Introduction

One of the many ways of examining the relationship between theory and practice in teacher training is inquiry. To inquire is to investigate, generally something that concerns or refers to oneself, one’s beliefs, theories, attitudes, values and emotions, and to reflect on how all this informs one’s work as a teacher. Inquiry into educational practice therefore entails a multidimensional review of what can generally be called school practices, a mixture of introspection, collaboration, critical thinking and political will to transform the school system (Gutiérrez Cuenca et al., 2009).

Inquiry is often articulated in dense stories told by the teachers themselves. Such stories can be constructed in various languages, including the language of photography. In the field of teacher training, the idea of “mental image” has been used to refer to beliefs (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 1988). Below, we shall see how images are involved in each of the components of inquiry.

Inquiry is, first and foremost, introspection, insofar as it establishes connections with the trainee or practising teacher’s past as a student when reflecting (Schön, 1998). Sources may include life stories, photographs and recordings of work in the classroom, students’ visual diaries, critical incidents in the classroom, teaching experiences and accounts of projects undertaken. Retrieval of autobiographical events enables teachers to examine their preconceptions, to render explicit processes of socialisation and to explore the main building blocks of their identity, critical incidents in their life story, how their demands and expectations have changed and the factors that have influenced their attitudes towards life and the future. Diaries, and public writing in general, are highly useful tools for narrative inquiry. As discussed in the previous chapter, diaries can be constructed not only with words, but also with images.

A second aspect is collaboration (Lieberman & Miller, 2003), which seeks to establish connections with the practices of other professionals with whom to understand and address situations that require transformation in the school. By sharing them, images can be used to forge these connections, and their ambiguity facilitates a margin for consideration by others and dialogue about their evocative content.

A third element is critical thinking about social relations within the school, which have been termed the school grammar (Tyack & Tobin, 1994). This grammar dictates the way things seem to work “naturally” in schools and at some point becomes the organisational or cultural norm, but it can be revised. Particularly in an exercise of memory, images can reveal the fact that schools repeat past organisational formulas or reproduce mass production spaces, which can prompt teachers to consider other forms of organisation that exist in other schools or which their colleagues devise and implement in their classes.

The fourth and final aspect of inquiry is political will. According to Gutiérrez et al. (1998), the aim of educational inquiry is the transformation of schooling, because a profession dependent on the public sector is always subject to change, particularly since the anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s and 1970s and technocratic reform. Change, moreover, is linked to the ethical nature of the teaching profession, which requires teachers to tailor their educational action to the values to instil in the classroom and achieve what in chapter six has been called educational coherence.

Inquiry has the virtue of provoking a mirror effect in the lives of those who read and analyse these stories (Liston & Zeichner, 1993; Gutiérrez Cuenca et al., 2009), prompting reactions that can lead to their transformation as teachers. Comparing situations and identifying consistencies or drastic changes can cue a reconsideration of what the images reflect. Questions arise that cause teachers to become aware of contradictions and resolve them by changing their theories, beliefs or teaching practices. Inquiry into practice has given rise to a new professional positioning, theoretical and practical knowledge and emotions (Bautista et al., 2018). The use of inquiry in teacher training has the potential to raise awareness of the importance of mental images and illuminate new educational positionings.

In various ways, photography can record and elicit evocations and resonances of what was intended or occurred in class. Therefore, as I shall show, images acquire enormous importance in the construction of inquiry by teachers. In this chapter, my aim is to identify ways in which inquiry emerges through photo-narration, raising trainee and practising teachers’ awareness of their practices and generating transformation. I shall also assess how this can be implemented in teacher training.

Prior Technical Considerations

Continuing with the idea advanced in chapter nine concerning photo-narration as a dialogue between several images, it is worth recalling the fundamental role here of the principle or argument that serves as the connecting thread (Freeman, 2010). Now that it is so easy to take pictures with a mobile phone and nearly everybody has one, practically anyone can assemble spontaneous stories from their accumulated bank of photographs. These stories can be re-elaborated and reflected upon.

