Introduction

If we aspire to a school system that succeeds in its mission to guarantee the right to education and attention to diversity of whatever origin, then we must develop creative, emancipatory approaches in initial teacher training. Trainee teachers must be able to act reflectively and critically against inequalities in order to later build democracy in the classroom. A school system that is fairer, more inclusive and equitable in the transmission of knowledge, that guarantees student learning and participation regardless of personal circumstances and/or characteristics, requires committed teachers who are capable of assuming this responsibility in any educational stage. The methods and strategies used in initial teacher training must be aimed at instilling knowledge that emancipates teachers and empowers them to do the same in turn. If instead such training is based on purely academic goals, interests and strategies aimed at the mechanical reproduction of knowledge, it will contribute to a bias in initial teacher training and the potential failure of the school system. Far from being neutral practices, training strategies can be the means to reproduce an educational model based on segregation and professional practices that are insensitive to inequality. Pérez Gómez (1997, p. 297) suggests an attractive alternative:

Teachers must engage in the adventure of knowledge, research and critical and reflective inquiry if they wish to instil a love of knowledge and respect for diversity and creativity in the younger generation; they must love democracy and commit themselves to meeting its demand for mutual understanding if they wish to create a climate of supportive relationships and construct a democratic community of learning. To engage in critical culture is to love, propagate and enjoy it as much as it is to apply and recreate it in each discipline, in each problem, in each impression, in each project.

Implementing a part of this alternative in initial teacher training requires two things; one is to promote what Bartolomé (1994) calls “political clarity”, the process whereby we identify the possible connections between political, economic and social variables (macro-level) and the academic behaviour of groups in the classroom (micro-level). The second is to foster what she calls “ideological clarity”, the process whereby we identify and compare our own explanations with those of the dominant discourses (Bartolomé, 2008). This enables us to understand how our value systems do or do not reflect dominant values, and consequently, how we may be legitimising practices that perpetuate inequality and exclusion.

Students know about today’s society, but their understanding of it is fragmented. The implications of certain socio-cultural dynamics for the school system are largely invisible to them. They inhabit local contexts, in a here-and-now in which they experience change and are involved in projects and social relations that are simultaneously localised and de-localised. However, they do so uncritically. They encounter serious difficulties in understanding their experiences in relation to the dynamics of the socio-historical times in which they are living.

Another important issue is that some trainee teachers will not have the same cultural, linguistic and social references as a large part of the student body with whom they will work on a daily basis (Zumwalt & Craig, 2005). Nowadays, the school system comprises a diverse space in which teachers’ teaching practice unfortunately reproduces the way they themselves were taught. Trainee teachers must learn how to connect with and intervene in an increasingly wide diversity of cultural, sexual and social identities.

We need aware teachers capable of identifying their beliefs and experiences, of subjecting them to contrasting perspectives and of understanding the contradictory and flawed practices and dynamics that define cultural, economic, work and social life. Only an intelligible and coherent account of the defining features of current society and the resulting changes will enable us to understand education as a series of transformative actions based on equity, social justice, inclusion and the participation of all students. There is no curricular tradition of this in initial teacher training, but nevertheless we must strive to train intellectually and culturally competent teachers so that they can construct more inclusive practices and exercise critical thinking in relation to the established dictates.

If trainee teachers can identify their beliefs about society, analyse how people and differences are embedded in unequal contexts and share, contrast and reconstruct these beliefs, then they will be in a better position to move forwards and assimilate the most inclusive and fairest forms of representation and action with regard to difference in an autonomous, conscious and committed manner.

What practices can we construct that will enable students to identify and above all understand the complexity of the mechanisms of exclusion and rethink their beliefs in order to successfully face the challenges of an inclusive and intercultural education? How can we create contexts of activity in which trainee teachers can work together to inquire into their particular visions and interpretations of social reality and analyse the educational implications of these?

These challenges and questions serve as an introduction to the subject matter of the present chapter, which explores the use of visual narrative in initial teacher training using photographs. We shall discuss previous studies on the use of photo-narration in different fields of knowledge, paying particular attention to research in education and above all on the use of photography in higher education. We shall then analyse the practical and procedural aspects of employing a photo-narration approach, drawing on several years of practical experience of using this tool in initial teacher training. Our work was the result of a teaching innovation project funded by the Vice-Chancellor’s Office for Teaching in the 2016 Call for the promotion of innovation in teaching and learning processes (reference UAH/EV737), entitled “The city as an artistic and pedagogical representation through multimodal narratives” and directed by Laura Rayón.

