Cameras in Classrooms: Photography’s Pedagogical Potential
Jeff Share
J. Share ()Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USAe-mail: [email protected]
Abstract This chapter looks at the unique qualities of photography that makes it an ideal tool to use in classrooms for teaching all different subject matter as well as an important device to teach about. Having years of experience as a photojournalist and as an educator, the author explores theoretical underpinnings of photography as well as practical applications for teaching. Today, the camera has become a power-ful pedagogical tool because of its ubiquity in society, low price, ease of use, and democratic potential. What had for years been too expensive or difficult to utilize in the classroom, is now an invaluable teaching aid that educators should integrate throughout their curricula and encourage students to analyze and use. Photographs have become so common these days that neither adults nor children are accustomed to questioning the construction or bias of the pictures that surround them. When using a critical media literacy framework, teachers and students can support demo-cratic pedagogy by using photography to co-construct knowledge and create alter-native representations of their world.
Introduction: The Power of Photography
Working as a professional photojournalist years ago, I had many opportunities to experience the power and limitations of photography. On occasion, my photographs contributed to positive change, educated some people about problems, and caused others to feel joy, pain, compassion, and outrage. There is a power that the photo-graphic image conveys that no other medium can do in the same way. French pho-tographer Gisele Freund (1980) asserts, “The importance of photography does not rest primarily in its art form, but rather in its ability to shape our ideas, to influence our behavior, and to define our society” (p. 5). Since Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s first photographic image taken in 1826, the medium of photography has been influ-encing society. In her renowned book On Photography, Susan Sontag (1990) states, “To photograph is to confer importance” (p. 28).
In comparison with other forms of representation, such as hieroglyphics, paint-ings, and even printed text, photography is relatively new. However, the photo-graphic image has been a major influence on the world in ways few previous repre-sentations were able to do (Goldberg 1991; Lacayo & Russell 1990; Monk 1989). Photographs by Lewis Hines of children toiling in factories contributed to the first child labor laws in the USA. Pictures of US soldiers abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq led to congressional hearings, military court-martials, and outrage around the world. Even my own photos of peace marchers walking across the USA for global nuclear disarmament were helpful to convince media outfits to report on the 9-month-long protest—something several editors had previously told me they were not interested in covering (Elliman 1986). Photographs have contributed to the starting and ending of wars, to sending people to jail, inspiring political dissent, and even like Cupid’s arrows, rousing people to fall in love. The photograph is said to be worth a thousand words because it transports us vicari-ously to experience a frozen moment in time; it permits us to see and feel the world beyond our touch and allows us to express our innermost feelings without speaking a single word.
“Photographs have a swifter and more succinct impact than words, an impact that is instantaneous, visceral, and intense. They share the power of images in general, which have always played havoc with the human mind and heart, and they have the added force of evident accuracy,” writes Goldberg (1991, p. 7). This assumption of accuracy combines with positivist notions about a single objective reality that leads many to consider photographs to be indisputable proof; they are permitted as evi-dence in a court of law and used by scientists to record data. Barthes (1981) states, “From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentica-tion exceeds the power of representation” (p. 89). For people around the world, the photograph is a document that conveys truth and preserves history.
While photography can be an important instrument to record reality and docu-ment our present and past, it is also a device that can mislead and be misused. By as early as the 1850s, Louis Agassiz and other eugenicists were using photography to justify their theories about the racial inferiority of non-Europeans. Banta and Hin-sley (1986) report that in the 1930s, similar racist ideas were promoted by Harvard University anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton, who claimed that his photographs of human skulls “furnished the ultimate proof of the validity of our morphological types” (p. 65). These days, the vast number of photographs in mainstream media that glamorize whiteness and marginalize people of color continue the legacy of racial misrepresentation. The rampant use of Photoshop and digital manipulation on practically all advertising and magazine covers contributes to the popular ideals of beauty as Eurocentric, artificially skinny, and unattainable (Jhally 2010).
Sontag (1990) asserts, “Although there is a sense in which the camera does in-deed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are” (pp. 6–7). Photographs, no matter how realistic they look, are always a subjective representation, shaped by the photogra-pher’s choices of who and what to photograph, as well as the context of how, when, where, and why to take the picture (Cappello & Hollingsworth 2008; Share 2003).
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The content that ends up inside the frame of any photograph is never neutral be-cause it has been chosen and constructed by a subjective human being. While pho-tography often seems to be objective and is given great storytelling authority, it is still just a human tool subject to all the limitations and frailties of any other gizmo. It is this power of credibility that is given to photography that makes the camera an especially important tool to use and critique.
Everyone Today Is a Photographer
For many years, this amazing tool has been primarily in the hands of photojour-nalists, visual artists, and photobuffs; yet now, with the popularity of tiny cam-eras embedded in computers, tablets, and cell phones, it seems that everyone is a photographer. New web 2.0 applications and smaller–faster hardware are making photography so common that millions of people are creating, sharing, and viewing photographs daily. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Imgur, Flickr, and Pinterest are popular social media that capitalize on photography’s powers and the technological ease of sharing images globally. According to a survey of adult Internet users by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project, “Photos and videos have become an inte-gral part of the online social experience…more than half of internet users post or share photos or videos online” (Duggan 2013). A Pew survey of teenagers, 12–17, found 78 % of teens have cell phones, and about half of those are smartphones (Madden et al. 2013). One survey of youth in Massachusetts reports the percentages of students with cell phones as: 18–20 % of third graders, 25–26 % of fourth grad-ers, 39 % of fifth graders, and 83–84 % of middle schoolers (Englander 2011, p. 3).
