature is interdisciplinary and nests its theoretical orientations largely within the social sciences. For researchers who are new to the field of VRMs in education there is little literature that explains, weaves together and supports critical discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of diverse interdisciplinary practices used in the uptake of VRMs in education. One self-evident but overlooked issue is that VRMs (as the name suggests) requires an understanding of the visual, visual studies and visual culture. Gillian Rose (2013), a seminal contributor to the field of VRMs, has argued that a lack of understanding in this regard by visual researchers is delimiting the field and is a barrier to understanding how our knowledge of the relationships between the production of knowledge and the production of knowledge by other social groups is emerging in the second decade of the 21st century.

Rather than merely fetishise a collection of case studies that use VRMs, the chapters in the book are selected to trace contemporary debates about the visual in educational research. We are therefore arguing that, given the intense interest in the adoption of VRMs in education, it is now timely to closely analyse the contribution made by educational researchers. As editors, we

•organise thematically the collection of research studies according to four key issues for VRM;

•evaluate the interrelationship of these approaches with visual cultural studies more broadly; and

•analyse the representations of the politics and practices of VRMs to provide a well-needed critical perspective on the contribution of VRMs in educational research, asking what we can take from the new and the old.

This approach affords our publication a unique space in the education and social science literature. As Rose (2013) asks us in the conclusion to her recent paper: Are social science researchers in fact doing anything different from what is occurring in visual culture, or is what is going on in VRMs characteristic of a broader convergence happening in the field of social science knowledge production? These meta issues of knowledge production will unfold in our volume as they relate to educational research.

The editors and authors in this book are researchers who, for some time, have been connected to the field of education, but in differing ways. The book does not focus solely on photography, as visual methods are more than that. The contributors were selected for their working knowledge of social theory and action, and for the points of difference we could see visible in the ‘look’ of their work. A common thread in the fourteen chapters is the deep reflexivity that is engaged by the authors. As Lather (2014) states, the reflexivity does not, however, assume ‘a modernist self, transparent methods, and reflexivity as a “too easy” solution to whatever problems might arise’ (p. 8). As editors, we have been both equally captured and caught by the field, and although we have differing disciplinary backgrounds, we are tied through shared concerns for the continuing development of the field of VRMs in education.

Despite the burgeoning publications in visual research from any number of perspectives, there is a continuing need to read the field through a critical consciousness that both celebrates what has gone on in education and questions what has been done and what is yet to be done in contemporary social science research and education in particular. Rather than gesturing towards a paradigmatic slice that understands the visual in educational research as limited to photography and participatory approaches, and has little to say about or speak back to educational policy and practice, we aim to illustrate, through the breadth of chapters, the innovative work that has been achieved in the last decade that keeps critical conversations to the fore. The book is intended to have a diverse audience. The chapters will be of benefit to researchers and policy makers, but also those who may be new to the field of research in education.

As Australian editors, we are accustomed to reviewing the field from the landscapes that are above us in the south. The spatial affordances of scholarship and the temporal nature of work, cliqued as it may be, are very much about what it means to become a researcher ‘down under’. We are taught through our graduate years to look out and across bodies of scholarship, research and policy. Increasingly, our Australian education faculties are situated as part of larger social science structures, such as colleges and mega faculties. Further, the higher education sector in Australian is like those elsewhere – globalised and engrossed in all things hybrid, technical and less humanised. Yet our work in education remains in communities, in schools and hyper-real systems where impact is less and less measured by the human touch or in the experiences that are educative.

Editing with the ‘signature method’ in mind

What can be offered in a short anthology of chapters from authors who are currently working in Anglophone contexts such as Australia, Hong Kong, Canada, the USA and the UK could be interpreted as a highly myopic method. To explain our method we have done some borrowing from Agamben (2009), the well-known contemporary Italian philosopher. We take our known limitation of the selection of contexts as read and are suggesting that while handbooks and publications specific to photography, participatory approaches, the use of film, media and the like have proliferated in recent years, the signature that each researcher presents in this book carefully considers the ‘look’ and mode of visual research. Education in the global world indeed has a ‘look’. It is increasingly codified, and practices appear in Anglophone words as ‘look – alike’, despite the vastly differing geographical and cultural nuances of place and social sites that situate education and schooling.

In his celebrated work, The Signature of All Things on Method, Agamben (2009) introduces us to the philosophy of signatures. Academic scholarship, like art, is readily identified by the author or creator. Academics, however, are rarely praised for their artistry or the ‘look’ that they bring to knowledge. In this book, the authors have taken a distinctive approach to their analysis and framework and reveal something of their ‘look’ and ‘signature’ to visual research. As Agamben has illustrated for us in his ‘theory of signatures’, ‘the paradigm of signatures is further complicated’ (2009, p. 38). Signatures etymologically can be connected to the act of signing a document. In Latin, signare also means ‘to coin’ (2009, p. 38), and for many centuries the signature was impressed as a seal on a letter. It is only later, as Agamben reveals, that ‘the signature decisively changes our relation to the object as well as its function in society’ (Agamben 2009, p. 40). In sum, for Agamben,

a signature does not merely express a semiotic relation between signans and a signatum; rather it is what – insisting on this relation without coinciding with it – displaces and moves it to another domain, thus positioning it in a new network of pragmatic and hermeneutic relations. (2009, p. 40)

Thus in the context of a small work which is not a handbook, the signature of the authors and their approach to visual research in education are developed to demonstrate an effective resolution for the field of education. Through the author’s selection of problem and visual method(s), visual research is re-positioned with an educative signature that critically reviews the approach taken to VRMs. We are proposing that visual research methods likewise are part of a new network of pragmatic and hermeneutic relations in educational research, but as a developing method we have much to learn from the new and the old. What follows is an overview of what each of the chapter authors have signed off for us: thirteen chapters that we have organised into four parts and bookended by an introduction and conclusion.

