Introduction

When Niépce created his first photographic or heliographic procedure in 1824, little did he know how far his invention would go. He called his idea “heliography” (sun and writing or drawing). Daguerre continued Niépce’s research and invented the daguerreotype, and in 1839, Bayard discovered how to obtain positive images on paper. In 1906, Gabriel Lippman received the Nobel Prize for discovering how to obtain photographs directly in colour on the same plate, the precursor of holography (Kurtz, 2001).

By the end of the eighteenth century, photography had democratised printed images at a time when it is believed that only 29% of adults could read (Burke, 1991). In 1885, the Kodak Company began marketing its first cameras, with a long roll of film, under the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest”, following which the Brownie, which cost just one dollar, was designed for children (Ramírez Alvarado, 2011). Digital photography ushered in a radical change in terms of the quality of the photograph versus the quantity that can be taken with this type of photography, with unlimited use and repetition. In its early years, photography was associated with the bourgeoisie—the only sector of society that could afford it—and was promoted by liberal, pro-capitalism groups. As a result, photography came to be associated with rise and fall of various ideological movements.

According to Dondis (2003), the invention of the photographic camera ushered in a new perspective on communication and with it, a new approach to education; in other words, photography has changed the way we perceive and communicate. Even Schnaith (2011) claims that photography elevates the importance of visual images to a universal code of communication, similar to language. With the introduction of different technologies, imagery is used in all discourses, personal experiences, information on events, communicating, teaching, etc., but it is seldom used as the protagonist of the information instead of the adjuvant of written or spoken information. Marzal Felici (2007), highlights the importance of photography: “we all too often forget that photography is the basis – gnoseological and technological - of all contemporary forms of expression and audio-visual communication” (p. 19).

The advent of the digital age saw the introduction of devices such as video recorders and mobile phones that some thought would be the death of photography. And true enough, photography as it was known to the first promoters of this language is far removed from how we know it today, but it can still be a fundamental element in teacher training and research. For the children of the digital age—“digital natives”—the speed of images, both in games, films, and all kinds of video clips, would appear to have rendered the still image obsolete; nevertheless, it survives.

Photography is an essential part of our everyday life: that desire to immortalize the moment and bring back memories of a past event, a place visited, or a programmed experience. However, it is seldom used in education, specifically teacher training, even though everyone uses it. Unlike old cameras, where we had to make a detailed study of the image before taking the photo in order to avoid wasting a shot, today’s digital mobile photography allows us to take an unlimited number of photographs that can easily be erased and taken again. This has increased the potential of photography and led to the creation of massive digital photo libraries (Pantoja Chaves, 2010).

In fact, the photographic image has become so generalized that it is used to express any type of idea, report on any event, or share any type of experience, and is also used for partisan interests. The almost unhealthy obsession among adolescents of constantly exposing their personal life on social networks using photographs or selfies that are taken to mark their role in society cannot be ignored, and is an example of the informative function of photography (Holzbrecher, 2015). It would be interesting to explore the perspective of students and children by studying the photographs that interest them.

We are witnessing a struggle between those in favour of the use imagery and those opposed to it, rather like what Umberto Eco (1994) called the apocalyptic and integrated intellectuals, where the former consider that overestimating the value of imagery results in seeing the image without understanding it, thereby devaluating conceptual language, while the integrated intellectuals adore cybernetic culture and are enthralled by the digital revolution and audio-visual communication systems. Umberto Eco, who published his book for the first time in Italian in 1964, was 50 years ahead of his time when he talked about the ubiquity of communication systems and the existence of more mobiles connected to the internet than people in the world. According to Hootsuite (2018), there are currently 8,485 million devices connected to the internet worldwide, the mobile phone has changed the way we use the internet, and 55% of emails are opened from a mobile phone. In percentage terms, the number of devices is equivalent to 112% of the total population in the world, that is, an average of 1.65 devices per user.

Eco distinguishes between those who trust in the evolution of mass media—the integrated intellectuals who experience this situation and believe that users participate and are taken into consideration—and the apocalyptic intellectuals, who think that the mass media destroy the characteristics of society and create a citizenry who follow sheep-like after slogans designed to keep them entertained without thinking. Therefore, the integrated intellectuals advocate the access of all citizens to culture, and the apocalyptic intellectuals believe it will destroy the human being as such. In the context of ith these opposing views, here we intend to demonstrate the value of the photograph, hitherto scarcely used in education, as a tool for reflection in teacher training. Trainee teachers use photographs in their reports when they want to illustrate the setting in which they work, but they do not use it to show the different aspects that photography can illustrate: use of space, student groups, teaching model, use of imagery in primary education, the emotional component of photographs, etc.