The popularity of taking and sharing photographs has also spawned new words, such as snaparazzi, snapaholic, screenshot, photoshop, webcam, livecam, photo-bombing, and selfie. The handheld self-portrait known as a “selfie” has become so popular that even the Pope has a selfie posted online (Alexander 2013) and come-dian Ellen DeGeneres broke records for the most retweeted selfie at the 2014 Oscars (Gerick 2014). Today, almost everyone and every place has a camera, so we are all being photographed numerous times throughout the day by security cams, traffic enforcement cameras, satellites, and people we never suspect. Photography is no longer just an expensive hobby or profession requiring costly cameras, lenses, film, developing, and printing. The camera is not just the instrument of experts; it is now one of the most popular tools and toys of millions.
Today’s educators can benefit from digital cameras that cost less than a trip to the movies or cell phones with cameras that most students walk into the classroom with and are often forbidden to use. Once you have a digital camera, everything else is basically free; you can take as many pictures as you want. For educators, this makes photography an option for the classroom that even most financially strapped schools can afford. The costs are no longer prohibitive and the level of complexity has been simplified, making most cameras very user-friendly. In the not-so-distant past, photographers needed specialized skills to read a light meter, factor the sen-sitivity of the film, change aperture settings, adjust shutter speeds, and maintain
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reciprocity. They also needed to understand depth of field and be able to focus the lens with the speed and accuracy to assure that their images would look clear while also framing and composing the foreground and background. And once they did all this, they then had to choose the decisive moment (Cartier-Bresson 1952) for when to push the button and take the picture that they would not be able to see until after the film was developed and the negatives or slides were printed. What a change—now even our cell phones can adjust for the lighting, focus for clarity, capture the image, and show us the results in seconds. However, since the technical skills for taking a picture are no longer needed, that does not mean that people do not need to understand the visual literacy skills for critically reading and creating images. Part of the requirement for being literate in the twenty-first century is being able to read and write images, sounds, multimedia, and numerous other “multiliteracies” (New London Group 1996).
It is the unique power of photography and the new ease of use, low cost, and accessibility that has made the camera a practical tool for education to teach with and about. Wendy Ewald has been working for years with children and cameras, and argues about the potential of connecting art with education through photogra-phy. Ewald (2012) explains that “certain formal elements of photography such as framing, point of view, timing, the use of symbols, and observation of details…have parallels in writing” (p. 2). Since the 1960s, Eliot Wigginton and the folks at Foxfire have been taking cameras outside the classroom to document their Appa-lachian community and create their own publications that became New York Times best sellers (Wigginton 1991). Cameras in journalism or photography classes are not new, but cameras in elementary schools and secondary school science, math, history, English as a second language (ESL), and English classrooms are far more rare. As the technology changes and more students enter the classroom with cell phones that can record still and moving images, schools have new opportunities to integrate photography into instruction as never before (Kolb 2008; Schiller & Tillett 2004; Cappello 2011). These new opportunities also require educators to embrace different ways of teaching, making learning more student-centered, project-based, collaborative, multimodal, and critical. Cappello and Hollingsworth (2008) state, “photography is best used where there is an understanding that reality is perceived or constructed” (p. 444). When educators integrate media education with photogra-phy, they gain a framework to help their students think critically about the camera.
Critical Media Literacy
Media education has evolved from cultural studies and is defined less as a specific body of knowledge or set of skills, and more as a framework of conceptual un-derstandings (Buckingham 2003). While many media literacy organizations have their own list of essential ideas (Canada’s Ontario Ministry of Education’s (2009) Eight Key Concepts, British Film Institute’s Signpost Questions, Center for Media Literacy’s Five Core Concepts and Key Questions, National Association for Me-dia Literacy Education’s (2014) Six Core Principles, and the Action Coalition for
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Media Education’s (2015) Seven Basic Principles/Questions), most share a handful of basic commonalities:
1. Recognition of the construction of media and communication as a social process as opposed to accepting texts as isolated neutral or transparent conveyors of information.
2. Some type of textual analysis that explores the languages, genres, codes, and conventions of the text.
3. An exploration of the role audiences play in negotiating meanings.4. Problematizing the process of representation to uncover and engage issues of
ideology, power, and pleasure.5. Examination of the production and institutions that motivate and structure the
media industries as corporate profit-seeking businesses (Kellner and Share 2007).
These elements of media education can provide a useful theoretical framework to support teachers as they guide their students to analyze and create media. In the Teacher Education Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), we use a critical media literacy pedagogy that includes these five conceptual un-derstandings along with feminist theory and critical pedagogy in order to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power (Garcia et al. 2013). We use the list of five core concepts and key questions assembled by the Center for Media Literacy because they simplify these abstract ideas into ac-cessible language for teachers to use in the classroom. While it is important for teachers to understand the concepts, most students only need to learn the questions because the questions, with teacher guidance, should lead students on a path of in-quiry where they will experience the concept:
1. All media messages are “constructed.” Who created this message?2. Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules.
