Photographic Elicitation and Narration in Teachers Education and Development

Front matter

Teacher Education, Learning Innovation and Accountability Series Editor: Claire Wyatt-Smith

Antonio Bautista Garcia-Vera Editor

Photographic Elicitation and Narration in Teachers Education and Development

Preface

The essay is a collective book, (thirteen chapters), which presents new research and experiences that implement the use of photography in teacher professional development. The research uses visual methodological tools, such as photo-elicitation and photo-voice, and the photographic narration; however, there remains a lack of clarity about what they mean, how they are used, and whether they are effective in providing valuable information about teachers’ everyday world. Through different proposals and examples, and the presentation of photographs, the reader will understand the value of photography to facilitate inquiry and reflection on practice. All this synthesizes the major contribution of the book. An interesting field to diversity of readers: Researchers, Postgraduate students, Undergraduate students, Practitioners, and international professionals associations.

What is it about photography that earns it its place in the pre-service and in-service training of teachers discussed in this essay? Well, among other virtues, it is a representational system that provides three levels of information: denotation or material information, connotation or semantic information, and punctum or emotional information. The first two are included in Panofsky’s iconography (1995) and in Barthes’s visual semiotics (1989). Denotation is linked to the level that represents the what or/and the who that give content to the image, and connotation refers to the meaning given to the image captured in a photograph. It was Barthes (1989) who expressed the need to contemplate the emotion transmitted by an image, making it the third level of information transmitted by a photograph. He called it punctum, meaning the wound, the prick or pain experienced and represented in a photograph taken by its author, or reported to those who observe it.

While the first refers to physical or material information external to humans, the last two symbolically convey their tacit and intimate ideas and feelings. All three are necessary and sufficiently representative, and therefore communicate our experiential life. Given these basic levels of information, in this essay we will also discuss the two sub-levels into which Van Leeuwen (2008) later divided the symbolic level: the iconographic symbolism of a photograph, referring to the external meanings of vi Preface its author stemming from agreements and sociocultural conventions; and the iconological symbolism, that includes the creator’s own meanings represented in symbols arising from his or her emotions and ideas.

The nature of this language, or symbolic system of representation facilitated by photography, has sparked our curiosity and interest in knowing how it can mediate the relationship between teachers, their school and their community and improve their pre-service and in-service education. In the following pages, we take for granted that any changes and improvements in the competence of our teachers stems from reflecting on and questioning their own teaching skills. Nevertheless, both historically and culturally, the context where such reflection takes place and the tools used to mediate that relationship have an effect on the direction taken by the intended professional improvement. Thus, an analysis of the institutional and research context allows us to modulate different space-time and organizational situations that will assign different functions to resources and different roles to the various elements that make up teacher training, where photography will be the main tool in these teacher development environments.

This book has been organized into three content clusters intended to contribute to the further development of hot topics and issues in teacher education. The first cluster consists of four chapters that address open topics, such as what content or photographic know-how should be included in the much debated media literacy of teachers or, more specifically, photography as an element of teacher training and research. We also discuss the way in which cameras and photographic language facilitate teachers’ reflections and their access to the theories and beliefs that underlie and guide their classroom and school practice, giving them the knowledge they need to change their approach practice and, consequently, improve their teaching skills. In this first cluster we will also study the different ways in which photography can develop the practical dimension of pre-service teacher education in skills that will not only improve their competence as teachers, but will also develop their artistic talents.

Chapter five includes a semantic review of photo-elicitation and the similarities and differences between this and photovoice. We show that they are two procedures based on photographic representation and communication that come from different traditions. Both Collier (1957) and Harper (2002), in the field of anthropology, claim that the essence of photo-elicitation is the incorporation of photographs in research interviews. Wang and Burris (1997), however, coined the term photovoice to refer to the use of photography to identify the opinions of users on their community and how it can be improved. Thus, while photo-elicitation is used as a data collection technique in research that revolves around interviews with a single person, photovoice has been used in groups in the context of social training and intervention or community change. The essence of procedures developed to evoke and represent contradictions and inconsistencies in teaching, based on photographs taken by the teachers themselves or by any other observer of life in classrooms and schools, have prompted us to combine both photo-elicitation traditions in teacher training, since they bring together both training and research.

