Abstract
Although various measures of student success are often used as data points in scholarly and policy debates about how to improve schools, the policy and school-level changes that stem from these discussions are presumed to be taken on behalf of students without very much effort to meaningfully include students’ perspectives on the proposed changes. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the promise of photo-elicitation-based data collection to authentically leverage student voice in research on policy and school improvement in ways that promote equity and critical social justice. Photo-elicitation, in its simplest form, involves inviting research participants to take photographs of a space (e.g., a school) under a broad prompt (e.g., places where you like to have fun) (Harper, Visual Studies, 17, 13–26, 2002; Torre & Murphy, Education Policy Analysis Archives, 23, 2015). This chapter highlights methodological choices researchers must make in utilizing photo-elicitation and how these choices bear on the equity implications of this method.
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Lapenta, F. (2012). Some theoretical and methodological views on photo-elicitation. In E. Margolis & L. Pauwels (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of visual research methods (pp. 201–213). London, UK: SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446268278.n11
Lapenta’s chapter offers a good overview on the methodological variants of photo-elicitation research. Additionally, Lapenta discusses some of the ethical considerations of photo-elicitation research.
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Wang, C. C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behavior, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309
Wang and Burris provide an overview of photovoice and photovoice’s potential as a participatory action research method. The article includes a discussion of the full arc of the photovoice process.
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Cammarota, J., & Romero, A. (2010). Participatory action research for high school students: Transforming policy, practice, and the personal with social justice education. Education Policy, 25(3), 488–506. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904810361722
Cammarota and Romero offer a discussion on how to enmesh youth in participatory action research to achieve social justice aims.
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Walls, J., Holquist, S.E. (2019). Through Their Eyes, in Their Words: Using Photo-Elicitation to Amplify Student Voice in Policy and School Improvement Research. In: Strunk, K.K., Locke, L.A. (eds) Research Methods for Social Justice and Equity in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05900-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05900-2_13
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