It should be noted that it is possible to convert these sequences into other audiovisual formats such as comics and videos, and that some narratives can give rise to others, adding specific features of these audiovisual genres. By incorporating these features, narratives acquire new expressive values. Whereas a single photograph captures a space limited by a frame, a photo montage widens the view of the observed spaces. The production of these stories forms part of the process of compiling experiences. The sequence in which ideas are ordered can be likened to a collection of slides. A sequence of images with lead-ins and speech bubbles can be presented as a comic, in analogue or digital format, using specific software.

To create a sequence that can be presented as a single unit, it is only necessary to save the pictures in the tool used for image organisation, which may be electronic presentation software, a video format or a video editor (already installed on many computers or easily downloaded), and then arrange the photographs. Accompanying soundtracks represent additional elements that can evoke an emotion (as has traditionally been the case with audiovisuals set to music), enrich the sequence, endow it with character and guide the plot generated through the production of these materials. Therefore, some aspects of audiovisual or cinematographic language are applicable to the production of photographic material arranged sequentially.

Audiovisuals Are Absent from Teacher Training

The language of cinema is generally a self-taught code which students may acquire in the private sphere, but among whom drawing in the margin of a notebook or book (40% of young people) is far more common than the practice of graffiti or image animation (between 3 and 10%) (Marcellán et al., 2013). Among students taking teaching degrees, the production and analysis of narratives is also infrequent, and is unfortunately associated with a lack of intercultural values (Medina & García-Morís, 2018). Furthermore, teacher training students rarely seem initially tempted to employ the language of cinema beyond their social groups and leisure activities.

For young people, audiovisual media are perhaps confined to the private sphere, in a mixture of seeking, self-affirmation, transgression and entertainment. The reasons for this exclusion are related to the dangers to digital identity arising from simple exposure, and addressing this should be an additional task for schools and teacher training colleges. Unfortunately, audiovisual media do not seem to form part of the stories authorised to students in teacher training colleges, nor are they perceived as a channel for communication, first because of their difficulty and second because of their infrequency.

The production of audiovisual materials is thus transformed into a complex task for students (Fernández-Río, 2018). Audiovisual projects entail several stages, the successful completion of which requires expertise on the part of the group planning and executing them (Ezquerra et al., 2016). It might be added that teachers are not particularly prone to generating audiovisual productions or films. It is as if schools had no time to generate such complex stories and as if the multiplicity of meanings ran counter to teaching practice, which brings to mind the concern for form rather than meaning and the restricted language used by teachers of visible pedagogies according to Berstein (1990).

Students require guidance throughout the process, from the initial idea for a photo-narration, through the documentation required to reconstruct it, to discussion of what is relevant and the final montage or result. This helps them acquire the technical skills necessary to generate photo-narrations. In their analysis of what happens from conceptualisation to production of a photo-narration, Bautista et al. (2018) found that rhetorical figures played an important role, in particular metonymy and the meanings attributed to objects and lived situations. Montage is a second form of writing, adding narrative elements (Bolívar, in Gutiérrez Cuenca et al., 2009) that can be technical, moral, emotional or political.

Social media and the internet can also be leveraged in the production of audiovisual material. Stories can be shared in public spaces that identify communities of practice, which will be discussed later in this chapter. This entails new problems in working with students, such as the right to suppress images of children or the need to protect people’s privacy, which is understandable but may become an obstacle given many people’s reluctance to maintain a public professional profile on social media. Driven by fear of online harassment and lacking a strong digital culture, some people are unwilling to share anything on the internet that could identify them. This limits the existence of collective spaces for professional development. It is therefore useful to hold class discussions on the importance of the public processes undertaken, the precautions to take to render these compatible with digital identities and their future impact on students’ personal and professional lives.

Improving participation in audiovisual culture will help bring school culture and external culture into step, with two important consequences for classroom methodology: a learning relationship between peers will be established and the boundaries between learning, production and distribution will vanish. Perhaps most importantly, images (which may be equivalent to the way we see the world) will not be imposed, but will be owned and shared with others.

