Abstract
This chapter presents photo elicitation as a procedure for applying photography to in-service teacher training. This use of images is based on the idea that when a teacher is aware of disparities between what they think (and verbally express) and what they do, or between actions aimed at an educational purpose that they believe is good and noble, this promotes a change in their teaching practices and, as a result, an improvement in their professional development. Two types of actions are analyzed and discussed; one is when a teacher independently takes photos of situations in their own teaching practice, either to inform themselves of what they do or to resolve a question about their teaching behavior. The second type of photo elicitation is carried out as part of a school’s training program and can be identified because the photos of a teacher’s work are taken by other colleagues who have been chosen by the institution. In this case, the participants ask the teacher questions to understand their educational purposes or to question and demonstrate possible inconsistencies or contradictions detected in their practice through the photographs.
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Introduction
When we talk of contradictions in teacher training, we refer to the existence of opposing beliefs in the same teacher, or to inconsistent theories in the same teacher, or to inconsistencies between the aim of their teaching activity and a particular activity they set their students. When this happens, the teacher’s cognitive and professional balance is disrupted. Teachers’ beliefs are linked to their ideas about some educational situation that they consider to be true, even though there is no evidence to distinguish them from those that are not. One of the basic assumptions is that professional development can only take place when teachers systematically change their beliefs and adopt others that are better constructed, or that are supported by rational arguments that give them the status of a theory.
Beliefs and theories, therefore, are conceptual elements in which the teacher is the protagonist and the subject. However, a construct emerged in teacher training in the beginning of the century - professional vision - that solidifies beliefs into educational goals and into the activities carried out by students to achieve these goals. Specifically, the teaching vision refers to the teacher’s personal position in respect of the values, ideals or educational goals to be achieved by their students through teaching situations (Kennedy, 2006; Lefstein & Snell, 2011).
The foregoing arguments in respect of teacher’s perspective support, in turn, the conceptual line between their contradictions and inconsistencies that will help to specify the elements and mental processes needed to bring about a change in their teaching activities. Therefore, contradictions are the teacher’s opposing beliefs or antithetical theories. For example, the belief that the school is a meeting place for families and teachers, while being convinced that parent-teacher associations and other social agents are more of a hindrance than a help. Now, the teacher’s lack of coherence, in other words inconsistency or incongruity, refer to the lack of logical synchrony between the aims sought for groups of students and the activities they have to engage in to achieve them, such as attempting to promote values of cooperation and solidarity while setting the student individual, competitive tasks.
An important issue in teacher training is the analysis of the structure of the elements and relationship and interventional procedures of photo-elicitation situations that are most likely to prompt manifestation and/or awareness in the teacher of the potential inconsistencies and contradictions in their professional development. This is important, because these incongruities and mental inconsistencies are sometime embedded in their routines, and will be perpetuated unless another person perceives and questions them. The changes made can be taken as an indicator of the teacher’s level of awareness that all is not well in their classroom and, therefore, of the need to make a change to restore the possible loss of balance and personal and professional stability and, consequently, to improve their teaching practice.
Photo-Elicitation Situations: Elements and Procedures
Following the concepts put forward in the introduction, the material and human elements involved in photo-elicitation sessions are as important as the organizational and participation procedures in terms of manifesting the teacher’s beliefs, theories and practices, and the possible contradictions and inconsistencies between them. We will analyse each of these elements separately.
Elements Involved in Photo-Elicitation Situations
Bearing in mind the conceptual analysis presented in the preceding chapter, photo-elicitation in this chapter is, above all, an educational situation in the framework of professional teacher development that involves a group of elements that can be contemplated, or inventoried, into two groups. One group consists of teachers and other members of the educational community participating in these sessions. Specifically, in addition to the students present or not in the photographs taken for the session and the external observers, such as parents, university lecturers and researchers, the session also includes trainee teachers, who act as both author and informant, or as questioner and critic, of the content of each photograph. In order for them to exercise these functions, they must be given the opportunity to speak at some point in the process; in other words, they must be given the floor. This is another essential element of the photo-elicitation session. Further on, we will suggest that another relevant question is the order in which each participant intervenes, depending on the purpose of a session or on one of the situations included in the previous session.