What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?3. Different people experience the same media message differently. How might dif-
ferent people understand this message differently from me?4. Media have embedded values and points of view. What lifestyles, values, and
points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?5. Most media are organized to gain profit and/or power. Why is this message being
sent? (Center for Media Literacy 2015).
These concepts should guide educators and the questions support students as they critically engage with media, technology, and popular culture. This is a theoretical frame that teachers at Leo Politi Elementary School in Los Angeles used for Project SMARTArt, a 3-year federal grant integrating arts education with media literacy (Quesada 2005; Share 2009). When this framework is combined with photography, much potential for learning can emerge, even with the very young. Schiller and Til-lett (2004) report on their experience using cameras with kindergartners:
Digital photography provided young children with the opportunity to present their views “about things that matter” in a medium taken seriously by adults and older children, as demonstrated by positive responses from older students at the school and the enthusiastic comments from the Kindergarten parents about the “professional” look of the children’s photographs. (p. 413)
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Elementary School
For 7 years, I taught in an elementary school classroom and used digital cameras with my students to document, investigate, and express their ideas. The camera was a magical instrument that motivated and educated in ways I had not seen before. My fourth graders and kindergartners were transformed from passive recipients of information into active photographers and/or subjects of their own pictures, co-constructing knowledge and representing their ideas. My English language learn-ers (ELLs) created their own flash cards by photographing each other in action to learn adjectives (synonyms and antonyms), irregular verbs, and prepositions. These students can be challenged by the many aspects of English that they need to learn explicitly, aspects that native speakers acquire from hearing and using English re-peatedly all around them (Krashen 1992). Not continually surrounded by English, ELLs face considerable difficulty learning irregular verbs, nominalizations, prepo-sitions, and the vast number of new adjectives and adverbs (Gibbons 2009). It can be overwhelming to learn a second language while simultaneously trying to learn the content of different subject matter. Writing from over 30 years of experience teaching elementary school, Pat Barrett Dragan (2008) explains that for ELLs, pho-tography “gives them a feeling of power and control over a piece of equipment, and that helps compensate for the lack of control they may feel over not yet speak-ing English. Photography gives my ELLs an additional language—another way for them to convey who they are and show what they know” (p. 41). Britsch (2010) reports that while there is little research available on using photography with young ELLs, it is important to recognize that “Language does not develop as an isolated mode of communication. Its relationship with visual imagery is primal” (p. 171). It was with my ELLs that I began to recognize the pedagogical power of photography. My students used cameras to document their learning and record our fieldtrips. However, it was not until they started to use the camera to construct meanings of the words and ideas they were learning, that I saw the incredible potential that pho-tography offered for so many other academic goals.
In my fourth-grade classroom in Pico Union, a largely Central American com-munity in downtown Los Angeles, we began by illustrating our vocabulary words. First, I had students take pictures that showed words they encountered in their text-books. The activity began with a class discussion about the meaning of the word and the different ways we could show it in a single image. The student photographer had to tell her/his classmates where and how to pose in order for the picture to commu-nicate the intended meaning of the word. We analyzed photographs from newspa-pers and magazines and brainstormed a list of techniques that photographers use to convey feelings and ideas, such as camera angles, composition, and lighting. After a couple weeks, the students were so enthusiastic about taking pictures that they be-gan bringing their own words into the classroom. This sparked an activity in which whoever brought in a new word would get to choose to take the picture illustrating that word or be in the picture. Because of the enthusiasm, we spent 5–10 min every morning illustrating vocabulary words and generating a massive collection of new
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words. I imported the digital images into a PowerPoint file that became a synonym/antonym flash card game. Students wrote sentences or stories to accompany their photographs and then printed PowerPoint handouts that we folded into pocket-sized books for each student. Some of the PowerPoint handouts were printed on colored paper, laminated, and cut up into popular trading cards. These personalized vocabu-lary cards and booklets were a huge hit with students and their families, as well as powerful student-made teaching materials to increase their vocabulary and literacy skills (Fig. 1).
My kindergarten ELLs were struggling with English prepositions, so as a whole class, we collaboratively took pictures to illustrate words such as: in, on, under, over, next to, etc. For each picture, we discussed how to best show the meaning of the word. One student would use the camera and all the other students would help her/him compose the picture to best communicate the word they were learning. Once we had the image, we would gather around a computer and through a guided writing activity, the whole class contributed to writing sentences about the word and photograph. As the students saw themselves in the pictures and wrestled with how to frame and show the word visually, the learning was meaningful and intrinsic. Even the students who were struggling with phonics were able to read these words because they had been actively involved in co-constructing the meanings of each word. The learning was amazing, test scores increased, students were using much more vocabulary words than previously, and they were becoming not only print literate but also media literate (Share 2009).