In this chapter, we analyse how we can use photo-narration in our professional practice to generate varied narrative modalities that together allow us to shape a voice intended to be shared and recreated, as means to enable students to explore reality, endow it with meaning and examine their own views and biases with their peers, while at the same time introducing other ways of thinking and intervening in the school system. The narrative practices that we have explored in initial teacher training revolve around community artistic practices and the concept of “drifting” or wandering in a physical environment. The notion of collaboration in narrative creation and the combined use of photography and elements of visual culture form the backbone of multimodal photo-narration. First, we examine taking photographs individually by students, who once they have specified their reasons and motives for taking a photograph, share the content with their peers through the procedure of photo-elicitation in the classroom. Then, they create a multimodal visual narrative through consensus. We discuss the value of this strategy based on the results obtained, and the possibilities of using this type of narrative to enable trainee teachers to learn to interpret the socio-cultural reality around them and identify unequal and unfair practices.

Photo-Narration and Personal and Social Transformation

Narratives based on photographs taken by participants is a procedure that was initially used in social science research (Banks, 2001; Mannay, 2017; Rose, 2001), but which has now permeated other fields such as health, diagnosis and therapy (Han & Oliffe, 2016; Knowles & Cole, 2008). Narrative supported by photography is considered an exceptional means to access human experiences (Harper, 2012). A photographed act, situation or event can be shared, in the form of a story, by means of photo-elicitation. This method has already been described in detail in the second part of this book, but briefly, the person who took the photograph shows the image and explains his or her reasons for taking it, and others request further information about details in the image or ask the photographer to expand on the meanings it contains. Photography thus becomes a means to generate stories about people’s motives, needs and beliefs, paving the way for personal transformation. This approach is used in the fields of health and psychotherapy in order for participants, either individually or in groups, to reflect on their experiences around a variety of topics, such as tobacco addiction, grief for a loved one or mental illness.

Interestingly, these fields emphasise how an event becomes an experience when it is formulated as a story for oneself and/or others, where the narration becomes an act and a new experience which in turn generates new stories. Manrique (2017) has termed this the narrative-experience-action cycle, and it forms the basis for personal transformation. Rodríguez and Manrique (2015) have suggested that film, and by extension other visual languages, can be used in this way in education. They argue that what we consider experience requires a process whereby the person becomes aware through reflection of what is happening in a given moment in space and time. Thus, they claim that narrative using visual languages such as photography and film enables individuals to construct stories in the present about specific moments or situations, and that the subsequent description and interpretation of these stories evokes the past in a reflective and conscious way, enriching the lived experience which is necessarily projected into the future in a different form.

In the field of education, the use of photo-narration has been explored in English-speaking countries by, among others, Lemon (2006), Bach (1998), Leitch and Mitchell (2007) and Thomson (2008). Of particular note is Moss’s work on narration using photographs and other visual media to promote the educational inclusion of diverse students (Moss, 2003, 2010, 2011; Moss et al., 2007). Other authors such as Carrington et al. (2007) have analysed how audiovisual narratives enhance the development of an inclusive curriculum and an educational environment that prevents the social exclusion of the most disadvantaged students. The evident desire for change in relationships and improved coexistence locates the use of audiovisual narratives in these works in the principles of equity and social justice that define a democratic education.

In Spain, the work initiated by Bautista (2009, 2011, 2013, 2017) is of particular note. He discusses the potential of narrative using the language of photography to promote understanding of others and the events surrounding the group that is narrating. More specifically, Bautista identifies photo-narration as the basis for an intercultural education in which, through the process of narration, group members, students or families propose stories, discuss opinions about the visual elements to be used, agree on the narrative structure of the photo essay and, above all, are given opportunities to get to know each other and understand their differences, and therefore, begin to appreciate one another.

All these studies evidence the importance of the concept of narrative inquiry, which is based on the idea that an experience can be considered a story, and as such, can be told and shared through the process of photo-elicitation. However, the ultimate goal of narrative inquiry in these studies is social—not just personal—transformation. The value placed on the narrative process itself as a means to promote dialogue, debate and the exchange of opinions between members of culturally diverse groups stems from its capacity to foster mutual understanding between participants. Beyond personal development, narrative inquiry is viewed as a process of participation and exchange between people intended to enhance understanding of other points of view, promote mutual comprehension and improve relations between diverse students experiencing inequality in the school system.