Panofsky (1972) and Barthes (1994), among others, have argued in favour of accompanying images with verbal or textual language. According to Panofsky (1972), language is essential at the time of denotation, or identification of the content of the image. Denotation, in turn, is important for subsequent interpretation, because it acts as a reference for connotation and emotion. The presence of the spoken word in photo-elicitation situations is also fundamental due to the polysemic nature of the image. Barthes (1994) documented two of the functions of words when used to accompany a photograph. The first, which is meant to give certainty to its referential elements, he called anchorage, which establishes the meanings of the photograph. It is the function that the authors of an image assign to the word when they use it to help participants identify or fix the meaning of the setting and its content and, therefore, to prevent errors in the denotative plane. This is achieved by the information they provide when describing the elements in the photographs. Similarly, at the connotative level, authors can also use anchoring verbal language to prevent external observers from making interpretations that are far removed from the purpose of the image, or they can also use verbal communication to specify their intended meaning.
The second function of words when used to accompany a photograph, according to Barthes (1994), is relay. This he saw as complementary to the image, because it adds new meanings or interpretations not previously given. This is the function that external observers usually give to the word when they intervene to wonder, or question, or express something different about the apparent content of a photograph, or about what is expressed verbally by its author.
The other group of elements is made up of tools, or cultural artifacts in terms of the historical-cultural approach, in their dual material or symbolic dimension. Photo-elicitation situations require a camera and the language of the still image. Knowledge of the latter will allow the creator of a photograph to look at reality, capture it and represent it differently from those who are not familiar with this analogical representation system, since they will perceive it according to the historically configured world view prevalent in their particular socio-cultural context. The symbolic language of photographs obtained using a camera, which consists of elements such as the shot, the camera angle, light, colour and composition, enable those familiar with this language to produce other types of images beyond the stereotyped, traditional and even ancestral depictions typical of a certain culture or society at a certain historical moment. In the hands of a teacher, these elements will convey something different about the school, because this type of language helps breathe life into the camera.
Teachers who have this visual communication competence, unlike those who do not, will maximise the technical possibilities that cameras offer, above all, their representative functionality. This is because in addition to denoting, they will be able to add meaningful and emotional connotations to the image of the chosen situation. For example, the teacher will use the image to educate, question, and also to describe a school activity, because it will establish both an analogy with that particular educational context, and a symbolic or figurative interaction. In this way, the teacher, more than merely informing, will be able to evoke and therefore intervene in and facilitate photo-elicitation situations. This is because photographic language will enable them to represent and manifest their entire teaching experience and the residue that this leaves in their so-called practical knowledge.
The Order of Intervention of Each Protagonist
Our review of the different ways of using photo-elicitation sessions in different fields of knowledge shows, among other things, the organizational flexibility of these situations, insofar as a photograph can be taken or chosen from among several photographs by one of the participants. These session, therefore, are welcomed because they help the protagonists of these elicitation processes analyse situations from the photographic and verbal perspective. Now, we need to analyse the different possibilities in order to identify their essence, because the way the meanings are constructed will, to some extent, depend on the organizational approach followed in each session.
These procedures have been studied by various authors. Fernández (1988), for example, contributed four technical sequences for analysing video recordings of teaching practice. The structures used in processes called video-analysis/discussion are designed to provide information that can improve the teaching practice of one or several teachers. To this end, Fernandez created four sequences, each of which follows the same structure:
Recording → Viewing → Analysis/Discussion → Project.
Each of the aforementioned procedural structures is distinctive for the way in which it gathers information for the video and the nature of that information. Specifically:
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Type 1: Video of an earlier survey of a small group of teachers taking part in a training programme in which they discuss the problems or issues to be addressed in the project.
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Type 2: Recording of surveys carried out on a large sample of teachers to gather information on the concerns and difficulties they encounter in their teaching practice.
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Type 3: Recording of interviews held with a small group of teachers about their urgent needs to improve their teaching.
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Type 4: Recording of an in-depth interview with one of the participating teachers committed to professional development.
Fernandez has shown the complexity and diversity of sequences obtained during these training sessions; for example, the foregoing procedures can be broken down into sub-procedures, depending on the role taken by the external expert, or by the colleague of the teacher or group of teachers, or depending on whether or not they appear in the video or have previously viewed the content of the shots. Torre and Murphy (2015), meanwhile, suggest that photo-elicitation involves three related moments: taking the photograph, showing it to a group and, finally, the intervention of the participants to obtain information. None of these authors stop to investigate the effect that the speaking order has on the nature of the information evoked and the interactions generated.