Jennifer Pineda (2014), a first year teacher working in an inner-city classroom documented the benefits she encountered using photography to improve her first graders’ writing. Before introducing photography to her class, her students were struggling with writing, finding it difficult and boring. When she told them that they would be taking pictures, Pineda states, “Cheers filled the room!” Pineda let her students use an iPad to take pictures of anything they wanted. She explains that
Fig. 1 This pocket-sized booklet of adjectives and synonyms is illustrated with photographs of and by fourth-grade students acting out their vocabulary words
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the students did not need any help taking pictures and they loved the process. Their photographs became the motivation for their writing and each student wrote stories based on the photographs they took or brought in from home.
Pineda encouraged her students to work together to take pictures, discuss their photos, and then write about them. By orienting students to each other, the children were able to help each other take the pictures and talk through their writing. Pineda reports, “My students were gaining a clearer understanding of how to show a story with their writing versus simply telling.” An unexpected outcome was the discovery that the photography process was also building community. Pineda writes, “Stu-dents would explain to one another why they needed to take pictures with each other and this always connected to how great their friendships were.”
The best writing emerging from Pineda’s students came from those who were writing about family photographs they brought from home. Pineda explains, “It was these students who were writing the most detailed stories. It seemed as though these students had strong connections with the pictures they were using because they had a vivid memory of the experiences they had in the moment the picture was taken.” This was a powerful way to motivate the writing process and also validate students’ funds of knowledge as they took pride in sharing about their lives beyond the classroom (Moll 1998).
Taking pictures involved more than just making writing fun and motivating. Pineda states, “The process of using pictures that they took on their own made the story behind every picture important. They were truly engaged in their writing be-cause every picture they took and used for their writing held a different experience in it.” In other elementary classrooms in which teachers gave cameras to students to use as part of the writing process, Cappello and Hollingsworth (2008) found “the photographs were both process and product. Photographs and the photo-graphic process provided the stimulus for writing, extended the meaning of the original texts (drafts), and encouraged complex thinking” (p. 448). These authors suggest that “[t]ransmediation, the process of interpreting meaning from one sign system to another is central to understanding the possibilities of photography in classrooms” (p. 444). When students move between different communication systems, be they oral language, print literacy, or visual imagery, they must invent connections be-tween the different sign systems, something that enlarges and expands the meaning. The photographs did not replace print literacy—they enhanced the multiple literacy processes.
Pineda asserts, “The most beneficial part of this process was seeing how stu-dents’ confidence grew and how their interest in a subject changed in such a short period of time.” Similar conclusions were reached by researchers who gave kin-dergarten and first-grade students access to a camera to create photo journals. In a student-centered approach to technology integration, Ching, Wang, Shih, and Kedem (2006) had students take turns using a digital camera in their classroom to photo-graph anything they wanted. The researchers noted that while technology in class-rooms is mostly used by teachers, when the students are given a camera, this can change the classroom dynamics and increase student access and empowerment. Ch-ing et al. (2006) report that when students became photographers, “they had more
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leeway to deviate from their normal activities to roam around the learning environ-ment and document various aspects of it” (p. 359). They explain:
The students were able to appropriate digital photography and use it as a means to shift from their usual roles as restricted participants in worlds where others make the rules (Carere 1987), and engage in sophisticated negotiations with their fellow students as photographic subjects and within the norms of classroom behavior. (p. 366)
Teacher Education
Now, as I teach the critical media literacy class in the teacher education program at the University of California, Los Angeles, I help student teachers recognize the ped-agogical power of photography for them to use with their K–12 students in urban schools. Our preservice teachers use cameras to explore their communities, to find mathematics and science in the real world around them, to reflect on their personal identities, to express their feelings and thoughts, to create visual representations of vocabulary words, to tell stories, to convince others about issues, to challenge dominant ideologies, to play games, and to make art. We explore different ways they can use digital cameras with their K–12 students and many of them implement the ideas right away.
In the critical media literacy class, the first activity students do with photography is to create a visual poster about a peer. For this assignment, students have to visu-ally represent their partner without ever showing the person’s face or name. They interview their colleague for just 5 min and then create a poster about her/him using any visual imagery they choose, photographs (of anything but the person’s face), drawings, logos, etc. This is our first opportunity to begin the conversation about visual communication and what it feels like to be represented visually as well as how it feels to represent somebody else only with images. For some, this is chal-lenging, as they try to visually generalize qualities of their subject while also trying to avoid stereotypes. This leads to discussions about media literacy core concept #4 ( media have embedded values and points of view) and the ways images in media often stereotype groups of people.
While we explore many aspects of visual literacy, we concentrate significantly on photography and its unique qualities. We discuss ideas about why the camera has the power to send a person to jail, something that drawings or other visual representations rarely can do since they are seldom allowed into a court of law as evidence. Why do people give photographs such power and believe almost anything they see? Is it the fact that photographs are created using machinery and science? Is it simply that a photograph looks so real that common sense convinces us to believe what we see? Whatever the reason, photographs have taken an authoritative, seldom questioned, role in society. We explore how this power has been used for posi-tive and negative purposes this past century as photographs have influenced laws, changed public discourse, and even contributed to saving lives (Goldberg 1991). Understanding this theoretical base helps educators and students recognize the po-tential photographs have to influence us and affect others. As students become more
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critical readers of images and better creators of photographs, the potential increases for them to use the camera as a tool to read and write their world (Freire & Macedo 1987).