Similar approaches have prompted Bautista (2017) to propose the use of photo-narration in teachers’ in-service training. Photography is a means to promote reflection on and knowledge of personal theories and beliefs by questioning teachers about what they do and the decisions they make in their teaching practice based on images of their classrooms taken with a camera. Thus, through inquiry and subsequent reflection, images can be used to transform and improve actions in the classroom (Bautista et al., 2018). Ketelle (2010) has also used photo-narration for teachers’ in-service training, working with eight head teachers to investigate the demands that school leadership and management place on teachers. Her goal was to understand the role that each of them played, determine how they perceived themselves professionally and personally and establish a dialogue between them that gave them access to different points of view and enabled them to compare their beliefs in order to improve their work as teachers.

Photography, Narration and Learning

In her interesting study aimed at understanding the learning experience in higher education using photography, Stroud (2014, p. 99) described learning through the combined use of images and narrative, emphasising that photography facilitates access to the internal aspect of learning, which is otherwise difficult for university researchers and teachers to penetrate. Cooper et al. (2017) have used photography as a tool to promote experiential learning and critical dialogue among participants in an undergraduate community health course. Ciolan and Malasian (2017) have employed visual representations with university students to identify learning styles, using photographs to explore the processes of construction and metacognition. In their study, students took photographs and then shared their meaning, generating conversations about how learning occurs and what students think about what and how they are learning.

Another area of research aimed at improving instruction is reported in the studies by Bailey and Van Harken (2014), Christensen (2012), Cook and Buck (2010), Edwards et al. (2012), Leipert and Anderson (2012), Lichty (2013) and Zenkov and Harmon (2009). All of these were aimed at understanding how photography can enhance academic performance by using it to detect errors in learning, thus accessing students’ individual interpretations of the products of their learning. Copperman et al. (2007) used photography in a similar manner to investigate the learning process when students attempted to learn a new concept or solve a problem. Other studies on initial teacher training have been oriented towards the use of resources that support the creation of stories (Sadik, 2008), but focusing more on the design of digital applications and environments than on using narration to encourage the exchange of ideas, beliefs and opinions.

Previous research has paid little attention to the function of photography as a representational practice for telling stories in a creative communicative process (Mannay, 2017). However, research is lacking on the use of photography to generate a symbolic space of intersubjectivity through the construction of stories that can be shared in order to promote student participation in university classrooms, in particular in initial teacher training.

As we have seen in the first section of this chapter, cameras can help trainee teachers to express themselves through images as channels for stories and to locate their personal beliefs about and visions of socio-cultural reality in relation to the mechanisms of inequality and its correlates in education. Photo-narration can thus be used to extend and enrich their professional identity. Britzman (2003) has contended that this identity is shaped by individual biographies of family, community, lived learning experiences and social relations, arguing that objects of knowledge are largely absent from teacher training practices. We believe that storytelling supported by photography would permit a transition towards an initial teacher training connected to students’ experiences and particular ways of seeing and interpreting reality.

Moss et al. (2007) have suggested that photo-narration disrupts the unidirectional communication dynamics that characterise academic learning in the classroom because it allows students to talk about subjects that concern and affect them. This represents an interesting approach to explore in teacher training. These authors contend that narrative supported by photographs facilitates access to students’ individual conditions and circumstances without dissociating them from the environment and the casuistry that condition their lives, and consequently promotes understanding of their lived situations. Photo-narration enables students to learn, reflect and grow from their experiences, and invites change because images can be read and re-read over time, giving them new meanings in a process of semiotic transformation (Leitch, 2008; Lemon, 2006).

Photograph, Narrate and Share: Constructing Other Discourses and Experiences

The course plan developed over the years for students taking teaching degrees at the University of Alcalá is based on a series of values such as creativity and participation, and university classrooms are conceived as a community that shares subjective experiences and interpretations of socio-cultural and educational reality. The medium, photo-narration, focuses on the following aspects:

  • Placing cameras in the students’ hands for them to give physical form to their experience and create images that provide interpretative references. By means of photo-elicitation, these references become visible and can be contrasted, expanded and elaborated.

  • By combining visual images and narration, photography provides new knowledge about how students see reality, whose gazes become socially constructed knowledge.

  • Images and narration forge diverse stories which take different forms for communication and sharing.