Preface Vii

In the sixth chapter, therefore, we argue that photo-elicitation is a flexible process open to the variety and complexity of purposes and emerging investigative and training situations in any educational institution. One of the contributions of this essay is to define the purpose of photo-elicitation in the training and in-service development of teachers. Photo-elicitation can be viewed as a cooking pot that receives and holds different elements or ingredients that are combined to prepare a nourishing, or nutritional, training dish. In the case of photo-elicitation, one of the ingredients is the camera used by one of the participants to capture moments of school life which, depending on the particular purpose of the training process, are important to reveal. The second element is the author of the image discussed at each session, who can be one of the trainee teachers, any other member of the educational community, such as a pupil, another faculty member, or a family member or guest observer, or even the person shown in the photograph. The third ingredient is the participants’ description, interpretation, assessment, or questioning of the moment contained in the photograph.

The final basic element of a photo-elicitation session is the order in which the members of the group speak, taking into account their dual role as either the creator of an image with a communicative intent, or as an analyst or critic, each interpreting the elements of photography from their cultural frameworks. Therefore, in this element, we have to consider the nature and purpose of the comments made by the participants, which may be to gather more information to better understand what has been previously described, or to determine the reasons for some of the actions included in the photographs, or to question or challenge the validity of the decision made by someone faced by a dilemma reflected in the image. In this way, photo-elicitation in teacher training involves the revelation of theories and beliefs, the intentions behind our own actions, the interpretations made by others that sometimes raise issues that compel us to become aware of the contradictions and inconsistencies in the objective we or any other school colleague pursue in our teaching activities, and that need to be resolved by introducing changes that improve our teaching skills.

In this book, we will see that the function of photography in these sessions is to help participants evoke the meanings, ideas and emotions that, for them, are symbolically contained in the elements that make up that image. In this respect, photography is primarily the vehicle of the connotative and punctum levels of the image, and secondarily of the denotative level that provide the descriptions of what is materially captured in the space of an instant. Thus, the seventh chapter analyses the tutor-student relationships in a practicum aimed at bringing together mutual training—the pre-service training undergone by students during their work experience and the in-service training of teacher-tutors. This second cluster ends with a study on the use of photo-elicitation in virtual teaching communities, specifically: is it possible to transfer the face-to-face essence of photo-elicitation to a virtual environment? What type of changes, or adjustments, must be made to photograph-mediated elements and procedures?

The photographic narrative that forms the content of the third and last cluster of the book is seen as the assembly of a group of still images in a chronological or argumentative sequence (Freeman, 2010). It can also be understood as a dialogue viii Preface between photographs, or as the fusion of several moments or instants of an episode, task or experience captured in photographs, where the teachers or authors describe textually or verbally their reasons or motives for taking that particular photograph (the result of their private mental inquiry) and how they come together and develop to form the audio-visual story (Chatman, 1992). The narrative introduces the time dimension into the spatial description and analysis provided by photo-elicitation, extending the discussion and debate beyond the content of each photograph, understood, in this sense, as a snapshot of life open to the past and to the future.

The chapters in this cluster explain the lines of research into the relevance of the use of the photographic story as a procedure to promote inquiry and narrative among teachers. For this purpose, we will discuss the modalities and types of narrative structures that call for enquiry among teachers, and which, in turn, contribute relevant meanings and arguments to photographic stories. These include essays and photomontage aimed at documenting and encouraging debate on professional development and, consequently, on improving the quality of the educational institution. Also, by way of example, the inquisitiveness of the self-portrait involves questioning the motivations that led a teacher to take it, and will thus contain their preconceptions and implicit theories about their job. Inquiry encouraged by a photo story enriches the evaluation of the customs or ways of life of the neighbourhood, or of organizational routines and rules on the use and function of corridors, playgrounds or other elements of the school that have been narrated.