Techniques of Photography
Students can address media literacy core concept #2 ( media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules) as they build a list of techniques of photography through comparing different photographs of the same person. They analyze two cover photographs of Arnold Schwarzenegger and name the adjectives they feel when they look at the pictures (Fig. 2). This lesson can be found in a booklet of 25 lesson plans that was written for the Center for Media Literacy, lessons 2A and 2B on basic visual language (Share et al. 2005). After the students list their various adjectives for each picture, we discuss why they chose different words to describe how they feel about the same person. This leads us to talk about how the photographs were constructed differently, connecting with the first core concept of media literacy ( all media messages are constructed). The students then generate a list of “techniques of photography” that derives from their prior knowledge, with minor guidance from the instructor. The students co-con-struct their knowledge through working together to solve a problem. Their task is to name all the things they see that are different between the two covers and explain what the photographer did to create such different photographs of the same person.
Fig. 2 These two magazine covers of Arnold Schwarzenegger are shown to students for them to compare and contrast the similarities and differences of the photographs and visual design
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This visual literacy activity meets many of the Common Core State Standards as students compare and contrast what they see in the photographs and explain their understandings about how the photographers took the pictures. At this point, we try to avoid discussing what they think or feel (connotations) about the pictures and subject matter so we can focus just on what the photographers did to create the photographs. Some of the common visual literacy techniques that students mention are use of background color, body language, facial expression, wardrobe, camera angle, lighting, and composition. When we analyze the effects that these techniques have on positioning the viewer, we discuss the ways images and symbols connote different ideas.
There are many aspects of visual literacy that we acquire through growing up in a visual culture, but seldom are these elements made explicit. Messaris (1994) asserts that learning about visual conventions is important because “it gives the viewer a foundation for a heightened conscious appreciation of artistry” and “it is a prerequi-site for the ability to see through the manipulative uses and ideological implications of visual images” (p. 165). It is often not until the techniques of visual literacy are taught explicitly and given names and examples that we gain the power to use them and see through their effects upon us as visual spectators. As students provide ideas for the list of photographic techniques, we chart their responses on a paper that can be kept posted in the classroom and often added to throughout the course. This is constructivist pedagogy (Vygotsky 1978) in which their ideas become resources for them to use as they are constructing their own photographs.
The university students, just like the elementary school children, use these tech-niques to create their own Good Photo/Bad Photo posters in which they take dif-ferent pictures of one student. They apply the techniques of photography that they just listed in order to make that same person look fabulous in one picture and aw-ful in the other. The elementary school students display those images side by side to demonstrate their understanding of visual literacy and provide the impetus for writing activities about metamorphosis or character development. One class also used these techniques to create two issues of the school newspaper. They created one serious issue with the standard portraits of the principal and cafeteria manager, then a second April Fools edition with scary pictures of the principal and cafeteria manager (Fig. 3). This activity helped the students understand that the “typical” school pictures with even lighting and eyelevel camera angles are just as much a subjective construction as the scary pictures in which they used extreme lighting and low camera angles.
Soon after the police killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, hundreds of African Americans used Twitter to pose the question: If they gunned me down, which picture would the media choose? Using the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, they tweeted pairs of pictures of them-selves, usually one in which they looked more “socially acceptable” by mainstream media standards and another in which they looked less “respectable” to the domi-nant media gaze (Vega 2014). This is a powerful example of how the new genera-tion is combining photography and social media to protest and challenge hegemony.
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While photos are an intricate part of popular culture, analyzing and creating photographs are seldom part of traditional public education. However, there are countless ways photography can be brought into the classroom to make teaching and learning more engaging and meaningful. A first step all teachers should do is send home two letters for the parents or guardians to sign, one requesting permis-sion to photograph and use images of their children and the second to allow stu-dents to use the Internet by signing the school’s acceptable use policy. These two letters give teachers the legal rights to use photography in the classroom and allow their students to look at images online. An example of these letters can be found at the website for the Los Angeles Unified School District (http://notebook.lausd.net/portal/page?_pageid=33,136640&_dad=ptl&_ schema = PTL_EP). Additional free online resources to support teachers include: the International Center of Photog-raphy’s comprehensive Focus on Photography: A Curriculum Guide (Way 2006), the Exchange’s Out of the Box Early Childhood training kit, Empowering Images: Using Photography as a Medium to Develop Visual Literacy (Duncan 2007), and Powerful Voices for Kids’ Interpreting and Creating Photos (n.d.).
Another use of visual images is for students to create wanted posters, visual representations of subject matter they are learning. This assignment is an opportu-nity to demonstrate content matter understandings, to use images to teach various
Fig. 3 Third-grade students at an elementary school in downtown Los Angeles engaged in a simi-lar activity as the Good Photo/Bad Photo Assignment, when they created very different photo-graphs of their cafeteria manager and principal
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subjects as well as learn basic computer skills for combining images with words and exploring visual designs. In the critical media literacy class, the wanted post-ers become class projects, and like any good project-based learning, the process of creating the product is where most of the learning occurs. It is important that teach-ers recognize the value of the process, so they do not fall into the common trap of overvaluing the final product at the expense of the creation process. The task also serves as an introduction to basic technology skills such as: inserting an image into a Word document, using Word Art for a title, including a border, and adding text boxes—a description and a warning. The assignment requires teachers and students to think about visual literacy and consider typography (type of font, color, size), photography, illustration, composition, and design (core concept #2: media mes-sages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules). In order for students to transmediate (Cappello & Hollingsworth 2008) the information they are learning into visual language, they need to synthesize the ideas into a single image, title, and brief text that will describe it and warn the reader about it.
