Using Photovoice to Support Children Participation and Community Change

Author(s):

María Isabel Doval(presenting / submitting)María Ainoa Zabalza-Cerdeiriña María Amalia Muñoz-Cadavid

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

04. Inclusive Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

04 SES 07 B, Participatory Research: A Process of Community Change and a Research Methodology

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

17:15-18:45

Room:

B014 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Liz Todd

Contribution

This work describes and analyzes the use of Photovoice in CEIP do Foxo, a Pre-primary and Primary school in A Estrada (Pontevedra), a local community in the Northwest of Spain. This methodology uses photography and dialogue to promote change and social improvement (Wang, 1999, 2006), encouraging all students to give their opinion about their opportunities in participation in the school and the ways to promote it. In order to converge on a local inclusive project, a local interactive exhibition was organized aimed at the immediate community. The exhibition provided a platform to review and to improve the strengths and opportunities of the school in order to promote community changes in student participation.

This work is part of a national research project funded by the Spanish National Research Programme R&D+i 2011 (Ref. MICINN- EDU2011-29928-C03-01), entitled “Schools moving towards educational inclusion: working with the local communicty, students’ voices and educational support for promoting change”, directed by Prof. Ángeles Parrilla (University of Vigo, Spain).This project is building an inclusive education local plan through the progressive establishment of educational and social networks in which the different members of the community involved in the project converge.

Our approach is in line with current international approaches which, under the heading of “Community Development”, promotes bottom up actions. These take for granted that people are entitled to speak and vote in the matters affecting them, special attention being drawn to some of the basic principles such as participation, mutual support and collective action (Fawcett, Goodwin, Meagher and Phillips, 2010). The aim is to develop a culture of full participation in relations between school and the community (substantial changes not only at schools level, but also, and at the same time, at local and community levels). From this point of view, schools can manage to make themselves visible, especially in certain fields, such as in rural areas (as in the case in point), and the most valuable resources in a community.

Main goal: to rethink, using Photovoice, the view of children’s participation at school in order to improve their reality by considering their analyses and proposals. To make the children co-protagonists of a process in which their opinions are taken into account, both in identifying needs and in the subsequent development of improvement processes. The work conducted set out to contribute to strengthening and improving the Foxo school by increasing the opportunities for student involvement, bearing in mind their view but also those of the social and educational media in which the school is immersed.

Objectives and strategies:

- increase participation processes in order to improve inclusion in the school, encouraging the genuine participation of the pupils;

- identify and prioritize situations involving exclusion and inclusion in terms of the participation processes in the school, through photography activities and a joint reflection around a micro-analysis of participatory situations;

- seek change in the excluding conditions/situations at school that arise from limitations set on participation in the community, through the contextualized design and putting into practice of actions and proposals that improve participation;

- encourage local involvement in the analysis and search for a response to inclusive or exclusive situations, enabling the community to take part in the results, collaborating with other schools and social institutions in diverse activities (interscholastic and local activities) that set out to converge on an inclusive project at local level.

Method

This paper sets out to respond to a critical-participatory research model, applying contributions and the use of Photovoice (participatory photography). This methodology follows the basic principles of Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), which considers the community as an equal partner throughout all stages of research, from identifying a research query to making the knowledge known and social action. CBPR processes provide a platform on which to revise and improve the strengths and opportunities in a community. It has already shown great potential for dealing with the problems affecting the participation of children in schools. This process, which lasted 42 days, involved adapting the proposal tabled by Wang (1999). A cyclical process was articulated from the intra-school level to the local level, but finally returning to the school. The initial level involved the whole school (110 children, 17 teachers, school counsellor, school’s Leadership team and families). The children negotiated and obtained digital images (using cameras, smartphones and tablets) and their corresponding narratives, referring to 4 different scenario: situations or activities in which the children were unable to participate, situations in which they were able to participate, situations in which they could not participate but would like to and situations in which they would not like to participate. By way of a subsequent step, all students, using diverse procedures, selected a total of 12 co-textualized photographs, considered to be the most representative of their school and made diverse multimedia products. At local level, an exhibition was organized in which the entire local community took part as well as educational and local authorities. This exhibition built up a collective awareness towards change and social transformation, which, in turn, involved a procedure for sounding out the community that was considering diverse parallel activities. All this shared knowledge reverted back to the school in order to establish improvement plans regarding the weaknesses and strengths noted in the participation of children at school and in the community. We used a wide range of qualitative strategies for gathering and analysing the information, with the involvement of all participants. Some of these strategies were: discussion groups, interviews, document analysis, observations and photo and video analysis. Content analysis turned out to be a complex task in which the students took part as co-researchers. As regards the photos and narrations drafted by the children, these were analysed by themselves and their teachers, following the proposals of visual ethnography.

Expected Outcomes

This method constitutes an effective tool for improving children's participation in school, for establishing networks between schools and making positive changes within the community. Main outcomes: - Reinforcement and improvement of the school’s social framework. - Improvement of physical and organizational conditions (in the school, in the classrooms and in the community). - A greater participation of the community in terms of organization, structure and methodology of the daily life of school. Each of these dimensions involved the development of several school-level and community-level improvement plans which, as a whole, comprised an institutional participation project. The entire process has had a substantial impact on the research process itself by entailing the development of genuinely participatory methodologies in which the teachers, pupils, local community and researchers have acted as equal partners, democratizing the research process and, in turn, making it all inclusive. This work also highlights, once again, the capacity that children have to contribute to school inclusion and improvement. This process empowered children, granting them the role of researchers in matters that concern and affect them directly. Children are able to carry out serious, significant studies if they have the opportunity and the appropriate support. This activity required an important collective effort in terms of personnel and timing, but it also led to many returns and satisfactions for the educational community. The degree of satisfaction for all those involved was very high. This process also impacted on the school mission and vision statements and its educational project, where a more inclusive culture is being fostered. This can be appreciated in the changes made to the documentation and official regulations on the running of the school and in the detection of new training needs for all its members. Also there has been an effective increase in the responsibility and collaborative work.

References

Alderson, P. (2002). “Children as researchers: The effects of participation rights on research methodology”. In P. Christensen and A. James (Eds.), Research with children. Perspectives and practices (241-257). New York: Routledge Falmer. Douglas, H. (2002). “Talking about pictures: a case for photo elicitation”. In Visual Studies, 7 (1), 13-26. Doval, M. I.; Martínez-Figueira, M. E. y Raposo, M. (2013). “La voz de sus ojos: la participación de los escolares mediante Fotovoz”. In Revista de Investigación en Educación, 11(3), 150-171. Doval, M. I.; Martínez, M. E. & Soto, J. (2012). “The Voice of Your Eyes: Children and Participation”. Paper presented in the 19th International Conference on Lerarning, London, 14-16 August 2012. Fawcett, B., Goodwin, S., Meagher, G. &y Phillips, R. (2010). Social Policy for Social Change. Melbourne: Palgrave. Fielding, M. & Bragg, S. G. (2003). Students as Researchers: Making a Difference. Cambridge: Pearson Publishing. Grover, S. (2004). “Why won´t they listen to us? On giving power and voice to children participation in social research”. In Childhood, 11 (2), 81-93. Kaplan, I. & Howes, A. (2004). “Seeing Through Different Eyes: exploring the value of participative research using images in schools”. In Cambridge Journal of Education, 34 (2), 143-155. Kroeger, S., Embury, D., Cooper, A., Brydon-Miller, M., Laine, C. & Johnson, H. (2012). “Stone soup: Using co-teaching and photovoice to support inclusive education”. In Educational Action Research, 20 (2), 183-200. Messiou, K. (2012). Confronting marginalisation in education: a framework for promoting inclusion. Abingdon: Routledge. Parrilla, A.; Muñoz-Cadavid, M.A. y Sierra, S. (2013). “Proyectos educativos con vocación comunitaria”. In Revista de Investigación en Educación, 11 (3), 15-31. Parrilla, A., Martínez, M. E. y Zabalza, M. A. (2012). “Diálogos infantiles en torno a la diversidad y la mejora escolar”. In Revista de Educación, 359, 120-142. Pink, S. (2007). Doing Visual Ethnography. London: Sage. Smith, L., Bratini, L. & Appio, L. M. (2012). “Everybody's teaching and everybody's learning: photovoice and youth counseling”. In Journal of Counseling and Development, 90 (1), 3-12 Wang, C. C. (1999). “Photovoice: A participatory action research strategy applied to women’s health”. In Journal of Women’s Health, 8 (2), 185-192. Wang, C. C. (2006). “Youth participation in photovoice as a strategy for community change”. In Journal of Community Practice, 14 (1-2), 147-161. Wang, C. C. & Burris, M. A. (1994). “Empowerment through photo novella: Portraits of participation”. In Health Education Quarterly, 21 (2), 171-186.

Author Information

María Isabel Doval (presenting / submitting)

University of Vigo

Didactics, Scholar Organisation and Research Methods

Ourense

María Ainoa Zabalza-Cerdeiriña

University of Vigo, Spain

María Amalia Muñoz-Cadavid

University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain

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