In the last two chapters, special situations of teacher training based on photographic narration are described. These are special because of their out-of-school survival contexts in which they occur; one, in places of pain, such as hospitals or childhood spaces and times that cannot be re-lived; and, the other, among the stones and sand of Saharawi refugee camps. If practical teacher training considers the teacher to be an artist, both texts discuss how to prepare him or her as such through photographic narratives, some of which are multimodal. Thus, in the twelfth chapter, the artist's book is presented as the document shaped by photographic auto-ethnographies, or photo-autobiographies, compiled by in-service or trainee teachers in difficult situations that they can only tackle personally as artists, and, perhaps in the future, as professionals. As the author says, these books are important to encourage teacher to engage in reflection, because there is nothing like training in creation to connect us with the other, because complex and subtle photographic auto-ethnographies ask and at the same time partly answer, generating uncertainty that helps teachers, or trainee teachers, to seek rather than find.

Inthe last chapter of this essay, the difficulty emerges from the context and survival situations in which the Saharawi people live and, consequently, the vital need to prepare them to ensure their future existence. A teacher training centre trains teachers in risk situations and ways of life in two contexts; one, in the occupied territories and, another, in the village of Tindouf where Algeria allows these people to live as refugees. In both situations, photography is important for these teachers, either to show educational content, such as how to identify and deactivate an anti-personnel mine, or how to improve teaching processes or the organization of schedules and spaces designed and used by teachers. In both contexts, the photographic narrative

Preface ix that goes hand in hand with the verbal language of the Sahrawi teachers is the soul of the survival training programmes. These initiatives map pathways between stones and sand for the young, growing population, and encourage teachers to observe, inquire and deliberate using ideas translated into images that will gradually make them safer, more artistically sensitive desert gardeners and, therefore, better teachers.

Finally, the texts that are the source of data in some chapters have, in turn, breathed life back into many digital cameras consigned to drawers or other dark, silent spaces following the advent of smartphones in technologically advanced societies. And there they remain, disinterestedly waiting for a teacher to take them to their schools to redefine their profession.

Madrid, Spain Antonio Bautista García- Vera bautista Q ucm.es

Barthes, R. (1989). La cámara lúcida. Paidós.

Chatman, S. (1992). Historia y discurso. Estructura narrativa en la novela y en el cine. Taurus.

Collier, J. (1957). Photography in Anthropology: A Report on two experiments. American Anthropologist, 59(5), 843-859.

Freeman, M. (2010). La narración fotográfica. Blume.

Harper, D. (2002). Talking about pictures: A case for photo-elicitation. Visual Studies, 17(1), 13- 26.

Panofsky, E. (1995). El significado de las artes visuales. Alianza.

Van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Semiotics and Iconograhy. In T. Van Leeuwen & C. Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of visual analysis (pp. 92-118). Sage.

Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education and Behavior, 24(3), 369-387.

Contents

PartI Photography as a System of Representation and Meaning in Teacher Training

Photography in the Media Literacy of Teachers: What Alfonso Gutiérrez Martin

TTE 3

Part II Photo-Elicitation in Teacher Professional Development

Photovoice and Photo-Elicitation: Similarities, Differences, Incorporation and Contribution in In-Service Teacher Trame eciseto dee cesa Ce EP CARE PURSE d Odd ti vddo dido María Jesás Romera Iruela

Structures of the Photo-Elicitation Process and Emergence Antonio Bautista García- Vera

The Use of Photo-Elicitation Situations in the Practicum .. María Jesás Romera Iruela, Mercedes Blasco Torrejón,

María Rosario Limón Mendizabal,

and Antonio Bautista García- Vera xi

Contents

Photo-Elicitation in Virtual Environments as a Tool Laura Cayuela Ferrero

Part III Photographic Storytelling in Teacher Training Javier Mariscal Ariza

Laura Rayón Rumayor and Ana María de las Heras Cuenca

Modes of Photo-Narration by Teachers and Their Effect Joaquin Paredes Labra

The Artist’s Book as a Form of Autoethnography Marian López Fernández-Cao

Angeles Ariza Núñez

Chapter 1 A) Photography in the Media Literacy ES of Teachers: What Impression Do We Give?

