"Seeing through Different Eyes": exploring the value of participative research using images in schools
Ian Kaplan and Andy Howes
University of Manchester
This article is an exploration of the value of research involving images in a school, and aims to provoke more general discussion of the purpose, value and risks of educational research using images. It reports on a participative research project in a secondary school which led to the construction of a website based on images of that school. The value of the process and of the website in promoting learning within the school community is discussed and assessed, along with the risks of abuse, misuse, and manipulation of those images. The authors consider the value of grouping and clustering the images generated in this project as a means of engaging meaningfully with the images themselves, their context and what they represent. Data are presented from discussions with students and staff involved in taking images, with further reflection on the process that they and we engaged in.
Introduction
There are more and more images of school in schools, particularly since digital photography has made it so easy to capture events and activities for displays, newsletters and websites. Many of these images reinforce positive messages about pupils, and about the opportunities that many schools provide for excitement and enjoyment, thereby playing a significant role in reinforcing desirable norms and promoting ideals. We want to suggest that this way of using images neglects much of their potential contribution to educational processes, and to the development of schools as educational institutions.
This article is an exploration of the value of research involving images in a school, and aims to provoke more general discussion of the purpose, value and risks of educational research using images. It reports on a participative research project in a secondary school which led to the construction of a website based on images of that school. The value of the process and of the website in promoting learning within the school community is discussed and assessed, along with the risks of abuse, misuse, and manipulation of those images. We present data from discussions with students and staff involved in taking images, and reflect further on the process that they and we engaged in.
Readers who have access to the internet may like to refer to the website connected with this project here sooner rather than later, for the sake of clarity and understanding. It is available on line at
The construction of the project
The ‘Seeing through Different Eyes’ project has its origins in a different research project in AppletreeSchool with which we were involved during 2002. The school had chosen to teach boys and girls separately in most academic subjects from years seven to nine, returning to mixed teaching for years ten and eleven. The effects this gender split teaching had on the school and its community were complex and little understood, and the school management invited us to conduct an evaluation. The school had many questions about how attainments, learning and participation, behaviour and numbers on roll had been affected during the three years of gender split teaching. We soon came to believe that all of these issues were interconnected parts of a larger phenomenon. Our starting point was not to ask, ‘does gender split teaching work in Appletree?’ but rather: ‘how does gender split teaching work in Appletree?’ This question guided our approach to the evaluation, and led us to experiment with the use of images.
While the perspectives of staff and even parents are often well represented in qualitative, school-based educational research, the perspectives of pupils are often marginalized, if not ignored entirely (Elliot, 1991). Since pupils generally have the least amount of power in school communities and the least say in terms of their education, school authorities can make it difficult for pupils to engage in research. Yet often it is exactly the views of marginalised pupils that are of most value in stimulating institutional change, because they are most strongly subject to the taken-for-granted and unquestioned assumptions of those who are more powerful. Given that interviews and questionnaires had not seemed adequate methods for learning about pupils’ perspectives, we looked for a methodology that would encourage pupils to engage in research on their own school.
We brought to this question a long-held fascination with photographic images and their social role. The notion that images can be more than archival records in social and particularly educational research is relatively recent (Banks, 1998; Harper, 1998; Prosser, 1998; Winston, 1998), and we were intrigued at the possibility that taking and considering images might open up new avenues of enquiry. We were influenced by the work of Micheal Schratz and Ulrike Steiner-Löffler in Austrian schools, which highlighted the benefits of image taking/making and consideration in schools as being not only a valuable source of data, but also potentially empowering for the pupils and staff who generate the images (Schratz and Steiner-Löffler, 1998). Consequently, as part of the evaluation of gender split teaching, we invited four Year 10 pupils to take photographs of places they felt comfortable and uncomfortable within the school. The resultant images and commentary was insightful and revealing.
The 'Seeing Through Different Eyes' project developed as a result of this first step. At its heart was the concept of reflection, and the assumption that members of the school community can learn a lot by considering the school as seen through their own and other’s eyes. We hoped that images might provoke reflection on aspects of the school that are often taken-for-granted.
