The presentation refers to our involvement in two municipal projects aiming to develop and implement more inclusive practices for 1) newly arrived pupils and 2) pupils diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The involvement revealed a frequent wish among project managers for assistance with raising awareness of these pupils’ experiences of their conditions at school. According to previous research, photo elicitation interviews (PEIs) are under-used for such purposes, both generally and in educational contexts, particularly in connection to temporal aspects. Thus, we addressed the project managers’ wish by applying the PEI approach, within two different frames. One is the framework of sociology of education based on Bernstein’s (2000) concepts of classification and framing, paying particular attention to spatiotemporal aspects. The other is the framework of social capital theory in combination with a fine-grained image analytical key. In addition to describing the methodological procedure, we present illustrative analyses of some pupils’ experiences and conditions, then insights obtained and constraints of the method are discussed. We also make recommendations, including how to use the images in the interviews. The specific desire of project managers to obtain knowledge on pupils’ perspectives and to obtain help with an identification of issues that need particular attention to facilitate equity, represents, according to our experiences as researchers, a contemporarily and generally expressed ambition in collaborations between researchers and municipal projects. On the one hand, we see PEIs as fruitful in an inclusive perspective; several aspects of pupils’ conditions emerged in our study that pointed towards the need for improvements both at an individual and a structural level. We see PEIs as fruitful also in a capability raising perspective; in one of the projects the managers started using PEIs in their own close work with pupils and found an analytical tool that matched their needs. On the other hand, we can see some potential dangers: when the methodology was continued by the project managers we, as researchers, at times apprehended concerns referring to ethical but also structural aspects.

Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research and critique. Revised edition. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.