In this research work, we explain the results of a proposed teaching innovation in a subject of postgraduate studies of Educational Psychology. The city, as a learning experience, becomes itself as a photographic image through the eyes of the students.  What visual representations they create and what narrative they design is the object of analysis in this document.

We are interested in exploring about the role that the multimodal productions have, for encouraging students to access an understanding of the transcendent features of the modern society. In addition, we want to understand how the photographic records allow to observe and to reflect about the environment and the sociocultural context of the school.

In the background of the university, some ways of traditional teaching are still developed exclusively in the classroom, even though when teachers and students are paradoxically moving in a technological environment, which has transformed what we are and what we do in our daily lives (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). A dense technological environment immerses us in different areas of communication as recipients and speakers through multiple channels and digital texts. We take under consideration the framework that gives us the perspective of social re-constructionist (Liston & Zeichner, 1993), because it provides us the theoretical and practical analysis of the teachers’ training. Theses analyses allow us to study the social conditions of schooling, as well as the implications of the sociocultural changes and the effects that the Information Society has for the school. Students in their initial learning are required to have an open and conscious position in the present; and then they can create environments equitable and inclusive learning for all students (Burbules & Torres, 2000; Reid, Gill & Sears, 2010).

It is obvious that our students know the actual society but they understand it in a fragmented way. The implications that certain characteristics of this society have for education are less visible for them. The perspective offered by the social re-constructionist defends a solid intellectual stance that promotes cultural, social and political training of teachers (Apple, 2011). This perspective takes explicitly a transformative political agenda on board. The academic works of Giroux (1993), Shor (1996) and McLaren (2008) highlight the need for teachers to take critical positions to critically understand the social dynamics, power relations and distribution of knowledge.

New forms of learning brings new object of knowledge under the multimodality. For Bazalgette y Buckingham (2013), the multimodality is not a simple aggregation of methods of communication. The use of two systems of representation gives raise to a way of communicating that, not only involves a quantitative change, but also through the combination of different ways and languages articulates different ways of communicating. 

Harter (2010) uses the photo-textual narrative for trainee teachers to represent and express the relevant social situations related to the object of knowledge. For the author, to work with words and images creates meanings that any of the systems of representation could create by themselves.

But the image made narrative mobilizes the emotion, and the concepts become themselves in forms of narrate and feel the socio-cultural reality. A dimension that Katheleen, Baker y Lyons (2009) contemplate as a need to mitigate the emotional disaffection that it is generated and reinforced by inequalities in the economic, political and cultural relations, raising the awareness in the students of the importance of the interdependence and solidarity which they should provide for the social harmony. Therefore, the photographic image mobilizes students’ feelings that demonstrate an emotional positioning facing the inequalities. This allows developing responsible personal identities that are made aware of social injustice. 

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