In all academic fields, photographic image can give information that is not initially evident, and that can be missed if it is replaced by diagrams or drawings (Mustelier & Díaz, 2017). Nevertheless, the photographic image can play a very important role in the transmission, conservation and visualization of all kinds of activities; it can document social situations (Pantoja Chaves, 2010) and fulfil the function of memory to recall events that allow for deliberate reflection and the prolonged exercise of this reflection over time, instead of the compulsion to react immediately to a scene from a film or television.

The image has emerged in different fields of study, such as history, where the phenomenon of the image and its uses in visual communication has become the means of conserving and expanding the visual memory of humanity. Photography, therefore, enshrines memory, and helps all fields of study to construction a visual discourse, “illustrating complex concepts or as a bridge to language” (Holzbrecher, 2015, p. 384).

It is important to consider photography as an element of reflection in educational history, such as historic photographs of schools in the past, and our disbelief that a teacher had 70 children in a single classroom, and could rely solely on his or her own methodological strategies. These photographs should serve as an excuse to learn about the methods of yesterday, to investigate the keys to the success of these methodologies that produced educated citizens in all social strata who participated in the society of their time. This is the capacity of the image to preserve, transmit and organize information, and thus contribute to memory (Díaz Barrado, 2004).

We can also reflect on what has really changed and what remains, as if we were wholly unaffected by the passage of time. Have deep-rooted changes occurred since the encyclopaedia gave way to the textbook, and since writing with a pen gave way to writing with a ballpoint or a digital device? When did the image lose its essence as a communicator? If we go back in time, before the written word, people obtained their cultural education from the images and words used by minstrels—travelling artists who memorized and orally recited traditional stories—and troubadours, who composed and performed their plays to both educate and entertainment their audience. Thanks to their extensive training in trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy), they gained access to European courts and their texts spoke of love and medieval knights. Both minstrels and troubadours were popular between the twelfth and fourteenth century (Quiñonero Hernández, 1997).

A study of text books shows that the text occupies all the space, and the image is a mere ornament, incapable in itself of accommodating a conceptual language. This was true until the advent of digital photography, in which the texts refers to the image and the viewer is not compelled to look at the text and image at the same time (Pantoja Chaves, 2010).

Looking at a photograph can generate concepts and make us reflect on bygone times and the historical journey of education. Photographs are essential for understanding, and should always be linked to written language. It is important to consider that there are written descriptions of what schools and teaching methods were like in the past, but there is no doubt that this description is far more complete when it is accompanied by an image.

A Note on Photography Today

Today’s use of the digital image has taken photography out of the passive role of accompanying text to transform it into a gateway to communication with other sounds, graphics and images. The intention is to galvanize society into taking action, taking sides, and even eliciting both critical and emotional reactions.

The press has begun to give priority to the photographic image over the moving image. This is because a photograph promotes interactivity, as can be seen in the daily edition of the Washington Post (2019). Photographs are used in the same way on television, where news programmes publish a series of photographs to highlight the information, as in the case of missing children or important events.

None of us will ever forget some of the images that impacted society, such as the naked girl from the Vietnam War in 1972 that showed the effects of napalm and that even contributed towards ending the war. Neither can we forget the image taken in 1993 of the starving Sudanese boy Kong Nyong sitting on the outskirts of his village with a vulture lurking nearby, or the image of Aylan, the Syrian boy of Kurdish origin who in September 2015 was found drowned on a beach in Turkey together with his brother and mother—this photograph of the drama of emigration caused a major impact worldwide. Other examples are the recent photograph of the 26-year-old teacher Laura Luelmo, murdered in Huelva in December 2018, showing a person full of vitality who should never have been murdered and who would never have wanted to be the protagonist of that news bulletin, or the shocking rescue of Julen in January 2019, which was followed by everyone in Spain and around the world.

However, the way an image in perceived is determined by cultural factors, and it can have different meanings depending on who sees it and where. Therefore, the Sudanese child represented poverty and the vulture that stalked him can symbolize capitalism. In Aylan's case, although photographs of shipwrecked immigrants are nothing new, the image of a drowned white boy lying on a beach shocked the whole of Europe. Or take the case of Julen, the two-year-old child everyone could identify with: a life lost too young; an example of the solidarity of all involved in the fifteen days of rescue; or the scale of the irregularities committed in Spain to save money and defraud the State, without understanding that such actions affect us all.