Alfonso Gutiérrez Martín

Baudelaire, the nineteenth century French poet and art critic who scorned early efforts at photography, claiming it would corrupt art, could never have imagined the current state of the art and importance of photography in today's world. “It is time, then, for it to return to its true duty, which is to be the servant of the sciences and arts — but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature." He went on to warn, “But if [photography is] allowed to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely upon the addition of something of a man's soul, then it will be so much the worse for us" (in Baudelaire, 2017: 231—233).

Many years of technological development later, we could conclude that the main role of photography and imagery in general continues to be that of a servant, albeit “a very humble servant" of the sciences and the arts, and in terms of teacher training, also of education in these fields.

In all these years, photography and the language of imagery, despite their importance and ubiquity, do not seem to have merited a leading position in school curricula or teacher training. In teaching, photography is used mainly for delivering presentations and as a teaching aid in various subjects. In teacher training, aside from technical education, it is only used to analyse the didactic potential of imagery and its function at the service of other arts and sciences. Visual literacy, media education, photography as art, are largely ignored in both basic education and teacher training.

A. Gutiérrez Martín (DI) University of Valladolid, Segovia, Spain e-mail: alfonso.gutierrez.martin Q uva.es

© The Author(s) 2023 3 A. Bautista García-Vera (ed.), Photographic Elicitation and Narration in Teachers

Media Literacy in Teacher Training

Before discussing any possible relationship between photography and education, it is important to highlight the need to introduce audio-visual and media literacy education in basic teacher training.

Since the introduction of Educational Technology in the last century, both photography and other new informational and audio-visual technologies have found their way into the sphere of education as potential facilitators of learning; as tools rather than as a subject of study and reflection. Perhaps due more to external social pressure than the commitment of education professionals and experts, new technological devices have been incorporated into the classroom as other markets, such as that of domestic appliances or business, have become saturated. In other words, cameras, video recorders and computers, for example, were introduced into educational centres once they had already been widely known and used in other settings, such as business or the home. Although these products, unlike whiteboards or overhead projectors, are not specifically manufactured for the classroom, in Educational Technology their more teaching-related characteristics and advantages have been highlighted to justify, albeit “a posteriori”, their acquisition and use.

Audio-visual devices and computers undoubtedly have considerable educational potential, and although they were not designed for education, specific educational and instructive programmes have been developed for both television and computers, and classroom activities can be programmed to take advantage of the benefits of each new device in the teaching-learning processes.

Teacher training in the use of these new media resources has always included courses on how to operate them before going on to describe their potential use as a teaching tool. As the complexity and number of devices have increased with digitization, teacher training has prioritised the technological or instrumental dimension over educational aspects (Bautista, 2014). Several experts have warned of this bias, pointing out that the most important thing for teachers is not to know how to use these devices, but when and why to use them, always trying to optimize their possible educational advantages and minimize their drawbacks.

If the role of media in education could be limited to their use as a teaching tool, it would be logical to focus teacher training in ICT and digital media on their technological and didactic dimensions. We know, however, that the educational potential of digital media, their ability to influence the opinions, beliefs and attitudes of users, is currently more important than any role we can assign them as teaching tools in formal education.

As early as 1980, UNICEF recognized, with some optimism, the potential of digital media as agents of informal education. They dubbed them “the third channel”, after formal and non-formal education, and defined them as “all the available instruments and information, communication, and social action channels that can be used to help transmit basic knowledge and inform and educate the population regarding social issues” (UNICEF, 1990).

1 Photography in the Media Literacy of Teachers: What Impression Do ... 5

With the advent of the Internet, this third channel has overflowed and flooded schools and other educational institutions. Our students are almost permanently subject to a barrage of increasingly visual information that is shared on social networks and different virtual communities. It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify the values and ideas inevitably implicit in viral messages, in YouTube videos, and in web pages due to the amount of information (infoxication) and the lack of control. In the last century, educommunication was required to develop skills in the critical appraisal of mass media; it is now also needed to join virtual communities, to create and interpret messages responsibly, to learn to value and read not only verbal language, but also multimedia documents, and, in short, to be twenty-first century citizens with all our rights and duties.