The assignment also provides an opportunity for student teachers to create post-ers to use as examples for their own students to see visual alternatives for demon-strating learning and reframing the discourse about whose story is seen and heard in the classroom. A social studies student teacher created a wanted poster of Gabriela Silang, an indigenous woman in the Philippines who led her people in armed resis-tance against colonial domination. When teachers and students have the opportu-nity to produce their own representations, they enact the power to determine whose stories are told and how. This wanted poster assignment is one of the most common assignments from the teacher education course that is taken directly into the student teaching classroom where elementary and secondary students create their own post-ers. One eighth-grade English teacher changes this assignment into the “wanted/hero poster” so her students can decide if their poster should reflect something negative that a character is wanted for or something positive and heroic to celebrate. By taking selfies, students can create wanted/hero posters about themselves.
As teachers and students recognize the power of visual representations, we prob-lematize the process to reflect on negative media portrayals they find of themselves. Students use Voicethread.com, an online social media site, to create their Through Others’ Eyes assignment that involves posting an image representing a visual por-trayal of an aspect of their identity that they have seen maligned in the media. They post the image and comment about how this representation negatively presents an aspect of their identity. Voicethread provides the opportunity for students to see and hear each other’s reflection as well as add their comments to their peer’s post-ing. In addition to providing experience with more sophisticated technology than the simple manipulation of images and text in the wanted poster, this assignment requires students to critically analyze media representations and push back at the messages that saturate the world around them. In doing so, students have critiqued the portrayal of body image, immigration, domestic violence, alcoholism, and re-ligion, as well as the intersections of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. These critiques help students explore the influence of visual images and the deep connection that media can have with power and identity, especially when represen-tations are negative.
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Analyzing photographs and visual images is important and seldom part of tra-ditional public education. There are countless ways photographs and visual images can be brought into the classroom to make teaching and learning far more engag-ing and meaningful. While observing Becky Padilla, a new student teacher, I was impressed to see her taking a strategy she learned in a mathematics methods course (Serra 2003) and applying it to teaching language arts to her third graders. Although most teachers introduce new vocabulary by giving the words and definitions for students to memorize, Padilla turned this common activity into a more constructive and engaging lesson. She projected four photographs on the wall and put a vocabu-lary word above them. Padilla instructed the students to find the one picture that is not like the others. She explained that three of the photographs are related to the word and one is not. Students were told to think on their own first, then pair up with a partner to talk about their ideas, and finally to share their views with the whole class. She projected four numbered boxes and placed a picture into each box, which allowed the students to simply refer to the number of the picture they wanted to mention. Padilla had the students explain how they interpreted the pictures and why they were or were not related to the word at the top. By describing their similar and different interpretations, students were also learning media literacy core concept #3 ( different people experience the same media message differently).
The students were fully engaged in the activity and demonstrated enthusiasm seldom seen when teachers introduce new vocabulary. This problem-posing use of images for students to collaboratively construct the meanings of new vocabu-lary words scaffolded the activity in a way that supported students to work at their zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1978). Mercer (2007) refers to this use of language for thinking together as “interthinking,” something that enables people working collaboratively “to achieve something greater than any of them ever could alone” (p. 3). This activity was a wonderful way of using images for students to construct knowledge. A next step could involve students taking their own pictures to illustrate the vocabulary words.
Shooting Back
One of the best ways to teach students to critically analyze any media is through having them make media. When students are actively creating their own photo-graphs, the learning process becomes more academic and empowering. Mohammed Choudhury was a middle school teacher in downtown Los Angeles who had his stu-dents use cameras to learn media literacy, social studies, and ESL. His students be-gan by analyzing the way mainstream media portrayed their neighborhood, some-thing that also led to discussion about media literacy core concept #5 ( media are organized to gain profit and/or power). As they noticed the patterns of negative im-ages and articles about the inner city, they decided to do their own exploration and went in search of the assets of their community. Students took walking fieldtrips to explore their neighborhood and documented their findings with photographs and interviews of the people and places they encountered. The interviews and photo-graphs became primary source documents for their original research about their
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community; something they were able to share with others to provide alternative perspectives about life in the inner city (Choudhury & Share 2012). We did similar activities with my fourth graders, exploring the neighborhood around our school and photographing the people and things that sparked the students’ interest. In the classroom, we used the pictures to map the community, write expository essays, and publish student-made books. Photography became a regular part of our classroom, with a different student working each week as the photography monitor, responsible for documenting classroom activities.