The project provided an opportunity for Appletree pupils and staff to view the school from their and other’s perspectives. For example, a photograph of an empty field (such as Group 1, field) may appear entirely self-evident and unimportant until we realise that the image is not just about the field itself as a physical location, but about what it signifies for different people. A pupil may have taken the image because it makes her happy and reminds her about sunny days and playing outside during lunch, a teacher may look at the image and think about emptiness and loss and all the pupils who have played there who are no longer in the school; another pupil notices the litter on the field and thinks how ugly it is. Not only does each viewer have a unique individual perspective, but perhaps also a shared perspective with others; a teacher, like the pupil, is also displeased with the litter, a pupil like the teacher, also thinks how lonely the empty field looks. Furthermore, different people may have more than one perspective about the image, and these perspectives can change, dependent on mood, situation and context.
In this project, we invited pairsof boys and of girls from Years 7, 8 and 9 to work together, so that both the making of photographs and their interpretation was a social process. They followed the same basic guidelines as the Year 10 pupils had done in taking their photographs. When we returned with the prints a week later, we invited pupils first to talk through the images without us, then to select the ten that they considered most interesting, and to write descriptions of these. At this point, we asked them to talk about these images on tape with us. Participating staff did the same, although they worked alone. Finally, we invited all groups to discuss the images of one other group, and again we recorded these comments. Part of the meaning of the process is suggested by participants who took the opportunity to be reflexive, turning to their own participation as a subject for study. Pupils, for example, commented as follows:
Pupil 1: This photo has all the people that...most of the people that took photographs of the school and it has Andy Howes and Ian something in it and it shows a bit of the computers and they're working together on the photographs and they're looking at each others photographs and they're discussing how they like it and how they don't like it. We are very glad we have been involved in this project…
Pupil 2: We are glad we have been involved in this project because like not all the school got to do it, only some people chosen and that was at random as well and I was lucky to have been one of them and its quite fun and it means we're allowed to miss our lessons. (Group 8 image, informal working group)
This evident enthusiasmextended into commitment as, for example, they spent lunchtimes in discussion and reflection of images. We identified several reasons for this, ranging from the personal to the political and the aesthetic. For all participants, as with Pupil 2 above, taking pictures in school offered an interruption to routine, something ‘out of the ordinary’. Handling and discussing the photos appeared to be motivating for a range of reasons. Some participants explicitly valued the way that staff and pupils were treated as equals in the process, although in practice, their different status afforded them differential access to situations and people in the school. There were groups of both teachers and pupils who tended to portray the school from a personal and idiosyncratic angle, reflecting, for example, their pride in the school, or searching to show features that they particularly valued, and capturing what might otherwise be lost. Some groups particularly focused on photographing displays, which linked with the purpose of achieving an aesthetically pleasing result. Then there were other, mainly older pupils who generated evidence to legitimate issues that they felt needed raising, either with the school management or with their peers. This last point highlights the contribution that images can make to informed discussion of the perspectives of those whose critical voice goes unheard, and we will return to this later.
The necessary subjectivity of interpretation of photographs is a key to their mediating role in bringing people's different perspectives into contact. The photographers have an ownership of and personal insight into their images, but when each image is viewed and commented on by others (indeed as soon as it is taken) it also becomes something other than what the photographer intended it to be. The photographs are each about a time and place, but they also represent a place at different times, and bring to mind associations of many kinds with that place. These images provide space and context for discussion of issues and interpretations, affected by the time between when they are taken and when they are viewed. In the process as we arranged it, photographers and other commentators (whether pupils or staff) were invited to give us their comments separately from one another and anonymously, at some distance from the tensions and immediacy of face to face discussion. Their interpretation of our role and position affected what they said (Harper, 2002), but there comments were not dominated by the existing hierarchies of relationships among different groups of pupils, or between pupils and teachers.
Three examples will demonstrate how images were used by participants. Firstly, the picture of pupils playing football on a pitch (Group 3 image, all weather pitch) was taken by a year 7 boy, and it provided both a specific and more general context for commentary. Pupils described what they had depicted: ‘We took it because it's tidy, a playing zone. It's fun to play on. We play there when there's a lot of mud on the pitch’ (Year 7 boy). When the learning mentor commented, he interpreted the image as exemplifying a general point: ‘Pupils having a good time, doing what they are supposed to be doing, enjoying school’. These easily interpretable images seem to allow for narratives that flow between the specific and the general, making them very engaging for participants. These narratives are also very helpful in constructing some of the assumptions and purposes which people in school hold in relation to various activities and opportunities.