Overview of the chapters

Part I is titled ‘Images of Schooling: Representations and Historical Accounts’. In this section, three groups of authors develop accounts that capture moments in time and engage with disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogues. McLeod, Goad, Willis and Darian-Smith, drawing on an interdisciplinary study of the history of school design and innovations in pedagogy, explore the socio-spatial arrangements of schools and classrooms as a focus for visual analysis. As with a number of chapters in the book, we get access to knowing more about recent large-scale studies. The chapter situates the explanation of the visual research from an Australian Research Council (ARC) study which examines how the architecture and design of schools interacts with educational ideas and practices, shaping understandings of the child; the citizen; learning; the natural, aesthetic and built environments; and the social world. The larger study brings together researchers working across the disciplines of architecture, urban planning, history and education in order to explore the multi-layered histories and interactions between innovations in school design, educational reforms and pedagogies, attending to the socio-spatial, aesthetic, built and natural environments of schools.

Rowe and Margolis examine the use of ‘found object’ images in educational research. They introduce the key questions of ethics that confront visual researchers. As they note, while privacy rights and rules protecting human subjects make it increasingly difficult to take photographs in schools, there is a wealth of visual data depicting schooling. The chapter provides several search and research strategies for collecting both old and new school images. Details on how to access sites from major online archives and school collections, to eBay and photo shows, tag sales, or swap meets, to online social-networking sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit, or simple Google image searches are described for the reader. The chapter also has a particular take on issues of representation through the introduction of photoforensics – the history of photography and photographic apparatus, styles used by professional and amateur photographers, and the specific development of genre schools. Acknowledging that typically materials are not ‘historic’ until they are more than fifty years old, they provoke us to consider what counts as an historical image in these times and argue that it is valid for visual researchers studying education to use broader definitions that fit their topic.

In the final chapter in this section, Pini, McDonald and Bartlett take up a key question that is often addressed to researchers in the form of a critique of visual methods. Rather than arguing that there is one approach that defines the field, the authors contend that an openness to varied and multiple paradigms which are guided by research questions and aims is needed. The researchers build on work which has mapped the use of approaches in elite schools through interviews with the producers of these images; that is, marketing and communication managers whose work is to produce and/or oversee the production processes of brochures, video newspaper advertisements and the like. The authors argue that this group of actors has become key in the educational landscape and the mediation of discourses that pertain to the rendering of schooling and education in this century. Moreover the authors illustrate how research on elite schooling and the take up of the visual have a lineage in the field. Pini, McDonald and Bartlett offer not only a concise overview of the corpus of work on elite schooling and marketing materials but also depart from it by talking to those who have the responsibility for creating the visuality of these schools.

Part II is titled ‘Performing Pedagogy Visually’, where the four chapters focus on pedagogy and the canvassing of issues that relate to the production of research in teacher education, learning spaces and the use of film in understanding teacher professional knowledge. The authors illustrate how new pedagogical relationships can be understood if we keep the visual in mind.

Senior and Moss introduce the well-known and rehearsed problematic issues and struggles of researching and reconstructing teacher education research in the context of global policy panic and teacher quality discourses. The chapter reports on the tracing of Kodak Easy Share™ method for transforming data and interpretation in a study of teacher education, school culture and pedagogy. Issues of method and analysis are addressed in the context of a project that was collaborative, contextually appropriate, feasible and ethically aware and negotiated over the life of the project. The co-production of knowledge is analysed to disrupt notions of how the visual and teacher education simultaneously get taken up in educational research.

Dixon is currently working in Australia and offers, in her chapter, a performative cartography of pedagogical spaces inside schools developed from a large Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) project on learning spaces conducted in Victoria. In these times, international bodies of classroom data are being assembled and rely heavily on large-scale data collection through, for example, videoing classroom action and international comparative studies. In her chapter, we are reminded of the multiple ways that pedagogical data are presented and how visuals are or are not put to work in educational policy. The chapter calls to account the politics of representation in studies of pedagogy and asks what else is needed or can redress globalising portrayals of pedagogy. Finally she concludes by outlining how pedascapes can address the pedagogical silences in the public portrayal of schools.

Thomson and Hall have extensive research backgrounds in collaborative and arts-based partnerships. In their chapter, they focus on the spaces between educational research, children and young people, and what their approach contributes to the remaking of how we might understand teacher professional knowledge. Through their aim of producing pedagogic resources for teachers through research, informed initially by visual research literatures, they explain and problematise what websites and film can do to support teachers’ learning. As they note, the visual research literature has less methodological discussion about, and empirical reporting of, research using moving images. The chapter takes up the problem of how to communicate different and more creative approaches to pedagogical practice which do not unintentionally duplicate the notion of a deficient teacher incapable of professional knowledge production. But the contribution of the chapter is not all methodological; there is a substantive and compelling argument developed on how films become resources and change practice and possibilities for alternative pedagogical approaches.

Working in the USA and a specialist in early years’ literacy, Hassett also reports on work that aims to be put in the hands of teachers. Drawing on social semiotics to push the boundaries of a print-based education, she introduces readers to an educational definition of visual literacy that begins with an analysis of highly visual and interactive children’s texts as resources in helping to ...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• Part I  Images of Schooling: Representations and Historical Accounts
• Part II  Performing Pedagogy Visually
• Part III  Power and Representation in Visual Educational Research
• Part IV  Ethical Issues in Visual Educational Research
• Index