Picturing oppression: seventh graders’ photo essays on racism, classism, and sexism

Abstract

This study, situated in an inner‐city school in Western Canada, involved 20 seventh graders producing photo essays about living with racism, classism, or sexism. Two questions guided the study: (1) How do students working with a critical pedagogue conceptualize their own experiences with race, class, and gender in ways that either interrupt or reinscribe dominant mainstream curricular narratives?; and (2) To what extent can visual methods serve to open up and expand researchers’ understanding of students’ conceptions of their lived experiences in the context of a critical pedagogy classroom? This study drew upon critical pedagogy, critical multicultural education, and visual methodology. Issues of societal curriculum and identity were central to this work. Students’ photo essays not only revealed some patterns of mainstream discourses related to race, class, and gender, but also revealed some very sophisticated understandings of how social issues play out in institutional systems.

Keywords:

• critical pedagogy
• visual methodology
• counterstory
• race
• class
• gender

Notes

1. School, teacher, and student names are all pseudonyms.

2. We were unable to acquire the funds required to reproduce the image here; any Internet search engine will produce the famous Widener photo.