Photo-Narration as an Inquiry Practice

Many educational projects conducted in class with teacher training students address some of the features of inquiry practices from an introspective, collaborative, critical and transformative perspective. Some do not include all of these perspectives, while others include new ones, such as the dimension of authorship inherent to production with technology; the pursuit of participation and horizontality in school relations, with shared languages that were previously alien to the educational institution; a new vision of the tools that connect subjects with knowledge; the role of the curriculum as a vehicle rather than an end in itself; or militancy in gender or community perspectives.

In view of the aforementioned barriers to expressing themselves though audiovisual media, for the majority of students their use implies a journey into the unknown, and therefore a journey of trial and error. For some students, several of the techniques may constitute new learning, while for others they might represent inquiry. Still other techniques will teach participation, transforming trainee teachers into authors. It is also possible to address some of the content and delivery of the curriculum itself by working with space and time. As stated in chapter one, a media-based education is fundamental to understanding digital identity (what it is, how to construct it, how to protect it) and the acquisition of sufficient digital media competence to feel comfortable about analysing one’s own practice and having it analysed by the teaching communities generated.

Inquiry is the narrative process that leads to the possession of a vehicle for constructing knowledge and culture. In this respect, it is worth recalling the work of Freire and the illustrator Francisco Brenand on “The Favelas Project”. As part of this project, in which the community used mobile phones to create images of daily life, Freire asked Brenand to generate a composition with ten images reflecting the life of agricultural workers, for Freire to use in his literacy work. He wanted images that made it clear, through a historical overview from pre-modern agriculture to the most up-to-date techniques, that this activity was the result of a context rather than being a natural state. The images were projected as slides in literacy sessions with the agricultural workers who were learning to read and write, and represented a cultural artefact that changed their lives as they recognised themselves through these media as authors and transformers of culture. Something similar can occur through the use of various techniques with images that speak of teaching practices, seeking to make their authors realise that these are constructed rather than natural, and that they can therefore be changed.

One should start by exploring emotional, creative and recreational proposals, and then introduce more rigorous inquiry procedures, although experience in managing projects in the classroom suggests that students require several pathways—not just one—to achieve any goal the trainer sets.

Types of Narrative for a Variety of Inquiries

The types of photo-narration presented in previous chapters have included portrait-self-portrait, reportage, essays, photo montage or collages, photo diaries or books and landscapes. I shall consider all of these.

Portraits attempt to capture the essence of people (what they are like, how they feel and how they see the world), and portraiture—for which photography is one possible medium—has a long history in the world of art. The value of a portrait is that it makes us stop and look at a person and consider who that individual is and what his or her aspirations and interests are. In education, this activity has been warmly welcomed as a means to humanise others, which can happen just by looking at the photographs on the student cards that teachers compile. There are portraits on the coat racks in infant schools and in end-of-year class photographs, reflecting the students’ human, non-objectified nature. They can also be found in teachers’ reports on the activities in which students have participated, attempting to reflect, from a close-up to a shot that captures body language, the actual emotion of each student portrayed.

In general, any photograph connected with a school’s social and sporting activities can be considered a portrait. Such photographs are taken to preserve a memory of what happened and to promote a sense of belonging. They are testaments to what happened and can provide complementary information about what happens in a classroom or school. During teacher training, students may take portraits of their peers to investigate what they are like, what they feel, what concerns them, what surrounds them, what they perceive and what they expect, as the basis for subsequent dialogue in class. One can inquire into the stories behind the portraits. This can be done on the basis of what the photographer saw when taking the photograph, what the person in question perceived or what the trainee teachers perceive when analysing the images. Such photographs depict the life and teaching aspirations of trainee teachers.

This also entails using the language of stills through the resources of camera position, lighting and colour, reading them and introducing new feelings and emotions. At other times, cultures that have received insufficient attention could be championed by trainee or practising teachers, perhaps through depicting them as part of their own origins, or attempting to capture them purposely by taking the person portrayed in that context or dressing him or her in that way. A variant of this activity is to place oneself in the same spaces depicted in earlier photographs and to reflect on happens to memory, the transformations that have taken place and the present challenges that face the person who occupies this space from the past.