Given our interest in knowing how to facilitate the emergence of contradictions and inconsistencies between the teachers’ theories, beliefs and practice, in this chapter we will specify the order in which each participant intervenes in photo-elicitation sessions in order to achieve the goal sought by a particular photograph in a particular situation. This decision is justified by the importance that verbal elements have on the content of a photograph that characterises these situations, as mentioned above. If the word is so essential, therefore, each protagonist must be allowed to speak; but, in what order?
In this chapter, we will deal with this issue by identifying the two aspects involved in deciding the order of intervention in a photo-elicitation situation: one is the purpose of the session, and the other is the person who has taken the specific photograph used in the session. In terms of purpose, we can distinguish between two types of photo-elicitation sessions. The first type is the descriptive-informative session, in which a teacher describes which characteristics of their teaching practice they consider to be ordinary, and which are extraordinary. The second type is, in essence, the formative-interrogative session, in which the classroom and school activities of teachers committed to improving their practice are subject to public scrutiny, which involves a critical inquiry, questioning, and analysis of the motivations behind their actions and the benefit of such actions.
Now, to the foregoing must be added the protagonist or person responsible for staging the photo-elicitation session. Specifically, we need to differentiate between who has requested a certain session for one or two of the above purposes—whether it is a specific teacher interested in exploring their own practice, or whether it is that teacher’s working group, acting on the commitment of all its members to improve their teaching practice. The difference between these sessions is that in the first case, the photograph is taken by the teacher, and in the second case it is taken by one of the members of the group—either a colleague or an external observer interested in asking about or questioning certain aspects of the work of a specific teacher undergoing external analysis and evaluation. Authors such as Taylor (2002) even distinguish between situations in the same session where the photograph was taken by the teacher who is the subject of the assessment, and when a photograph of the teacher’s work is taken by another person. He refers to the first case as self-photography, and to the second as photo-elicitation.
The essence of each of the four procedures involving the combination of the two dimensions indicated will be discussed on the basis of different studies carried out in the field of teacher in-service education, and specifically, on the basis of the value of the experiences reported when different orders of intervention are used in the different situations where photographs are projected or viewed in a given photo-elicitation session.
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Procedure A:
Session Requested by One of the Teachers
Most authors on this subject agree that most sessions take place at the request of a teacher committed to improving their teaching practice (Birkeland, 2013; Dockett et al., 2017). The person who has called the session and taken the photographs to show each situation they bring to the table usually speaks first about the content of the photographs. This is based on the “auteur theory” (Mannay, 2017; Rose, 2001), which states that the most relevant thing about a photograph is what its author wants to convey. Following this, if necessary, the rest of the group are asked to respond to the author’s concerns and teaching activities, or to explore the value of his or her work from the point of view of others.
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Subprocedure Aa:
Descriptive-Informative Function of the Photo-Elicitation Session
If the purpose is informative, once the photograph has been shown to the group, the teacher who has taken the photograph is allowed to speak. He or she can then describe their teaching practice in the classroom or school using the elements shown in the image and the relationships between them to support their argument. At this stage, the description of the content will be referential/denotative, and will facilitate the interpretation and, therefore, understanding of the meaning of later events that will also be photographed.
In this type of session, when the photograph is taken by a teacher who is the subject of the session, he or she describes typical situations encountered when working with students in the classroom and, as a sort of therapeutic confession, seeks the agreement and approval of the other participants. This interest manifested by the teacher who first intervenes then becomes the purpose of the photo-elicitation session, and the function of the rest of the participants is to listen, agree and understand the work described by that teacher. External observers will only ask questions if they need to fill in gaps in the description or need further information in order to understand the situation.
Within this function, an interesting situation arises when the photograph used in the elicitation session includes one or more students (Pyle, 2013; Trott, 2013). This is because these students will usually be required to speak later to confirm or refute any statements the teacher might have made during his or her interpretation of the photograph.
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Subprocedure Ab:
Interrogative-Formative Function of the Photo-Elicitation Session
Though less frequent, the teacher’s request may also be motivated by their concern about a circumstance or unforeseen event that has taken place in some part of the school and captured in the photograph (Bautista et al., 2018). The teacher’s intervention will first allow them to specify the polysemy of the image while conveying their dilemma, doubt or concern to their colleagues, students and external observers present in the session. These participants will then be able to analyse it from another point of view, and suggest other courses of action or other possible decisions open to the teacher who is the author of the image that has facilitated the verbal evocation of the situation.