If media education is a prerequisite for anyone who is part of the Information Society, it should also be a mandatory subject in teacher training in ICT and digital media. With regard to ICT and media training, from a purely educational, as opposed to instructive, point of view, digital media or digital literacy in teachers is today far more important and necessary than the acquisition of the technological and teaching skills which are prioritised in pre-service and in-service training programmes.

The tendency to prioritize technological and instructive aspects over training in ICT could be a logical consequence of a neoliberal approach, where results matter more than processes, and where these results must be quantitatively measurable. As we have already pointed out in Gutiérrez and Torrego (2018), governments and educational institutions appear to have reached an overall consensus with regard to competence-based education. Teachers at different levels, textbook authors, and educational authorities work together to formulate basic education and teacher training in terms of competencies. In this respect, the Institute of Educational Technology and Teacher Training (INTEF, in its Spanish acronym) published its meticulous 2017 Common Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (INTEF, 2017).

UNESCO had previously published its "ICT Competency Framework for Teachers", adocument that, according to its authors, was created to inform education policy makers, teacher trainers, vocational trainers and in-service teachers about the role of ICT in education reform (UNESCO, 2011).

Although we believe it is essential for teachers to develop clearly definable and assessable ICT skills, in this chapter we are calling for teacher media literacy, so we warn the reader that current competence-based models focus on the technical and operational aspects of media devices more than media literacy education. Potter and McDougall (2017: 85), for example, question both US and European competency frameworks for media literacy, and ask whether this competency model does not ignore two important dimensions that underlie all media literacy education: cultural studies and social literacy.

After publishing its aforementioned ICT competency for teachers, UNESCO went on to release a new document on media and information literacy (Wilson et al., 2011) for teachers, or what every teacher should know about media literacy and how to teach it. This new document, however, was not as influential as the publication on

ICT competency for teachers—hardly surprising in a country where neither audiovisual literacy nor educommunication have been given the importance they deserve in the digital age.

One of the main objectives of media literacy education is to raise awareness among the general public, mostly ICT users, of how the media influence their education, how the images they offer us gradually shape the way we see the world around us and the people in it. In the case of teachers and educators, understanding the educational potential of the media will encourage them to assess their educational potential inside and outside the classroom in awareness campaigns, values education, citizenship education, etc.

Teachers, particularly those that include the media and ICT in their subject content, will also be responsible for the media literacy of their students and for media education. Like languages or mathematics, which have their own teaching methods (Gutiérrez & Torrego, 2018), media education should be included in teacher training programmes in new technologies.

The foregoing authors propose a model for teacher training in ICT and digital media consisting of five general subject blocks that cover the training of different teachers and educators: (1) Multiple literacy in the digital age; (2) Media and digital environments as agents of informal education; (3) Integration of digital media and technologies in the curriculum as teaching tools; (4) Integration of ICT and media in the curriculum as a study subject. Media education in formal education; and (5) Media education in university education and pre-service teacher training.

FORMACIÓN EN TIC Y MEDIOS

The three basic dimensions of ICT and media training of all teachers, irrespective of their level or subject specialty, are depicted in the first three concentric circles of

1 Photography in the Media Literacy of Teachers: What Impression Do ... 7 the graph of this model. In the first place, the competence all teachers should have as members of the Information Society, i.e. media and digital literacy, but which cannot be taken for granted, particularly among older teachers.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, a series of key concepts of critical media literacy education in schools were developed in Canada (Duncan et al., 1989), based on the approach put forward by Len Masterman (Masterman, 1985; Masterman & Thompson, 1980).

These key concepts (media constructions, representations, institutions and audiences), which formed the basis for the golden age of media education in various anglosphere countries in the 1990s, could also be valid today if the new literacies, "trans-literacies" or “multiliteracies” are taught from a critical perspective instead of focussing on the characteristics of digital technology or the needs of the market.