The use of photo-narration presented here formed part of a project based on two types of process with different approaches to story production. In one, a story was shared verbally through photo-elicitation, and inquiry emerged in response to the students’ photographs, while in the other, a story or narration emerged through the creation of a collage mural. However, both approaches employed photo-elicitation as the basis for narrative inquiry, albeit on different levels and in different ways. Below, we describe our work with initial teacher training students in terms of organisation, space, time and procedure.

Wandering, Taking Photographs and Composing Narratives Through a Collage Mural

This project was implemented from October to December 2015 with 17 students, in a workshop called Transigrafías [“transigraphs”], a term coined by Albalá (2018) to conceptualise a process of participative work involving collaborative exchange in urban spaces with the aim of exploring, documenting, interpreting and representing journeys through the act of walking and taking photographs. Participants were asked to construct a story based on the photographs taken, which they could combine with written language, drawing or any other object and/or element related to visual and digital culture. Three groups were formed to carry out the following procedure and tasks:

  • Prior planning on a map of the route to be taken through the city of Alcalá de Henares. After consulting maps of the city, students planned the routes they would take, indicating the main routes to take (Fig. 10.1) on a given day. They were advised to walk quietly, to observe and to capture moments or situations that attracted their attention. No limits were placed on the number of photographs they could take, nor were any specific themes defined that they should stop and observe or on which they should focus their attention. Each member of the group was instructed to photograph whatever caught their attention that they considered significant, to be shared subsequently with the other members of their group.

  • Next, the photographs were printed and brought to class for the groups to analyse, seeking and sharing the meanings supported by the images. At this point, they had to identify a thematic thread with which to construct a visual story that illustrated a problem or situation to be explained, which was then analysed and questioned by the other groups. The questions “What have we photographed and why?”, “What are the meanings of the photographs taken?” and “Why is this photograph important to me?” formed the starting point for students to begin identifying an agreed upon theme that could be narrated in an individual voice. Students exercised full control over which photographs to (Figs. 10.1 and  10.2).

    Fig. 10.1
    A photograph of two students looking at the photographs spread out on a table.

    The narrative creation process (1)

    Full size image
    Fig. 10.2
    A photograph of a group of students working on a project in a classroom.

    The narrative creation process (2)

    Full size image

  • Representing: by this stage, the students had already defined the theme and content of the story; now, they had to decide how to represent their narrative, using photographs and any other form of representation, written text or visual elements they considered appropriate. This was a creative process in which they exercised full control over the physical form of the composition (Figs. 10.3,  10.4 and 10.5).

    Fig. 10.3
    A photograph of three students using a projector for visual narration. It shows two students holding the brown drawing on top of it.

    The narrative creation process (3)

    Full size image
    Fig. 10.4
    A photograph of students using visual narrations like photographs, drawings, written text and handcrafted objects to compose stories.

    The narrative creation process (4)

    Full size image
    Fig. 10.5
    A photograph of a group of students spreading out a white sheet on top of the table.

    The narrative creation process (5)

    Full size image

  • Their visual narrations gave rise to a space for representation or a multimodal story: inequality as a construction of access according to social origin (Fig. 10.6); the city centre and periphery (Fig. 10.7); and diversity as inequality in different spaces and manifestations (Fig. 10.8), using photographs, drawings, written text and handcrafted objects to compose stories in a collage mural that covered the walls of the faculty.

    Fig. 10.6
    A photograph depicts the visual narrations of access according to social origin and construction as an inequality.

    Inequality as a construction of access according to social origin

    Full size image
    Fig. 10.7
    A photograph depicts the visual narrations of the periphery and city centre.

    The city centre and periphery

    Full size image
    Fig. 10.8
    A photograph of photographs, drawings, written text and handcrafted objects to show diversity as inequality in different spaces and manifestations on a cloth hanged on the wall.

    Diversity as inequality in different spaces and manifestations

    Full size image

Breaking the Frame

As evidenced by the students’ productions, visual narratives based on students’ photographs support subjectivation and the construction of complex meanings. The transformation of tangible images into visually and conceptually dense narratives formed the basis of the narrative inquiry carried out by groups. This enabled them to move towards a story shaped by a collective voice, albeit not without uncertainty and intensity in the analyses and debates generated in the classroom.

Inquiry into the meanings associated with the photographs taken and their value as regards contributing to a story that was meaningful and relevant for the students formed a powerful cognitive and social process. Photography as an instrument for collecting moments of experience in the city, and as a means for subsequent evocation in the classroom in the photo-elicitation stage, gave rise to participatory knowledge construction, but was not without its difficulties. This stage was characterised by the complexity of constructing a consensual story, and although rich in evocations of the meanings supported by the photographs, it would have been even more enriching if the participants had been provided with a card for each photograph on which to note a title for the photograph, a description of it and the reasons for their choice, as proposed by Moriña (2017) when starting to work with photographs created by participants.