As mentioned above, the sponsor or teacher and, therefore, the primary protagonist of a photo-elicitation session, sets the agenda for the different photographic situations presented in the session, and defines the specific aspects of their work that can be discussed, evaluated, advised, and so on. This is because the goal of the session is to be observed and to receive help on a specific aspect of teaching practice that concerns and interests the teacher, who will therefore only accept interventions involving this topic. The role of the rest of the participating group is to listen and, if necessary, ask questions to gather more information or further details on the situation already described. This will help them complete and understand the discourse of the teacher who took the photograph and requested the session. Therefore, the intention behind this type of situation is not to create a space for evaluative judgement where the teacher’s overall work is subjected to public criticism.
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Procedure B:
Session Requested by One of the External Observers or Other Teachers from the School in Order to Explore Some Aspect of Life Inside or Outside the School Related to One of the Teachers Undergoing In-Service Education
As in the previous case, this group of photo-elicitation sessions arose from a series of academic research and innovation studies, In this session, the photograph is taken by someone other than the teacher who is the subject of these in-service education situations based on the use of still images. For example, Strickland et al. (2010), Miller (2016), Bautista et al. (2016) and Bautista (2017) have developed photo-elicitation situations involving photographs taken by students and their parents for the purpose of informing and asking their respective teachers about their homework, or about the interaction between a group of families in relation to the school. Other authors, such as Richard and Lahman (2015) and Ruto-Korir and Lubbe-De Beer (2012), in their role as external observers, took photographs of the practice of specific teachers, and subsequently analysed the beliefs and theories underlying this practice.
In all these situations, the person that had taken the photograph spoke first and set the agenda for the session. This group of sessions can also be divided into two subgroups, depending on their purpose.
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Subprocedure Ba:
Descriptive-Informative Purpose of the Photo-Elicitation Session
Our review of studies on this subject shows cases where external observers, parents or colleagues of a particular teacher have sponsored sessions to ask the teacher their reasons or motivations for engaging in a specific activity, or to enquire about a decision made on the organization of classroom spaces, etc.. In other words, after having taken a photograph related to this teacher and shown it to the group, the author of the photograph takes the floor to describe the content of the image, or the significance the elements have for him or her and, usually continues with a “why”, addressed to the teacher, about some aspect of the teaching practice shown in the photograph. Obviously, the teacher in question, the subject of that session, must then speak to clarify their reasons or motives for taking that decision or engaging in that activity. Stockall and Davis (2011), for example, took photographs and gave them to teachers so that, once viewed, they could talk about the significance they gave to the children present in them, and in this way understand and explain their theories and beliefs about childhood that underpin their discourse about the actions of these students captured in the image. This type of session involves procedures that could be identified, with some relevant differences, with the criticised micro-teaching sessions, with respect to the proposal made in this chapter to facilitate the emergence of teachers’ contradictions and inconsistencies, and not the acquisition of routines in environments outside the classroom and school.
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Subprocedure Bb:
Interrogative-Informative Purpose of the Photo-Elicitation Session
Finally, the last of the four groups of situations included in the analysis carried out is the most ground-breaking - the one that follows non-traditional revealing formats, the one in which the specific purpose is to interrogate a specific teacher to reveal contradictions and inconsistencies in their work (Walker, Ballet and Kuntz, 2012), or to make demands on the personal and professional identity of an educator (Kearns, 2012), and with it, change their theories, beliefs or practices in order to restore their professional stability to its previous level. As mentioned above, an external observer takes photographs of events involving a colleague in the school and, after the group has viewed each of these images, takes the floor to ask about something that he or she sees as an inconsistency. This is expressed using verbal structures such as “why …, if …”, or “if …, why …”, for example, “If you intend to develop the creative thinking of your students, why do you propose single-response activities?”.
The presence or absence of the teacher in question - the subject of in-service education in a particular session - in the photograph discussed by the participants, requires this teacher to speak at some point in the process. This is because the participants need to know his or her intentions in respect of the activities photographed, and to be able to contrast this explanation with the interpretations made by the other external observers. In the sphere of university teaching, Raven (2015) suggests that all subjects present in the image, students, other teachers, etc., should speak in order to enhance the revealing function of the verbal elements used to interpret the content of the photograph.
