Imagining Where We’re Going As We Fly: Unshackling Methodological Chains Through Photovoice

• In Event: Seeking New Suns: Murmurations on the Visual, Affective, Geographic, and Sonic Possibilities of Collaborative Liberatory Methodologies

Abstract

As educational researchers and teacher-scholars who use visual methodologies, we typically find that we do not have a natural home at AERA. This work serves as a reclamation of ourselves, a right to take up space at AERA, and an example of what it looks like to “let go” of normative Westernized qualitative methods and analysis frameworks. Specifically, this paper explores our collaborative data analysis approach around a year-long photovoice project with teachers of Color, and our reflections on our generative methodological innovations during a research retreat.
We are a group of women educators working in K-16 education. Coming into a shared data analysis retreat, we had planned to follow a pre-determined and traditional qualitative methodology that used a priori codes applied to photos, captions, and discussion transcripts (Latz, 2017). However, immediately prior to the retreat, we found that the pre-determined method was not generating novel insights; moreover, the normative and typically siloed approach was not rejuvenating for us as researchers and as people. After some discussion, we decided to put our pre-determined path on pause, but hadn’t yet envisioned how we might re-construct and reimagine our methodological approach to data analysis.
Gathering together in a writer’s retreat that is owned by two Black women, we turned away from our training (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2019) and our computers to conduct our analysis using more improvisational (Lees, 2018) and emergent (Brown, 2017) methods that privileged collective meaning-making. Using printed physical copies of project photos and our photovoice prompts as our jumping off points (see Figures 1 and 2), we created our analytic method in vivo by riffing on the photos and off each other. Through iterative dialogue and storytelling, we saw themes and larger narratives among the data emerge.
As the process unfolded, it was clear that the themes uncovered created a sister circle where we were able to heal and share stories that bonded us together. We unshackled ourselves and training to reaffirm and recenter our scholarship. We realized that the physical space of the retreat was a place of collective respite; walks, informal dialogues, meals, and shared space helped to think around pushing against normative and hegemonic practices. The element of rest and sustenance also allowed us to come to new understandings that were not immediately apparent from a more time-structured reality. Greater human connection through physical presence afforded deeper ideating around history, community, and care that were previously invisible. The co-constructed data analysis process resulted in new counterstories from teachers of Color who provided additional context and ways of thinking through their stories and the renovated analysis process. Unexpectedly, the data analysis process emerged as an element of photovoice itself, adding an unpredicted layer to the project.
In this symposium, we invite the audience to explore uncharted scholarly territory through our reflective process to see how our methodological approaches unfolded, while also providing permission for others to generate their own restorative murmuration(s).

Authors

• Lynnette Mawhinney, Rutgers University - Newark

• Laura Krystal Porterfield, Rutgers University - Newark

• Deborah Bartley-Carter, Montclair State University

• Carol Rinke, Marist College

• Christina Wright Fields, Marist College