Thus, photographic portraits can form part of projects intended to reflect the aims of humanist photography as represented by photographers such as Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Doisneau and Sebastião Salgado. These photographers have produced series of photographs with a social and political message. In the case of teachers who follow in their wake, they can reflect the students’ diverse expressions and attitudes and the similarities between them that bring them together, as an analysis will confirm.

Similarly, leveraging the principle of juxtaposition discussed in chapter nine, teachers can be encouraged to inquire into their practice through various contrasting photographs and classroom contexts, which may have an emotional or conceptual force whose evocation promotes analysis and reflection. Another possibility is a humanist project with photographs of the community in which trainee or practising teachers live, with similar goals to those indicated above. These may discover that they are surrounded by diverse people who feel and work, and in turn, may generate projects in these contexts and reflect on themes, whether related to schooling or not, that shed light on their present or future students’ concerns and difficulties and those of other agents in the community.

Some portraits no longer make sense, such as the school photographs in the teacher’s desk, which date back to the 1930s, continued to be taken until the 1970s and may have been the only time a child was portrayed, because at the time, photography was a sophisticated and expensive technique. However, their use in class can provide the opportunity to reflect on what teaching and children’s lives were like then. Another idea would be to carry out projects based on performing what is depicted in the photographs or attempting to reproduce what they were intended to convey and express. Such projects could be conducted with trainee teachers to stimulate discussion about the differences between the schooling and contexts depicted in the past and those in the present.

Self-portraiture enables students to reveal themselves to the class and can be a source of inquiry by their peers, helping to create a good relationship in the class and promoting dialogue. At the same time, the activity encourages introspective inquiry because the audiovisual material stimulates internal dialogue. Such representation enables trainee teachers to reorganise their experience, which is essential for critiquing preconceptions about their future teaching practice.

A photo reportage captures an aspect of interest in the life of a school or classroom through a collection of photographs. As discussed in chapter nine, such projects require inquiry to produce a script, as well as planning in order to take the minimum number of photographs with the maximum amount of information. Although photographs entail no material costs thanks to digital technology, revising all the material to assess its value for the projected story may prove costly in time. In schools, reportage can begin spontaneously, but is generally aimed at documenting an activity such as breaks, the beginning of the school day, individual work or lunch times. Other reportage themes that emerge from teachers’ inquiry into their practice may include diversity, the environment of school activities, family life, the neighbourhood, work, the status of women and a host of other topics related to the curriculum, with the aim of producing a record that can be analysed and used in education. Teachers can report on what is happening in their schools and neighbourhoods, capturing problems that arise in their communities (e.g. social difficulties or accidents) for subsequent use as the basis for inquiry into these problems and decision-making to improve school life. Reportage concerning activities that involve a process, such as workshops, can provide feedback (and therefore training) for the group involved, or for their successors.

A photo essay is a visual version of the equivalent literary genre: the photographer expounds ideas about a subject or problem through a series of photographs, using a particular style created through shots, angles and lighting. As with multimedia projects, which also require perhaps unaccustomed technical know-how, photo essays should focus on problems that rarely receive attention or aspects where the visual component is of crucial importance. The associated inquiry required of the teachers will yield knowledge that will define the script, and this in turn will give visual support to the series of ideas. Photo essays can be used to generate discussions on complex or rarely analysed problems in education.

As discussed in previous chapters, a photo montage is the result of cutting and gluing several photographs together (“collage” is the French term for “gluing”), and may include texts from newspapers and other lightweight materials such as fabrics. As at its inception one hundred years ago, the inquiry informs the process of photo montage can lead teachers to report, poetise or seek new spaces and times that reconfigure the organisation of the educational institution.

Likewise, a photo diary is a collection of images assembled with a purpose, such as capturing important incidents in the classroom or an issue that concerns the students or the teacher. As with teaching diaries, it constitutes a bank of information for the teacher, an instrument for reflection and reworking in other materials, which is not necessarily made to be read by anyone other than its author. Alternatively, a photo diary may contain life stories for sharing with other teachers. These materials can be shared in the form of photo-books, for inquiry, discussion and explanation with the aim of prompting the author and other trainee teachers to reflect on educational practices.