The idea of using the camera as a tool to talk back and respond to dominant media portrayals is something that has been utilized more often in nonprofit orga-nizations and after-school programs than inside K–12 public schools. In the 1980s and 1990s, photojournalist Jim Hubbard (1991) did powerful work putting cameras into the hands of children who were homeless. He and other photographers taught the inner-city youth and children living in homeless shelters, how to use cameras to document their lives. Currently, in East Los Angeles, an after-school program called Las Fotos Project teaches teenage girls to use cameras as phototherapy to build self-confidence, as education to learn creative writing, and as advocacy for social change. In southern Mexico, cameras have been finding their ways into the hands of indigenous people as tools in their struggle for human rights. Carlota Duarte (1998) led The Chiapas Photography Project in the 1990s, where they provided the photo-graphic tools and resources for indigenous people to tell their own stories through pictures. This is a significant change from history, in which Anglos used photogra-phy to record indigenous people as objects of science, art, and entertainment.
Several organizations have been working internationally to do similar work. Kids With Cameras (2014) is a nonprofit organization that was started in 2002 by photographer Zana Briski based on her experiences teaching children to use camer-as in brothels in Calcutta, India. PhotoVoice is another nonprofit organization based in the United Kingdom with projects around the globe. Their mission statement emphasizes the idea of empowering people to use cameras to shoot back: “Photo-Voice’s mission is to build skills within disadvantaged and marginalised communi-ties using innovative participatory photography and digital storytelling methods so that they have the opportunity to represent themselves and create tools for advocacy and communications to achieve positive social change” (PhotoVoice 2014).
The Indymedia movement is another example in which cameras are being used by the people who for too long have been merely objects of photographs. The power of photography to objectify people can be challenged when the camera is used to tell different stories by the people who have traditionally been disempowered by tech-nology. When the people who are often marginalized are the photographers, they move from being objects to becoming subjects empowered to name and frame their ways of seeing. Freire (2010) writes that science and technology have been long used “to reduce men to the status of ‘things’” (p. 133). This objectification of people through art and photography has been especially pernicious for people of color, women, and the poor who have traditionally been represented as less than, othered, exotic, or sexual objects to be looked upon (Berger 1977). Through Independent Media Centers, videos and still photographs are being taken and shared around the world by people with little economic or political power to bring awareness to
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issues that are rarely covered in mainstream commercial and government media. Photography can be a powerful tool for democratizing media representations, so this power to move from being objects to becoming subjects is something teachers and students should be learning how to use in their classrooms.
Connecting Academics to the World Beyond the Classroom
While photography may seem like a natural fit for teaching social studies or lan-guage arts, it can also be an excellent tool for teaching mathematics and science. Students can become mathematicians and scientists, armed with cameras to explore their school and community for places where they can find mathematics and sci-ence concepts in the real world (Neumann-Hinds 2007). This is an activity that can be used with any age for almost any concept. I have had kindergartners search their school with cameras to photograph and name the different shapes they could find in the objects on the playground. A similar project was done with ELLs to photo-graph real-world examples of shapes that they had been learning in the classroom (Thompson & Williams 2009). Older elementary school students can use photo-graphs of shapes to figure perimeter and area. Secondary school mathematics stu-dents can hunt for slopes, parabolas, ratios, circle sectors, and functions. Motivation increases and academics become more meaningful when students make connec-tions between the world around them and the academic content they are learning inside the classroom. The camera can be an ideal tool to bridge this gap between students’ lives and academic concepts.
Orellana and Hernández (1999) report on a project in which they took first-grade students on literacy walks around their neighborhood to explore and photograph the environmental print. They write, “The print that surrounds children in urban communities can provide an excellent source of literacy conversation and learn-ing. By taking literacy walks with children in their community, teachers can learn much about children’s everyday literacy and their worlds” (p. 612). Orellana and Hernández found the photographs the children took on their walks helped connect their home lives with school and also “prompted children to reveal rich experiential knowledge” (p. 617).
In a language acquisition course for preservice elementary school teachers, stu-dents took a similar literacy walk around the university in teams, using their cell phones to photograph anything that interested them. After exploring for 30 min, the students returned to the classroom and created products that combined their photos with words. One team made homophone flash cards with photographs of a statue of a bear and the bare ground, of stairs in a building, and two students as they stare at each other. On another team, each person took numerous pictures, returned to the class and selected one each, then displayed them on their cell phones and wrote haikus to accompany the images (Fig. 4). A third team made a collage in PowerPoint with their photos and wrote a poem to accompany them. While debriefing about the activity, they commented about the power of having students become the creators of their texts and how well the camera functions as fresh eyes to make the familiar new.
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In the critical media literacy class, preservice mathematics and science teachers use cameras to create mathematics trails and science trails. They work collabora-tively to find and photograph concrete examples that demonstrate a mathematics or science concept. They photograph it and then create questions for their students to solve based on the photographs. One group of science teachers turned this into the popular cell phone game 4 Pics 1 Word. They chose the word “photosynthesis” and then took four pictures that represented key components necessary for photosynthe-sis (Fig. 5). The lesson was engaging and academic, requiring students to demon-strate their learning through the creation of a project using their surroundings and photography. Another option could be for one group of students to create a treasure hunt for other students to find the science or mathematics concepts that the students photographed.
