Educational Significance

• In Event: Academic Upgrading Students Remember their Pasts and Dream for their Futures through Photovoice

Abstract

Educational Significance
Multimodal approaches like photovoice encourage the active engagement of students in ways that more instrumental approaches do not. Findings suggest that instructors in academic upgrading contexts need to move past skills-based programs and welcome students’ lives into the curriculum (Christensen, 2017). This study underscores the need for welcoming the unexpected, including critical engagement with students’ life experiences.
The collaborative nature of the study highlights the value of doing things differently in adult upgrading classrooms by inviting students to use multimodal avenues for academic and artistic expression, de-emphasizing individual curriculum mandates, and inviting students to engage with a broader range of critical and cultural texts. This study also suggests the epistemic value of positioning students as knowledge generators and co-inquirers. Student researchers reflected on the texts we read together, posed questions and problems (Freire, 1971/2001) that informed their conversations and writing, surfaced critical perspectives on the world around them, and presented these inquiries multimodally. Their research echoes the findings of scholars (e.g., de los Rios et al., 2017; Huber et al., 2023) who have documented the potential of photovoice as a participatory research method. The projects we share in this symposium foreground questions and insights raised by those most directly impacted by schooling, with the goal of forging solidarity across difference in the service of educational justice.

Author

• Jennifer Emelife, University of Toronto - OISE