Lastly, one of the least frequently used forms of narration in education is landscape photography, which involves capturing the space in which we live and work. This is particularly interesting in terms of architecture and lighting, because schools—and educational buildings in general—reflect ideas about order and participation that are indicative of the type of teaching practices implemented, and therefore their analysis is productive.

Other Ideas for Inquiry Using Photo-Narration

Paul McIntosh (2010), who teaches social workers, has proposed familiarising oneself with prospective techniques from the most emotional and least personal point of view as possible. Thus, a group of trainee teachers who had carried out teaching practice were asked to characterise their experience using an artistic image from a bank of figurative paintings provided by the teacher/facilitator, in which one colour predominated. For example, Renoir’s painting of a woman sitting beside the sea is full of blues, and to launch the activity, participants were invited to examine the composition, form, tone and space to determine the underlying theme. They were then asked to talk about the tone of the class in which they had participated in their teaching practice (accompanying a tutor, or alone with a group of students younger than themselves), the feelings they had experienced and how the artistic work was connected to what they had felt. According to McIntosh, the exercise enabled students to talk about what had happened during their teaching practice and connect it with other experiences. He contends that art allows us to give shape to confusion, conflict and uncertainty in the light of our own reasoning.

Digital storytelling has been used to evoke trainee teachers’ relationship with technology (or any other subject), their previous knowledge, their biases and their initial view of lifelong learning. An example would be a photo-narration that includes images of artefacts, spaces and relationships with technology that are significant for the author. Techno-autobiography means expressing these relationships in different formats, using audiovisual and text resources created by students. The productions are watched by the entire group, stimulating individual and group reflection and constituting an initial diagnosis that provides clues about individual starting points as teachers and students. Through analysis, these can be demystified, revealing their everyday nature and our daily contact with them. The aim is to render the invisible visible and thus trigger the proposed learning process.

Visual maps are productions that inquire into subjects’ learning paths (Sefton-Green, 2016). Although they are not strictly photographic sequences, but rather artistic products, the material content the teachers pour into them is equivalent. Graphic representation, in this case usually a handmade poster with cut-outs, colours and whatever other elements participants desire, presents a challenge because most of them will have forgotten the freedom that everyone should allow themselves to create something graphically. The authors comment verbally on their productions in a dialogue with peers and activity facilitators. There may be informal phases of dialogue during creation, and formal stages in a presentation to the group. The works can continue to evolve until this moment of presentation to the group. When asking about the biographical relationship to trainee teachers’ learning, the opportunity will hopefully arise to challenge some of their stereotypes about teaching.

Literature is a resource that connects the stories of others with one’s own life (Kincheloe, 1999). In describing people’s vicissitudes and stereotypes, literature invites us to inquire into other spaces worth exploring and inhabiting. In this literary context, trainee teachers can use series of photographs to talk about their concerns, their training, their analyses of life at school and in the community, their ideas for change and even the concerns, fears and joys that these situations elicit in them. They can tell stories or condemn something.

Photo-dialogue is a technique with a Freirian basis that mixes images and literary creation to engage members of a group in an analysis of situations that enables them to reflect on their past and their present. Originally, it was used with Latina women in literacy classes in the United States with the idea of adding content to a writing task in order to depict each woman’s life through a sequence of five images of consecutive moments in her life, and to stimulate discussion while learning as adults to improve their reading and writing. In another training context, young female teachers who had been invited to speak as women within a feminised profession chose artists, athletes, scientists, vocational teachers or their mothers as the vehicle for a freely proposed story (Paredes-Labra, 2014). When they reflected in writing on these visual stories, they become aware of their own trajectories and status as women.