Photography in Teacher Training

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area following the Bologna Declaration of 1999 involved a major commitment to the role of Information and Communication Technologies in the future of teaching. Photography is part of many of the courses taught in Fine Arts degrees, starting in the first year, but little is known about the use of photography as a conceptual language in other degree courses. However, this technique can be useful in the initial training of teachers at all educational levels, and also in in-service teacher education.

As shown in a comparative study by Alba et al. (1994) on the situation of technology in undergraduate teaching, the still image, such as photography, is included in some educational technology teaching guides, although it is given less importance than other elements, such as applied technology, moving images, or computer programs, and even the direct use of cameras by students. Given that teacher training addresses situations that stimulate higher mental processes, such as reflection, reasoning, participation, etc. (Bautista García-Vera, 2013), photography can be very effective in activating these mental processes in students both during their undergraduate training and later in their teaching practice. They can go from seeing the photograph as an additive to a text to making it the protagonist of what they want to study and learn in depth.

ICTs are clearly an important tool for teaching, research and knowledge transfer (Morgado-Aguirre et al., 2015). However, according to Bautista García-Vera ( 2007), in the case of university lecturers they have not been used to acquire these skills, a factor that influences the scant use of such media by this professional group. The same authors found that when present in undergraduate teaching, in the Vygostskian sense, ICTs are mainly used to reproduce information and not to create documents with students or to promote the psychological interrelation between them in their training function (Vygotsky, 1979). Therefore, it is hard to find photography being used beyond subjects taught in Art and Educational Technology, and even less so for the purpose of training and research for future teachers.

Photographs help in deduction, interpretation and imagination, so subjects and their sociocultural belonging become involved in the cognitive processes that are set in motion by observing an image (Ramírez Alvarado, 2011). They are never an end in themselves. but rather a means of communication (González Granados, 2008), while photography encloses a world that transcends the camera and the printing of images (Fandiño Lizarraga, 2013). According to Brown (2009, p. 14), photography is important because of “the veracity of the appearance of things”. Photography can be fundamental in helping teachers engage in detailed, thoughtful reflection on what goes on in their classrooms, the use made of space, the work done by their pupils, the relevance given to certain contents, or the classroom rules, shared responsibility and activities. It can even help in creating a collective memory and promote parent-teacher relationships.

We rarely reflect in depth on the image we transmit to the educational community, in other words, to children, parents and even colleagues and ourselves, and these elements are rarely studied by the teachers of today and tomorrow.

Based on the notion that photographs provide evidence, proof, and certify an experience, we could say that “every photographic image is, in a certain way, self-authenticating” (Schaeffer, 1990, p. 61), it helps us verify our actions by forever freezing that exact, fleeting moment. “Human beings think not only with language, but also with visual images, with gestures and with sound models” (Eisner, 1992, p. 15). Harper (2002) argues that images evoke deeper elements of consciousness than words alone. This does not mean that he considers the importance of photographs without words, but that, ideally, these two forms of representation should be combined.

Based on the premises put forward in this chapter, and given that photography is not a subject of study in undergraduate teacher training, we believe it should play a leading role in reflection without being linked to a specific specialist subject, but as a tool for analysis and inquiry before action, during action, and after action. If communities of practice can be formed in educational centres and schools, special emphasis will be placed on joint reflection on certain aspects which, though peripheral, are no less important.

Communities of practice can involve not only teachers, but also students and other members and agents of the educational community in debate or discussions about certain elements that conform educational centres. Dialogue, based on photographic images that capture a specific moment in time and that include not only material elements but also people, can help shape debate that reveal our preconceptions, our training and experience. These are all elements that configure how we perceive reality, but discussing them with others can help us consolidate our ideas or rethink elements that we had not previously considered.

Photographs could be taken of the space reserved for students, teachers and parents in the school, and spark debate on which routines, situations or relationships are considered suitable and which should be changed or remodelled. It often happens that certain elements that strike an outside as being strange will have gone completely unnoticed by those who pass by them every day.

When students are given a voice, they are also capable of analysing the corridors, classrooms and other elements of the school, and of discussing how they would like them to be, what is missing or what is superfluous, and why. However, they are rarely given the opportunity to express themselves, and with this, the schools misses an opportunity of making them feel an active part of school life and equally responsible for caring for and improving their surroundings. This means that school facilities are not perceived and experienced as places we have to inhabit, but are identified with the tastes and preferences of those who make use of them.

Photographs can be used for the purpose of debate during both the theoretical and practical stages of undergraduate pre-school and primary school teacher training. This would allow photography to become an important part of this training, instead of being used merely to illustrate class work or the final practicum report. Thus, in the initial stages of teacher training, on a weekly basis, undergraduate students could be encouraged to bring photographs of schools to class to discuss them with their classmates. This will give them insight into their weak points and compel them to engage in activities and projects that can remedy these situations, habits and space–time relationships that can be improved.