Having presented, and partly analysed, the different elements of the four structural procedures of photo-elicitation, in the next section we will discuss and argue that the latter is the one that best reveals the contradictions between theories, between beliefs, or the inconsistencies between the aims and the practices of a certain teacher. This discussion is needed because it is not always possible to obtain the elements that make up the photo-elicitation situations described above. Similarly, as described, not all sessions follow the same order of intervention or type of relationship. Therefore, it is best to analyse the different possibilities and value them according to their suitability for invoking, revealing, and raising the teacher’s awareness of the potential contradictions and inconsistencies in their practice.
Structure of Photo-Elicitation Sessions Aimed at Revealing Contradictions
To glimpse a contradiction between certain ideas, beliefs, etc. we first need determine the contradictory situations. Similarly, to perceive an inconsistency between two related elements, such as theory and practice, there has to be a moment when the logical relationship initially linking these elements ceases to exist. To reveal contradictions and inconsistencies, therefore, we need to represent both moments, each of the contradictory situations, in a continuous photo-elicitation session where at least both situations take place. This is possible because these two moments occur in a training evaluation session that includes at least two situations, one for each projection, evocation and analysis of the content of a photograph. Dissonance will emerge in the discourse that attempts to unify the interventions in photo-elicitation situations in a session, because the reality captured in each photograph corresponds to different contexts from the one forming the basis of the teacher’s belief, and can be contradictory.
One approach that helps explain the mental processes taking place during the description or the story narrated by a teacher in an in-service education context is narrative inquiry (Atkinson, 2010; Barkhuizen et al., 2014; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Harrison, 2002; Huber et al., 2014; Yuan & Lee, 2016; among others). This is based on the notion that every human experience can be understood as a story and, as such, can be told. Specifically, with respect to the subject discussed here, we will focus on photographic narrative inquiry (Bach, 2007; Caine, 2010; Dietz & Davis, 2009; Lemon, 2007; Moss, 2008). In the literature on this subject, most authors agree on including three elements in any narrative inquiry: space, time and the cultural and social context. This justifies the inclusion of photographic narrative inquiry in photo-elicitation in the form of narrative inquiry sessions involving various photo-elicitation situations. This technique is used to encourage teachers to give narrative explanations and make it possible to raise questions that allow them to become aware of a possible contradiction that they will later have to resolve in order to restore their professional and personal stability.
The presence of space and time in any narrative inquiry will require a list of photographs arranged in a certain order to trigger the inquiry process. In this work environment, each image is considered an opening into both its past and its future (Lemon, 2007), where the connection between them is narrated by the participating teacher, drawing on the content investigated by observing the photographs taken of their work by an outside observer. Both the meaning given to each of the images and the motivations that justify the meaning given to the connections made between them are fed and sustained by, among other factors, the teacher’s beliefs and opinions of the activities and relationships taking place in the school.
In this way, the external observer who acts as inquirer-evaluator in this photo-elicitation narrative inquiry procedure held to question the work of a particular teacher, will choose photographs showing the professional practice of that teacher over several days, selecting those that represent tasks that are inconsistent with their educational views. For example, when the teacher in question tries to encourage their students to engage in creative or collaborative thinking, but nevertheless one of the images shows them engaging in repetitive tasks copied from the blackboard, and another shows each student working individually at their table, isolated from other class members. Similarly, using various situations/photographs in a single photo-elicitation inquiry session so that the teacher appearing in them expresses the mental processes that step-by-step or situation/photograph-by-situation/photograph lead him or her to make sense of the content of all the images presented, forces the teacher to describe and interpret them, to compare and combine them in order to unify them using a consistent, well-structured story. But to do so, the teacher necessarily has to bear in mind the space–time, social and educational context of each situation photographed, and will then inevitably have to confront any inconsistencies and contradictions that emerge in the narrative. The photograph used in each photo-elicitation situation can remain on the table throughout the session to form a collage of all the previous images and facilitate comparison by placing them side by side.
The foregoing shows the need for a temporal continuum during an inquiry session by accumulating different photo-elicitation situations to bring out the contradictions and inconsistencies between a teacher's beliefs or between their approach to education. However, it will not reveal all the teacher’s shortcomings, because this type of continuity is contemplated in the four types of situations described in the preceding section. What is missing, and which of the four best fills that gap?