An initial process of semiotic construction was defined in accordance with Leitch (2008, p. 2), who has contended that by themselves, photographs do not narrate. Rather, it is the meaning attributed to them and the voice behind the photograph that allow memories to emerge, evoke the place and the moment and bring the photographs back to life. Each photograph evoked visible references to the experiential image participants had in the city, and this generated an initial semiotic process of constructing oral stories. Each photograph functioned as a discursive unit. Next, they were placed in relation to other visual references, other photographs, in order to construct the lived experience by assembling a final group of images (Fig. 10.1). These two semiotic construction processes formed the basis for a third stage when the photographs were ordered, sequenced and arranged on the mural (Fig. 10.4), giving rise to a third level of construction of meanings that led participants to place the photographs in relation to other elements of visual culture, written text, drawings or magazine images. The processes of narrative inquiry have an analogy in Russian dolls, the matryoshka dolls, in which each doll encases another. In this case, the photograph as discursive unit was the matrix for moving towards a sequence of photographs that defined a thematic and/or temporal order of still images. From there, the story or narration was completed by relating the sequence of images to other systems of representation and to images constructed by others for other purposes (Fig. 10.9).

Fig. 10.9
An illustration depicts the multimodal photo narration in initial teacher training.

By the authors

Full size image

This process generated multimodal stories based on the sequence and arrangement of the photographs and images, which were not left to chance because they defined a conceptual narrative order. Thus, as can be seen in the first and second multimodal narratives (Figs. 10.6 and 10.7), the students constructed narratives by contrast or antithesis, to create a social representation of inequality according to social class, in the case of the first narrative, and in the second, a representation of the segmented urban space formed by the World Heritage city and the city on the outskirts, consisting of working class neighbourhoods and new housing developments.

In the third narrative (Fig. 10.8), this stage was defined by more complex and diverse semiotic processes. By means of discursive units consisting of a sequence of photographs complemented with drawings and magazine images, the participants created micro-stories, in the sense defined in the previous chapter, that all showed diversity as inequality, although gender inequality prevailed as the central theme. In this series of micro-stories, inequality was conceptualised through different ideas and socio-cultural manifestations. Synecdoche and antithesis were intertwined in the visual representations, giving rise to a semiotically multidimensional narrative comprising the experiential image, the photographs and magazine pictures. As with the other two productions, drawing reinforced the organisation and discursive sequences that defined each micro-story.

In this respect, it is worth noting that the photo-narration constructed by assembling various photographs and combining them with other visual elements enriched the conceptualisation and argumentation of the story thus constructed. We consider that this method of using photography in training is richer than if photo-narration had been based on a simple verbal description of the reasons or motives for taking a particular photograph or series of photographs. Identifying, sequencing and arranging photographs as a photo essay is an act of creation in which other elements of visual culture may intervene, giving rise to more complex and richer processes of construction of meanings. Placing photo-narration at the service of multimodal production generates what Butler (2009, p. 12) has termed breaking the frame, in other words questioning a reality that is taken for granted, exposing the resources and discourses used to maintain and legitimise a dominant and interested vision of that reality. This is an essential condition for students in initial teacher training if they are to move towards the political and ideological clarity advocated by Bartolomé (1994, 2008), which in turn is necessary in order to be able to identify inequality and injustice in schools and to act reflectively and critically in the construction of an inclusive school.

When students control the process of creating photographs, they select subjects to photograph that are relevant to them, they shape their voice in visual narratives freely and autonomously and they deploy skills in order to see, question and depict reality through imaginative productions. We believe that, as Bautista (2011, p. 119) has indicated, narration using the language of photography diversifies the intellectual and social options and opportunities of the people narrating, because “audiovisual languages in particular encourage participation when they are used to tell stories collectively (…) such production includes the need for communicative actions that lead to agreement”. Defining and delivering photo-narration in university classrooms presents a challenge for teachers, who sometimes need to locate themselves on the margins in order to define practices such as the one we have described and discussed here. However, we should also point out that such processes convert academic spaces into places for the transformation of teaching and learning and the creation and communication of messages based on multimodal literacy processes. In the words of Emilio Lledó: “Orality is the present; while we speak we share a common time, which embraces us”.