The time is right, since according to Ollé et al. (2004), in the first years of this millennium, when the hegemony of Mass Media 1.0 gave way to that of the so-called "participatory" media 2.0, critical pedagogy experienced a worldwide boom based on new utopia (such as "Another world is possible"), on the new approach to social and educational theories (Habermas, Chomsky, Freire), and on new transformative educational practices (such as learning communities or democratic schools).

We agree with Jolls and Wilson (2014) that “new media" neither change the essence of media education, nor modify its growing importance for social development. However, we would point out that although these new media, particularly digital photography and video, have not changed the essence of media education, they have changed its content and practices to the extent that we need to establish and clarify the basic principles or essence of liberating media literacy currently obscured by the glamour of digital technologies.

These key concepts inherited from digital media education of the last century would, according to Gutiérrez (2008), give rise to five basic contents that are also applicable to digital photography and new media:

e The photographs and documents released by the media are not mere reflections of the reality they represent, not windows on the world, not pieces of reality embodied in a medium—they are constructions, ways of representing a reality.

e Media companies are complicated networks with considerable commercial and ideological interests that are reflected in the products they create and the way these are distributed.

e Audiences are considered as “products” that are offered to advertisers and data management companies for commercial purposes.

e The media act as educators of their audience, transmitting an ideology and making a decisive contribution to the creation of a particular cultural identity or type of society.

The media literacy of any individual, therefore, involves becoming aware of the potential of the media as agents of informal education. Therefore, we need to add the teacher’s need to become aware of the educational potential of the media and ICTs to the second circle of our graph. The teacher, being an educator, must have a greater understanding of the educational potential of the media than would be expected of other individuals, greater than that of first level literacy expected of any other person or student.

Third, we need to add the specific training undergone by the teacher as an educator: understanding the educational potential of each new medium—in our case of photography—and its possible advantages and disadvantages as a tool to facilitate the teaching-learning processes in the instructive and practical dimensions of education.

Levels four and five, as can be seen in the graph, are not applicable to any teacher at any level, but only to those who teach ICT or media-related subjects, such as Photography, Computer Science, Communication or Media Education (level 4), or teachers in training in these subjects (level 5).

Photography in the Development of Media Literacy: A Bit of History

As discussed above, we consider media education to be part of basic literacy, applicable to both students and teachers at any level. In this section, when we refer to the development of media literacy, we mean not only students in compulsory education, but any other person, and in particular teachers, who in many cases find themselves responsible for their own media literacy and that of their students.

According to authors such as Fedorov (2008), media literacy education began in France during the 1920s with the cinema club movement and its clear educational intent. This initiative, launched by the Offices regionaux du cinema educateur, coincided with the introduction of photography, cine films, and the gramophone in schools by Freinet and his wife Elise, who carried on the tradition of the “new school” and incorporated into their class the most modern techniques of their time, such as typesetting, photographic and video cameras, cine films, and the tape recorder.

Freinet, whom Fedorov (2008) considers one of the founders of media literacy education, explained that photography and cine films were not simply means of entertainment or teaching resources, but “the new way of thinking and personal expression” (Freinet, 1963: 12). This is why this pioneering French teacher believed that schools should teach the language of audio-visual media in the same way as basic principles of art were taught.

However, these and similar experiences in Europe with state-of-the-art photography or cine films in the first half of the twentieth century can be considered isolated events or individual initiatives that almost always involved the introduction of cine films into the classroom, such as the case of the British Film Institute in the United Kingdom. Media literacy was not introduced into formal education until the 1950s and 1960s. Until then, educational institutions had ignored cameras and the media, and newspapers, comics and other elements of popular culture were banned from the classroom—hardly surprising if we bear in mind that today new media such as telephones and other mobile devices are not allowed in the classroom.

1 Photography in the Media Literacy of Teachers: What Impression Do ... 9

In the second half of the twentieth century, the ubiquity and influence of television made it inevitable that not only the pioneers of audio-visual education, but also formal education systems would consider its introduction into school curricula. This introduction of mass media, film, press, radio and television can be approached from two basic perspectives: