Today, digital technology is present in schools and universities; eBooks, interactive blackboards, tablets or notebooks are now commonplace in Europe’s classrooms. However, when using this technology, students are typically positioned as consumers. In an effort to change this tendency, our project draws on DIY culture, encouraging students to become producers of digital objects. We believe that students and educational institutions need to foster learning experiences that support learners' critical capacity. This is not a goal that can be achieved by using only one platform or tool. Instead, true digital competence means using available devices with pedagogical approaches that connect with youth culture (Buckingham, 2007) – and which are therefore applicable – or transdisciplinary inquiry-based projects, which guide young people to grow into active and thoughtful learners.

The communication focuses on the development of the formation period of the European project “Do it yourself in Education: expanding digital competence to foster student agency and collaborative learning (DIYLab)” (543177-LLP-1-2013-1-ES-KA3MP). The main objective of this project is to promote lifelong and life-wide learning by expanding students’ digital competence, agency, and creativity, by putting into practice DIY philosophies (Guzzetti, Elliott, & Welsch, 2010; Lankshear & Knobel, 2010).

The DIYLab project aims to develop a 'DIYHub' in each participating educational centre to promote student engagement in primary, secondary and higher education by proposing collaborative, meaningful and authentic learning experiences that can be sustainable and expandable after the end of the project. This practice will depend on the use and implementation of different technologies as tools (video editing software, mobile/flexible applications, html5-based services for learning, etc.), focused in one way on documenting students learning processes, and the dissemination and construction of a DIY community (Kafai & Peppler, 2011) in an open, on-line platform.

Initiated in January 2014, this project is carried out by researchers, primary and secondary schools, and universities in Spain, Finland and the Czech Republic. The first phase of this project entailed working with focus groups (Stewart et al., 2007) of teachers, students and parents in order to understand what DIY practices are already in place in each participating context.

The second phase of the project, building on information received in the focus groups, entailed the formation of participating teachers in support of the upcoming implementation of the DIY Lab. The goal of the formation process was that all partners accompanied and participated in the formation process to produce a conceptual and technical approach for the implementation of a DIY Lab in each school.

The communication will discuss to what extent visual methods and documentation could be understood as an educational research process, during this second phase. To do so, we will approach to documentation and the use of visual methods to do qualitative research. We will explore the possibilities of visual methods used in the documenting process with the aim to find other manners of production of knowledge.

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