Photovoice as a Pedagogical Tool in the Community Psychology Classroom

Abstract

Constructivist perspectives contend that individuals actively extract and make meaning from the world around them. In the classroom this means that students are not passive recipients or repositories for our theories and empirical findings; instead, they actively redefine and relate to (or not) the concepts presented. To simultaneously stimulate and build on this process, I adopted Photovoice as a pedagogical tool to situate students as observers of their own community and create space for them to engage in participatory, community-focused meaning making activities. By employing strategically crafted framing questions, students generated Photovoice data that served as a powerful jumping off point for discussing key community psychology concepts. In addition, the Photovoice process provided students the opportunity to directly experience a participatory research process as well as engage in basic qualitative data analysis. This article presents the general process my class undertook as well as qualitative feedback from students.

KEYWORDS:

• Photovoice
• classroom innovation
• active learning
• undergraduate community psychology education

Acknowledgments

This work was completed while the author was affiliated with Portland State University. She is currently affiliated with the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.