Britsch (2010) describes how creating photo trails can provide an opportunity for ELLs to learn key vocabulary and syntactic patterns necessary for providing directions and describing locations. She explains that English language develop-ment occurs best when teachers plan strategic verbal interactions with the photog-raphy assignment. “Verbal interactions will necessarily highlight the role of key locational and temporal vocabulary in syntactic constructions such as PREPOSI-TION + NOUN PHRASE (e.g., ‘toward the principal’s office’) or IMPERATIVE VERB + ADVERBIAL (e.g., ‘Turn right.’)” (p. 175). One photo trail my preservice teachers created included a photograph of a candy vending machine, with the ques-tion: “Functions—for every x value, there is one and only one y value. How is a vending machine like a function?” Another group took a picture of bicycle tires and asked, “How many circle sectors exist on the bicycle? Find the area of each.”
Fig. 4 This is the final product of a literacy walk in which preservice teachers used their cell phones to explore the campus, photograph what they noticed, and then create a haiku poem
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A photograph of cracks in the sidewalk generated the question, “How do cracks in concrete form?” The picture of a streetlight elicited the following questions: “How does this lamp work? How does electricity produce light in an incandescent bulb?
Fig. 5 Preservice science teachers created this game from their photo trail as they walked around the campus photographing images to represent the scientific concept of photosynthesis
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What happens when electricity passes through the filament? Is the filament under-going a chemical reaction?” In all these examples, the camera was just one aspect of an overall pedagogy that aims to make learning more inquiry based, interactive, and student centered.
Applying these ideas during his student teaching, Alexander Dinh turned his ninth-grade biology class into a critical media literacy inquiry. While studying DNA and genetics, he asked his students, “Where do racial categorizations come from?” To answer this question, his students split into inquiry teams to research and create public service announcement (PSA) videos to explain their findings. Using their cell phones to photograph and film, students unpacked the science about transcrip-tion and DNA translation as well as discussed the way science has been misused to promote racism. In one PSA, the students report:
The idea of genetics causing racism has constantly been twisted and turned in all sorts of directions. Ninety-nine percent of our genes are similar to all around us. That one percent is what makes us unique and apart from everyone else. Yet, society creates racism. Looks and appearances, judging of one another, [telling] racial jokes, are what racism is and it needs to be stopped. All must be informed about what genetics are to fully understand the concept of racism. (Stop Racism 2013)
Photography can become a tool to democratize the classroom by empowering stu-dents to question and explore their surroundings.
Challenges to Bringing Cameras into the Classroom
Any new endeavor has its challenges and the current atmosphere of scripted curricu-la, pacing plans, and high-stakes testing is not helping promote creative educational innovations. Schiller and Tillett (2004) report on a project in Australia involving seven and 8-year-old students using digital cameras with a teacher who had very little knowledge or experience with photography. For them, this project highlighted “…the need for additional time to be spent on activities, the need for ‘just in time’ as-sistance, the importance of team input and the crucial need for additional support for the teacher” (Schiller & Tillett 2004, p. 411). The teacher was successful because she reached out to other adults for support and even involved the students as co-learners and co-teachers. Schiller and Tillett write, “…the children themselves contributed to this ‘just in time’ assistance as they excelled in different areas…. Collaboration between adults and between the children in assisting each other was an important feature of this project” (p. 412). As with much of the new media and technology, the rate of change is so fast that nobody is an expert in everything and we are all learners in something. As more students are gaining access to cell phones, tablets, computers, video games, and other information communication technologies, they are acquir-ing skills that can be significant assets in the classroom. Using photography in the classroom can become an opportunity for teachers to facilitate learning with students in a process that can shift the power dynamics of the classroom to become more democratic; from sage on the stage to guide on the side (King 1993).
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Conclusion
In the twenty-first century, the way we educate our youth must keep pace with the realities they are experiencing in their home lives and in the world around them. Photography and media are their tools of choice for engaging with others and ex-pressing themselves. These are also the platforms that most commercial media are using to sell products and disseminate messages. As educators, we have the respon-sibility to prepare students to be able to critically analyze visual images as well as printed texts. Visual literacy and critical media literacy skills are necessary today for responsible citizens to be able to participate in a democracy. It is also one of the expectations of the Common Core State Standards, which state that students need to present information and demonstrate their learning with digital media and visual displays. Students need to know how to use these tools to create their own alterna-tive messages that can challenge injustices they find in the dominant discourse. The type of literacy needed in the twenty-first century is far more visual, multimodal, and complex than the print-based requirements for reading and writing in the last century. The good news is that now the tools are cheaper and more user friendly than ever. A powerful pedagogical tool has come of age and educators need to em-brace photography for all its potential.
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Jeff Share worked for 10 years as a freelance photojournalist documenting situations of poverty and social issues on three continents. After a decade of photojournalism, Jeff changed careers and moved into education. He taught bilingual primary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 6 years. During this time he earned his master’s degree researching the potential for teaching students to think critically about media. Through combining his experiences in photo-journalism with his passion for teaching, Jeff ventured deeper into the area of media literacy. For a couple of years, he worked at the Center for Media Literacy as their regional coordinator for training and later earned his PhD in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Jeff currently works as a faculty advisor for UCLA’s Teacher Education Program and continues his research and practice focusing on the teach-ing of critical media literacy in K–12 education. He has created a course in critical media literacy that has become mandatory for all new teacher candidates at UCLA. In 2015, Peter Lang published the second edition of his book, Media Literacy is Elementary: Teaching Students to Critically Read and Create Media.
