Picturing Culturally Relevant Literacy Practices: Using Photography to See How Literacy Pedagogies Matter to Urban Youth (original) (raw)

Using PhotoVoice to Empower K-12 Teachers and Students through Authentic Literacy Engagements

Writing and Pedagogy

PhotoVoice is a community and participatory action research method based in grassroots empowerment education, critical feminist theory, and documentary photography which enables people with little money, power, or status to communicate needed changes to policymakers. Prior to this in-school research project, studies of PhotoVoice in the United States focused on adolescents in out-of-school educational settings Strack, Magill, and McDonagh, 2004; The Viewfinder Project, 2010). In this study, teacher participants found that English language learners and resistant writers were motivated to identify the impact of personal and political realities in their lives in order to question existing structures and to imagine alternative futures. The use of PhotoVoice in K-12 classrooms offers an accessible, motivating, and technologically rich entry point and an authentic forum for emerging young writers to share their photos, their writing, and their stories with others to create powerful visual representations to transform existing conditions in their communities.

Literacy Through Photography: Multimodal and Visual Literacy in a Third Grade Classroom

This article reports findings from a diverse third grade classroom that integrates a literacy through photography (LTP) curriculum as a central component of writing instruction in an urban public school. A case study approach was used in order to provide an in-depth, multi-dimensional consideration of phenomena by drawing on multiple data sources to examine and describe the LTP program in this third grade classroom. Data were gathered, on average twice a week, throughout a full school year. The findings of this study demonstrate how utilizing different forms of communication, such as photography, alongside traditional school literacies, such as writer's workshop, expands the options that children have of processing and expressing their understanding.

Photography as a Visual Literacy Tool

Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 2016

This article is an attempt to show some theoretical issues founded on how visual literacy processescome about through a photography project. The framework explained is based on Wendy Ewald’s literacythrough photography study (LTP), and on Freire’s reading conception which stare at literacy as a processfor social inclusion. Further a literature review, I provide some practical aspects based on a visual literacyexperience carried out in a private school in Bogotá. Likewise, I describe some key moments of the visualliteracy process that can be developed by an image’s viewer. All this process is based on the socio culturalperspective.

Through parents' eyes: An activist visual literacy project

This visual literacy study, embedded in an intergenerational instructional innovation at an urban primary-junior school in Ontario, Canada, used photography to ascertain caregivers' perceptions of their children's everyday experiences. Photographs, logs, and discussion sessions documented the culture-filtered understandings and sensibilities of caregivers as they reflected upon children's educational experiences in their newly adopted country. Beyond this anticipated function, these data sources served as conduits through which professional educators could access domains of knowledge related to spheres of influence in children's lives that are not normally discovered through standard schooling practices. Equally importantly, they helped immigrant parents to access, and better understand, the diverse resources that children call upon as they navigate various aspects of their Diaspora experiences. Thusly, the photographs functioned not simply as representational icons that substituted for verbal texts but also as heuristics that drove participants' thinking about the psychological and social worlds of immigrant students.

Media Literacy through photography and participation. A conceptual approach.

We are living in social massification processes that oppress our identity and specificity as a human group; however, there are tools increasingly present among researchers, educators and other professionals who help to develop interpretations and create knowledge by developing a participatory communication perspective. This article discusses how communication and learning through dialogue and creative practice can be fostered with social interaction and dialogic processes generated through participatory photography workshops, in order to contribute to media literacy. Similar to other creative experiences of this kind, this is not only a space to share products, jobs, tips and techniques, but also one for social interaction and communication. Educators in the field of media literacy can find, unprecedented challenges and opportunities in these initiatives to take advantage of the body of knowledge of adolescents and promote learning.

Literacy, visual culture, and citizenship in education

Septentrio Conference Series, 2020

Brief : In this presentation, we propose to share, and theorize work in which our education students (in our literacy and curriculum design courses, at Adelphi and Louisiana State universities) explored educational inequities in their local contexts (e.g., differences in school funding in communities on Long Island; in curriculum and pedagogy in schools in Baton Rouge) and created visual representations for communicating the knowledge gained and contemplating how to create alternatives that might work in ways aimed at promoting greater justice. Critical readings of and compelling representations for communicating knowledge, and access to such via education, are particularly called for in the present historical moment wherein equity is increasingly at issue, and access to information while abundant arrives also exponentially and overwhelmingly within an excess of misinformation. Full Proposal: Critical readings of and compelling representations for communicating knowledge, and access...