First, we have already argued that it should be one of the procedures where the photo-elicitation session is requested by an external observer. This person is responsible for taking the photographs, and once they have been displayed will be the first to speak and describe, interpret and argue their content, and eventually point out the possible contradictions and incongruities. Secondly, of the two types that involve an external agent as an informant of the teacher’s work, based on the literature on this subject, the most suitable type of situation is the one that interrogates the teacher “under review” using words such as “ if …, why …”. Specifically, according to Stockall and Davis (2011), the questions used to initiate and maintain a dialogue are sufficient to reveal the teacher’s beliefs. However, an opposing argument is needed to bring about a change in these beliefs. Golombek and Johnson (2017), for their part, observed the richness of the reflective processes generated by teachers when an external observer is inserted into their teaching space, above all, when they are questioned or when elements evoked when reporting and analysing the actions in their classrooms and schools are challenged. This line of questioning shows the teacher the meaninglessness of some of their practices, and encourages them to change their underlying motivations, which include their beliefs about education. This kind of change is fundamental in in-service teacher education, because, in the words of King (2003), “we live stories that give our life meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives” (2003, p. 153).
Therefore, the questions or doubts that illustrate the teacher’s contradictions will be better presented by incorporating the temporal dimension into the description of the elements of the space contained in an image. To do this, several school moments must be captured in photographs to be laid out in a particular order and analysed in a photo-elicitation situation. In this regard, the time gap between the photograph of one situation and another will evidence the changes, contrasts, confirmations and contradictions between the beliefs, theories and educational practices of the teachers featured in the narratives. This is because these elements are more easily represented in a continuum.
Configuration of a Teacher Inquiry and Evaluation Ritual That Promotes the Emergence of Contradictions: Elements and Structure of a Photo-Elicitation Session
To end this chapter, we present a procedure designed to promote in-service teacher education by showing the inconsistencies in their beliefs and the contradictions between their educational goals and the practical work they set their students. This procedure is based on the foregoing arguments regarding the role of the intervening subjects and the procedure to be followed in an inquiry session involving photo-elicitation situations.
One way of implementing this type of in-service teacher inquiry and evaluation is to consider them as part of a training programme approved in the school. This, following Van Gennep (1986), will be taken to be a rite of passage between the two mental states of the teachers undergoing the photo-elicitation session. The latter, with fewer contradictions and inconsistencies due to the knowledge acquired during the ritual. This ritual will involve a symbolic transaction by which the teacher sacrifices themselves on the altar of public evaluation, and in exchange receives knowledge that will enable them to improve their teaching practice. Within the rites of passage, teachers will undergo what Turner (1988) calls a life-crisis brought on by the humiliation at having their professional contradictions and inconsistencies exposed in public; humiliation, according to Turner, is common in the sacrificial victim, in this case, the teacher under evaluation.
A photo-elicitation session taken to be a rite of passage will be more easily understood and have greater social and institutional significance, because the material elements, participants and organized interactions between them will act as signs that will give social and institutional meaning to the process of in-service education in that school. These ritualized sessions will be a temporary parenthesis in a particular space in the institution. Repeating them at regular intervals, or from time to time, will make them part of school life, and although a different teacher will be the focus of each session, the forms and procedures will remain part of the educational rite of passage organized using that space–time structure.
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A.
The Participants in the Educational Inquiry and Evaluation Rite of Passage
The human elements involved in the teacher inquiry and evaluation sessions included in the photo-elicitation rituals include the observer, the teacher/subject, participants and witnesses. Officiators include:
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A1.
The master of ceremonies. This will be a colleague (teacher) of the subject of the rite of passage. Their role is to coordinate the inquiry-evaluation ritual, and they will also be responsible for appointing an external observer to evaluate the session using a procedure established in the school, for example, random assignation.
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A2.
The evaluator. This role will be filled by an external observer who will act as prosecutor. Their duties are to question and present photographic evidence of examples of some of the contradictions and inconsistencies exhibited by the teacher undergoing the evaluation. As the educational rite of passage is sponsored by the school and the contradictions are critically formulated by an external observer, possible tensions and susceptibilities in the relationship between evaluator and subject of evaluation, that is, between the prosecutor and the victim, are avoided. In other words, the school is performing the evaluation, and not a colleague of the teacher under evaluation. The external observer declares his or her intention to help the victim see the concerns that his or her work raises in those who have other interpretive references, in observers who are not influenced by the routines or actions considered common sense in that particular school.