A second image, of a field with woods in the background, was taken by a pair of year 7 girls (Group 1 image, field). This is one of many that indicate how participants held shared perspectives. ‘I think it's a nice site because it's got different colours... the trees just turning orange and red…but I think there should be an improvement in the litter because there's lots of litter’ (Year 7 girl). The teacher who commented on the image seemed to share the perception of the aesthetic value of the scene, and also talked about pupils’ carelessness of their environment. ‘It's a very special place for the pupils. This is a nice, nice beautiful campus that we have here. It's something we take for granted, teachers, pupils, all of us, we don't know how much it costs to have grounds like this…I'm hoping to be able, through the PSE program, to develop an interest in maintaining these grounds…It frees the mind to be able to look out over this kind of thing, and I don't think our pupils appreciate it yet enough’. Identifying such contradictions is potentially powerful as part of a process of teachers and pupils learning more about each other, and learning how to work together.
A group of year 7 boys took the third image (Group 3 image, trees) and described it as
‘a woodland area at the front of our school, which we like because it’s very tidy and its got lots of trees, and a big field. There's like birds singing, and like birds nesting. There's lots of animals’.
A learning mentor later commented on how
‘the branches of the tree also show me that to get to one destination, if there's a career they want to go for, there are different ways to get there. Not a particular way. I'll keep on saying, when I was at school I didn't think I'd be doing what I'm doing. For me the branches themselves show that there's always another way to get to your destination’.
In this way, he used the image of the tree as a symbol of something that linked him with pupils: all of them faced with choices about careers and an unknown future. The image became an opportunity to construct a sense of possibilities and opportunities, for both himself and the pupils he worked with.
As with all comments recorded, these were made not as a reaction to someone else’s comments, but only in response to the image itself. We felt that by reacting to an image without any text, participants felt freer to present their associations and thoughts, speaking more openly than they might have done in responding to the commentary of others.
The construction of the website
We envisaged a website which would offer users the opportunity to make their own associations with and between the images and commentary from the pupils and staff of the school. We wanted to create a platform on which the different ways of seeing and thinking that existed in the school community could be explored, compared, contrasted and questioned, with a structure which would guide users without constraining too much the possibilities for making links and connections. There was something initially liberating in thinking of the web as a space in which to create a sort of alternate, or parallel universe for the Appletree data to exist in. Yet at the same time, it was necessary for us to provide categories and devices which people could easily access and learn to use.
We felt we needed a standard form of layout and operation, both to facilitate construction and so that people using the site would feel at home with the routines and procedures. Our designs permeate everything from thematic categories to page layout, image selection to length of comments. In attempting to capture and (re)present a diversity of views of the school and participant perspectives we had toomit some images and comments from the final product. In framing the website, we inevitably constructed limits to others’ exploration. For example, we felt that viewing the commentary that accompanies the images should be optional; we saw it not as simplifying things, but as highlighting the complications, various meanings and perspectivesthat surround these images. In this project it is particularly easy to reflexively trace our influence as researchers through the whole of the process from inception to analysis.
The influence of the product on the process
We wanted users of the website to be able to engage with the perceptions of different participants about images. Here was an example of how the characteristic linking nature of the web influenced our plans for the project. It was with a systematic website in mind that we systematically invited participants to comment on each others' images as well as their own.
While we hoped the photographs would stimulate interesting interactions between the photographers and members of the school community who viewed them, the assembly of the website created more complex dynamics between their perspectives. Although participants’ commentaries could be seen to have been taken out of context, each image provides a reference for the comments below it; each photograph becomes a context for the comments. The ‘layering’ of commentary from pupils, teachers and sometimes other staff, while not representing a discussion or dialogue in a literal sense, becomes something more than a juxtaposition of monologues. We see it as something like the first stage of a dialogue, inviting but not containing further negotiation or clarification.