Other ideas for inquiry using photo-narration are based on classroom projects on a relevant subject such as memory. Old photographs can be superimposed on new ones in an attempt to understand what has happened in the space or with the group of people who appear in two similar photographs from two different time periods. This activity raises questions about the spaces and the relationships that occur there. As with time, spaces can also be the subject of a story associated with a meaningful journey for teachers. Spaces are loaded with meaning, and the freedom to travel through them, the memories they bring and the associations they generate are important to understand the lives of trainee teachers.

To launch an activity on space and time, it can be useful to suggest someone other than a trainee teacher as the main character, and to think of a parent, a grandparent, an acquaintance, a fictional character or someone of the opposite sex or another race making that same journey. The journey and the reasons for undertaking it also help raise critical awareness. Another possible subject for projects is daily life affected by personal or community issues. This technique is called photo history (Keremane & McKay, 2011), a participatory research method in which participants photograph their daily lives to inquire into them in focus groups (Bautista et al., 2018; Clandinin et al., 2007).

Other subjects for photo-based inquiry include the organisation of shared spaces, the questions generated by work or the feelings experienced. According to McIntosh (2010), the analysis should be declarative (what appears), symbolic (explaining the symbolism used) and relational (identifying the model of relationships contained in the representation). Later, another analysis can be added, of resonances, referring to the evocations our representation suggests to us and to others. According to Gebhard (1990), these activities can in turn facilitate joint problem-solving between the tutor and the trainee teachers. Notably, these latter have different points of reference for solving the problems they encounter, such as a tutor’s guidance, their peers’ opinions, their own sources or self-discovery.

Additional Considerations for Analysing Photo-Narration in Teacher Training

Although the procedures and some of the results of inquiry through photo-narration have already been discussed, it will be useful before concluding to explain the functions of the teaching knowledge generated through portfolios. Connected to the class curriculum, students’ portfolios are one of the sources of practice that provide visual evidence. Teachers may wish to organise analyses of the productions through comparison and sequencing of portfolio materials, gathering a representative sample from the class, or even its entirety, and ordering this sequence using various criteria and pursuing distinct goals. For example, as part of teachers’ continuous training, they can examine how their perceptions of certain teaching practices have changed, through a series of practices ordered using this criterion. They could also analyse the moment during the academic year when these practices occur.

The use of narrative inquiry based on portfolios involves a presentation and a public text open to written comments and responses from facilitators and peers, or viewing in face-to-face sessions followed by focus groups in which the materials are commented on by peers and, in the case of continuing education, by parents and students (Bautista, 2017). The portfolio is a living document, which is unusual in standard educational practices, where a task is generally finished once it has been handed in. Virtual spaces such as forums have also been used to facilitate the formation of communities of practice (Paredes-Labra, 2014; Paredes-Labra et al., 2013) in relation to work with diaries and public writing, common among teachers in the English-speaking world (for example, Lieberman & Miller, 2003). This has the potential for open learning, communicative interaction and active participation of students in the collaborative production of knowledge. Unfortunately, research by Colas et al. (2018) casts doubt on its empirical value, indicating that further research is required to refine the rigour of its presentation.

Some techniques include successive analyses, focus groups, discussion with the producer, recordings of the sessions for re-analysis and a written presentation of the subject explored, whereas others can be less involved, aimed at training teachers in more complex analysis processes through assessments of a sentence or image that evokes the subject or a song that adds emotion to the analyses.

It should not be forgotten that the productions of students in teaching practice delve into various problems, use different sources and have a very broad framework of interpretation, so that the responses from their peers and from the teacher/facilitator will be complex. Teachers who observe their teaching actions through photo-narration become more reflective and acquire the capacity for self-assessment (Kaneko-Marques, 2016). By conducting a thorough analysis of practice, they identify and understand the complexities of teaching.

When this activity is collaborative, it can be expanded to other situations (e.g. students and parents, other educational institutions, groups and associations) and form the basis for changing the conditions of teaching and the school’s community, forging a community of practice with a critical, transformative purpose, which Bautista has called the third stage (1994). The effect on inquiry into practice is that participants become aware of the characteristics of the contexts in which they work, their schools and classrooms, the competencies these require, the actions they take and the political, ethical and collaborative nature of their teaching practices.