The project can be productive and creative or reproductive. In the first case, the students work with their own photographs, in the second, they reflect on photographs obtained from other sources, but not taken by them. They can engage in the same activities every week during their practicum under the supervision of their university tutor, discussing photographs with other colleagues in the same situation who are tutored by the same professor. Any situation related to life at their school can be discussed in these meetings, giving the student the opportunity to become aware of them and analyse them on the basis of their theoretical training or on their own life experience. During the debate, participants can suggest changes, which should then be reflected in subsequent photographs, once the change has been implemented. Another idea is to keep a visual record—a sort of practicum diary—not for the purpose of reporting what has happened every day, but to highlight whatever drew their attention for a specific reason, presenting it as an object of perception, analysis, reflection and debate, giving prominence to the photograph when it is accompanied by a text or verbal narration.

Trying to identify possible solutions or changes that can be made to the situations detected contributes to both reflective training and active investigation. These must then be implemented by the student, so that the group can analyse whether it led to any effective change. Some of these reflections, the result of the work developed with trainee teachers in the subjects I teach, may involve the following topics:

  • Distribution in the classroom and its space, such as: workplaces (isolated tables for individual work, tables in small groups, in large groups, distributed in a U-shape, in pairs, etc.); distribution of work areas (corners, library with cushions on the floor, pets, plants, terrariums, minerals, small laboratory, experiments, etc.); use of the classroom walls (they become an element of training, a reminder of rules, activities, announcements of events, exhibition of school work, etc.)

  • Use of material resources and working conditions: classroom material (computers, tablets, video projector, digital whiteboard, mobile phones, work platforms, educational games, abacus, painting material, writing, recycled material, etc.); elements that affect students’ work, such as lighting, temperature, sound insulation, etc.

  • Classroom and recess methodology: individual or group activities (in pairs, in small groups, large groups, interactive groups, assemblies, etc.); characteristics of the students (homogeneity, heterogeneity, special needs students working with others in the classroom or alone or with a specialist teacher, etc.); recreational activities (groups doing the same activity, talking groups, traditional games, football, separation by gender, by age, by social background, etc.)

  • The school's commitment to sustainability: energy sources, recycling bins, use of paper in the classroom, use of recycling items, etc.

Each of the foregoing elements can be the object of group reflection among trainee teachers, because they can stimulate discussions on classroom methodology, distribution of space, organization of classes, etc. Each of the elements presented in each section can indicate the processes followed in the classroom, and can help participants reflect on how they are carried out. For example: the presence of separate tables may mean that the students engage in personal work, but it can also indicate individualized work, which is not the same; or the presence in the classroom of children with special needs can mean inclusion, or merely integration.

Photography can also help us to go beyond the school itself and compare our own personal experiences with those of other schools in Spain or abroad, analysing whether these teaching situations can be transferred to other locations, or whether they require conditions that cannot be met in our setting. This is because photographs allow participants to explore their own lives, and inquire after and initiate conversations with others (Bautista García-Vera, 2013). Sometimes, a very limited view centred on the school itself does not allow us to evaluate and learn from everything around us, and does not allow us to be aware of elements in our setting that can be used to teach both children and teachers alike. Therefore, photographs can also be taken outside the school and submitted for debate.

Communities of practice, as described by Wenger (2001), can plan to meet weekly, twice-weekly, monthly or twice-monthly in their school. These meetings can take place in person or online, taking advantage of modern technology to involve the educational community in their ongoing debates: students, teachers, parents and other social and cultural actors. This will give them the opportunity to participate in the interpretation made and put forward their own interpretation and suggestions for change.

It is important to remember that still photographs allow us to analyse in greater detail images that may be part of a continuous sequence. Capturing the moment gives us the chance to stop time and become aware of that which surrounds us but does not become part of our daily analysis. This might be an excuse to talk about topics that otherwise would not have been the subject of debate.

In this regard, as will be seen in the following chapters that focus on photo-elicitation and narrative photography, the still image helps teachers and their students develop sensitivity to aesthetics and an interest their surroundings (Ramírez Alvarado, 2014). This intuitive representation system, therefore, can promote self-awareness to both pre-service and in-service teachers. This knowledge can help teachers deal with unforeseen events that may arise in their teaching practice by developing a fundamental skill: the ability to observe, to look in detail at everything in their classroom and school. This will allow them to gather information and combine it with information they receive through the eyes of their pupils, enabling them to find the best ethical solution to the dilemma.