Making Meaning and Planning Change With Students Using Photo-Cued Interviewing

• In Event: Student Voice Research Symposium: Theory, Methods, and Innovations From the Field

Abstract

OBJECTIVES. In this paper, I explain and demonstrate the utility of photo-cued interviewing (PCI) as a novel student voice research strategy. I first identify the purpose and value of PCI as it relates to the SVRF. Then, I illustrate and discuss the PCI method in practice. I ground this discussion in data from a study of migration and Indigenous student identity formation in Peruvian higher education. I detail our research process, highlighting key points for student voice researchers to consider in their own projects. I end with logistical considerations and practical recommendations for others using PCI to understand students’ experiences and to improve their practices.

FRAMEWORKS. Using general examples from my team’s research, I highlight how PCI embodies each of the four tenets of the SVRF—Intersubjectivity, Reflexivity, Power Dynamics, and Context. I also demonstrate PCI’s philosophical foundations in phenomenology and how the photo-cued interview becomes a pseudo-phenomenological space where researcher(s) and participants(s) return to experiences in situ through participants’ photos, exchange understandings of perspectives on those experiences, and co-create new understandings about the meaning made from those experiences. As experiences are pre-reflective (van Manen, 1990), students (and educators) must be provided with the opportunity to purposefully reflect in order to understand and make meaning from an experience (see also Dewey, 1938).

METHODS & DATA SOURCES. In the case study I discuss in this paper, our research team traveled to Cusco, Peru to learn from 28 first-generation Indigenous postsecondary students and recent graduates about how migrating to urban Cusco from their rural communities in the Andean highlands and the Amazonian rainforest affected their identities, their ability to accomplish their goals, and their sense of self and wellbeing. We also invited them to share recommendations for how to improve access, experiences, and outcomes of other rural Indigenous students who wish to pursue higher education. This study arose from the research team’s years-long research and work with these communities, which has illuminated the
opportunities and challenges facing students who seek formal education (Authors, 2015; 2018; 2020a; 2020b; 2022b). The ultimate goal of this research was to impact educational change that would make higher education more responsive to the identities, needs, values, and goals of rural Indigenous students like our participants.

RESULTS. There are many possibilities and challenges to leveraging PCI as a student voice research method. Using PCI in this study helped us and our participants to achieve our learning goals and will be instrumental as we continue to work toward institutional change. PCI helped to build intersubjectivity within the interview space, reflexively examine our biases and assumptions, level researcher-participant, settler-Indigenous, and other power dynamics, and respond to the unique contexts and lived experiences of our participants. The resulting photos and narratives compellingly illustrated the complex identities that rural Indigenous students embody and how migrating to Cusco impacted—for better or worse—who they are and their abilities to achieve their goals. Each of these benefits will be elaborated upon and evidenced in the presentation.

Author

• Kayla Johnson
  Presenting Author