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A3.
The subject of evaluation. This is the teacher whose work is the subject of public inquiry and evaluation in that session. As a victim, his or her function is to speak when asked to do so by the master of ceremonies and to anchor the meaning of the photograph in which he or she is present, explaining the intention of the action photographed. In this way, the teacher specifies the meaning of the action and qualifies the interpretation made by the evaluator.
Finally, the remaining participants or witnesses to this ritual will be colleagues of the teacher evaluated, their students and their students’ families, and other observers from outside the school, other than the master of ceremonies, who are invited to attend the session.
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B.
The Procedure
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B1.
Announcement. The process is started by the master of ceremonies, who announces that the inquiry-evaluation session is to be held on the premises of the school. The master of ceremonies, in accordance with his or her role, chooses a subject or teacher to evaluate and an external observer as evaluator. The evaluator observes and analyses the nature and type of actions carried out by the teacher, who plays the role of victim in this session and, at the same time, shows photographs of the essence of these practices. Similarly, the evaluator analyses the theories, beliefs and educational purposes that guide the teacher’s actions. This will allow the evaluator to study and illustrate any contradictions and inconsistencies found and reveal these during the inquiry and evaluation session. The evaluation ritual is held two weeks after the announcement, and the evaluator must complete these tasks within this time.
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B2.
Conduct of the evaluation ritual.
According to Turner (1988), every rite of passage involves a space and a time where interactions and exchanges take place between the individuals involved, in this case the master of ceremonies, the external evaluator and the teacher being evaluated who is prepared to undergo this ordeal to improve his or her teaching practice. In this space and time, a narrative inquiry session is combined with the content of various photo-elicitation situations, one for each photograph taken and chosen by the evaluator. We will not specify how the participants should be arranged in the space, their clothing, their gestures with regard to the image shown, etc. These details of the rite of passage will be decided based on the historical, social and cultural context of the school. All we will do here is present an outline of how the ritual can be conducted, based on the content of the preceding sections:
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B21.
The master of ceremonies, as the school representative, speaks first and opens the training session. He or she then gives the floor to the evaluator, who launches the inquiry process by using the relay function of verbal language to ask, question, etc., about the content of the first projected image.
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B22.
The evaluated teacher is then given the floor so that, using the anchor function, they answer the questions and doubts raised by the evaluator and communicate the intentionality or motivations of the action shown in the photograph.
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B23.
The foregoing inquiry procedures will be repeated for each of the photographs taken and chosen by the evaluator. The information received will allow the evaluator to validate his or her interpretations and conjectures relating to the possible contradictions and inconsistencies of the evaluated teacher, and then proceed to expose and evaluate these elements. Viewing the photographs as a collage will make it easier to detect possible inconsistencies or contradictions between parts or elements of the entire educational process. In other words, as mentioned at the beginning of the third section of this chapter, several photo-elicitation situations are presented within an inquiry-evaluation session in order to present two apparently contradictory or inconsistent moments in the evaluated teacher's work represented by their corresponding images. These images will facilitate the corresponding photo-elicitation situations.
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B24.
The evaluator takes the floor again to describe and illustrate the contradictions between beliefs, between theories or, bearing in mind the teacher’s approach to education, to show the inconsistencies between the educational goals pursued and the practices proposed by the evaluated teacher.
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B25.
The master of ceremonies gives the floor to the teacher undergoing the session who, by way of defence, states the intentions and motivations behind the practices shown in the sequence of photographs in order to explain overall meaning of the teaching practice, if applicable.
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B26.
Finally, the master of ceremony gives the floor to the teacher’s colleagues, in their role as witnesses, so that they can contribute their interpretations in light of the opinions voiced by the external evaluator and the teacher undergoing this educational ritual.
The more this educational inquiry-evaluator ritual is systematized and staged, and above all, the more it achieves social consensus as a rite of passage, the better will it become consolidated in the school as a memory, or foundation for change, and as an institutional tradition.
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B21.
References
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Bautista García-Vera, A. (2023). Structures of the Photo-Elicitation Process and Emergence of Contradictions in Training Teachers. In: Bautista García-Vera, A. (eds) Photographic Elicitation and Narration in Teachers Education and Development. Teacher Education, Learning Innovation and Accountability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20164-6_6
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