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

Abstract

This article investigates the use of photography as a narrative approach to learning in the context of postsecondary education. Two cases are presented: 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. With each case presentation we explore how the assignment of photography both instantiates and cultivates the student's ability to tolerate, represent, and interpret encounters with pedagogical complexity. A term of learning that apprehends the pedagogical encounter as made from the tensions between knowing and uncertainty, pedagogical complexity is discussed with regard to the psychoanalytic concept of containment. Using a case presentation approach, the authors explore the possibilities and limits of the assignment of photography in relation to the pedagogical work of containment. Engaging a cross‐case analysis of the research data, the authors conclude by discussing the potential for photographic practices to contain the dynamics of pedagogical complexity.

Notes

Notes

1 Each author secured permission through university ethics protocols to gain access to the student coursework that is discussed in this article.

2 We realize that the assignment of photography also bears a history of educational demand given the particular context of learning. In an arts education classroom, for example, students may have a different relation to the photographic impulse than in the social studies classroom. As a practice of narrative representation photography, like the research essay, is thus also burdened by both popular and institutional expectations. It is our argument, however, that it may achieve different work with regard to the symbolization and containment of pedagogical complexity.

3 One of our seminal course texts was Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's () Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Reading selections from this text, students were asked to identify and describe the authors' vision of ethical encounter and to develop, over the course of the semester, their own understanding of this term in relation to their individual witnessing practice.