This paper draws on research into a participatory photography project, designed to explore how pre-service students conceptualise and experience poverty and disadvantage when teaching in East London schools in socio-economically deprived areas. The setting for much the research is a university-based post-graduate teacher education programme in the London Borough of Newham, which with 30% child poverty levels ranks the third highest in the city and the thirteenth in the UK overall. The research includes analysis of how the students in the sample group (n=15) use photography to conceptualise and discuss their experiences of working in schools with high levels of poverty and disadvantage. The use of photography as a participatory tool within visual research methodology is well documented. In this research this method, particularly photo elicitation, offers a means of developing powerful narratives of experience. Other qualitative research methods, particularly interviewing and documentary analysis, are also deployed. The findings are analysed using a bespoke theoretical framework, combining perspectives on teaching for social justice through teacher education, research on the processes of learning to teach and studies of space/spatiality. Important here is Hargreaves’ (1995:32) argument that ‘what it means to be in teacher education.... can only properly be understood by firmly locating our studies of teacher education in space as well as in time’. The findings of the study indicate how space both structures and is structured by the social practices of teacher education, and how it affects the possibilities for the construction of student teachers’ identities and the social and psychic boundaries of the ‘self’ as they come to terms with working in schools in deprived areas with pupils who live their lives in poverty and suffer educational disadvantage. Findings from the research are then used to develop appropriate pedagogical frameworks for addressing the effects of poverty on educational attainment.

Hargreaves, A. (1995). Towards a Social Geography of Teacher Education. in N. Shimahara & I. Holowinsky (Eds.), Teacher Education in Industrialised Nations: Issues in Changing Social Contexts. New York: Garland