Containing Pedagogical Complexity Through the Assignment of Photography: Two Case Presentations

• In Event: Aesthetic Objects, Art Practices, and Curricular Inquiry

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of photography as a narrative approach to learning in the context of post-secondary education. Two case presentations are discussed: a social studies methods course in a teacher education program in the south of the United States; and a senior undergraduate seminar on global violence at a university in southern Ontario, Canada. The cases are culled and then theorized from our separate experiences of assigning students with the task of taking photographs to help represent their understanding of course material. Using psychoanalytic theory as our theoretical framework, we explore how the assignment of photography contains and works through the complexities of learning out of crisis, frustration and anxiety. The paper, thus, has two different objectives. One purpose is an inquiry into how students symbolize their learning when that experience contains and/or represents a difficult demand – such as in learning to teach or learning to witness narratives of violence. Second, we inquire as to whether or not the photography assignments we invite our students to complete can contain these experiences and lead to new forms of thought.

Our use of the term “pedagogical complexity” is inspired by inquiries into learning that view the self as relational and so consider how one’s attachments to the social world - sometimes conflicted, sometimes passionate and/or indifferent - can lead to new forms of knowledge and understanding. Here, we are influenced by terms of learning such as Britzman’s (1998) “difficult knowledge”, Pinar’s (2005) “complicated conversation”, Felman’s (1992) “teaching out of crisis” and Ellsworth’s (2005) “pedagogical address”. What these terms share is a perspective that education brings the learner to the limits of knowledge and of the self, an encounter that is both affectively charged and emotionally significant.

To engage in our inquiry we each present our cases using a narrative approach that describes our rationale for including photography as an assignment. Using student work and our interpretations as “data”, we then proceed to a cross case analysis and discussion of the work. Our findings indicate that the practice of photography offers the student a way to represent and interpret their experience, bringing about a tolerable and instructive containment (Bion, 1962; Waddell, 2002).

Further, the assignments themselves operate in strikingly similar ways. The act of taking the photograph displaced worry onto a new frame (literally and figuratively), making space for meanings to emerge as tentative ideas. The textual and narrative reflection that followed the creation of the photographs invited the circulation of new narratives and understandings. The assignment also provided a way for anxious feelings, confusions, or apprehensions to return back out to the world.

The significance of this study is that a productive distance was found between the apprehension and understanding of difficult experience. It was our goal, as pedagogues, to keep that distance open, for it is this invitation that lends pedagogical force to the learning encounter.

Authors

• H. James Garrett, University of Georgia

• Sara Matthews, Wilfrid Laurier University