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Aronson Associate Professor Wendy Luttrell played a role in the cross-disciplinary faculty team that created Thinking Like an Educator, a case-based learning course launched in the spring of 2004. This course was developed to be part of a core curriculum available to all master's and doctoral students. Luttrell has transformed some of her work with schoolchildren used in the course into a research project on how children perceive their environments and what teachers-in-training can learn from these experiences.
Q: You first met the students at the Columbus Park School in Worcester while working on HGSE's pilot core course, Thinking Like an Educator. Can you tell us more about working with the children and this innovative methodology known as PhotoVoice? A: My role in the Thinking Like an Educator course was to bring an ethnographic perspective and analysis of culture to bear upon issues raised by the course "case study"—for example, issues like how best to serve a multicultural student body in a low-income, urban neighborhood. But, for ethnographers, it is work with real people in real places that draws out the specificities and brings to life the conditions and experiences we seek to understand. I designed a course unit that would feature real children—children enrolled at the Columbus Park School in Worcester, MA, whose social demographics and schooling conditions mirrored those presented in the case study. My work on this unit has evolved into a research project about the shaping role of class, race, gender and culture in the children's self-understandings, including their notions of success and failure. The project was conducted at the Columbus Park School in Worcester, MA. 12 racially, ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse fifth-grade students—six girls and six boys—were selected to participate by principal Dr. Dolores Gribouski and teacher Jayne Cardin, coordinator of the school's technology lab. They talked with the children, secured permissions from their parents, and helped design the project. We adapted an innovative methodology called PhotoVoice, a research and educational tool that uses photography as a means to tap people's knowledge and expertise about their own lives. It was first used in public health; researchers asked rural Chinese women to take photographs of community and family life to document health conditions. Taking photos also served as a catalyst for the women to discuss their own assessments of the health needs of their communities. This method treats community or cultural "insiders" as crucial sources of information and interpreters of their own lives. We adapted PhotoVoice and put cameras in the hands of the Columbus Park School children. We wanted the children to represent the everyday conditions which shape their lives from their perspective, so we asked them the following: "You have a cousin who is your same age and is moving to Worcester and the Columbus Park School. Take pictures of what you want her/him to know about your school, family and community." Each child had four days and 27 exposures. After the photos were developed, we met with each child and asked her/him to tell us about the photos. These conversations were videotaped. The children's photographs provide clues to their concerns and identities. The photos are a starting point in learning what is important to them. What the children have to say about their photos provides another layer of insight into their shared values, beliefs and knowledge about the world and their place in it—including what it means to be an educated person. Most important, by putting the children in charge of representing themselves and their surroundings through photography, they are given an opportunity to regard themselves in new ways. Similarly, as viewers, we are afforded glimpses into the children's worlds that only an "insider" could provide. Q: What are some of the preliminary lessons you have drawn from the children's photographs and voices? A: I have been struck by how the Columbus Park children's images and voices bring to light the especially hidden reach of class and class inequality into self-understandings. This has been a question that has compelled my research: how students identify themselves with regard to class and how they internalize a sense of themselves as a success or failure, as entitled or constrained.
For example, one girl took a picture of her mother standing at the kitchen sink. The girl spoke with pride and admiration about the woman, whom she described as "real smart, even though she didn't go to college." What was her motivation for saying this? Was she defending her mother (and, by extension, herself) against the possibility that she would be seen as "less than" others (including the interviewer) who have college degrees? Perhaps she was voicing an alternative value that holds in highest esteem the "real intelligence" that it takes to make ends meet—a value I found expressed by poor and working-class women I interviewed in the late 1990s. This familiar cultural script, that higher education affords people more status or respect, was sounded throughout the children's interviews. It raises the following question: How does a sense of status, respect or "smartness" get under the children's skin and into their hearts? As educators, we must ask ourselves how are we implicated? We must also consider what it means for this particular girl, who clearly identifies strongly with her mother and wants me to know that she is grateful to her, to imagine herself seeking a college education. How would a college degree affect her sense of identification or affiliation with her mother/parents/family? In what ways does this unexamined cultural value about education as a path to upward mobility make schooling a fraught experience for poor and working-class children, and what can teachers and administrators do about this aspect of inequality? The hidden reach of race, gender, and, especially, social class into people's personal senses of limitation and possibility makes the use of visual images and image-making especially valuable. I have learned that words are not always an adequate means of expressing self-understanding, nor are words sufficient for representing the lives of those who, for whatever reasons, have been marginalized and whose faces are missing in educational research. The Columbus Park School children's photographs push us to recognize them and their concerns in a fuller way. Q: Late this past fall, you helped design a visual exhibit, "Framing Childhood," that displayed your work with the Columbus Park children. Tell us about the exhibit and what do you think is the impact on the community involved—both adults and children? A: The last step of our project was to ask the children to "curate" an exhibition for the public. They came to HGSE and spent the morning sorting through their photographs, talking about which photos might grab audience attention and why. The children also discussed which images most resembled "art," which they defined as a picture you would most likely find hanging in a museum. One group of children wanted the exhibit to feature pictures of "everyday life," while another group thought each child should select his or her "favorite" photos—their own or others. The key lesson from the exhibition is that it is impossible to collapse the vitality of the photographs chosen by the children into one single theme or analytic framework. Each individual photograph tells us much. Taken together, the photographs speak of larger social conditions and ideologies that shape the children's lives and schooling, including the role of media and consumption; the place and value of work (their parents' and their own); the salience of mothers as emotionally powerful figures in childhood and schooling; the implicit gendered contours of friendship; and their insights about what it means to be an educated person.
Their photographs, chosen by the children, take viewers into personal, intimate, domestic spaces—bedrooms, kitchens, the family sofa—inviting curiosity about what goes on here and how it shapes children's sense of constraint and possibility. Especially striking is the confidence with which the children speak about their photos. Viewers have remarked upon the children's assured tone of expertise and their visible pleasure at being listened to with special intent. Perhaps it is because schools do not put children in charge of their self-representations or position them as experts of their own experiences that the children's materials are so compelling. In any case, the exhibition invites audiences to look, to listen to the children's videotaped interviews, and to consider the "frames" of childhood that are being offered. Q: How will the children's visual images and voices translate into curriculum for the Ed School in training its students to better comprehend educational issues? A: I see two important curricular outcomes of this project. First, images and image-making provide a point around which the HGSE students can search for evidence of the conditions which shape children's lives and learning, and get a glimpse into children's experiences, their cultural and personal meaning-making. Second, the materials gathered for this project offer the HGSE students an opportunity to examine their own tacit assumptions about childhood, children's lives and schooling—to stretch themselves in ways that they may be unaware they need to stretch. Looking carefully at the children's photographs forced the HGSE students to put words to unspoken judgments about what they were seeing. And, equally important, the photographs spurred the HGSE students' desire to know more. What are we looking at? What is happening in this image? What led up to this image? What does it mean? Why was it taken? How are these images related to each other? What motivations and interests are expressed? In short, the photographs invited HGSE students to be investigators, not just spectators, of the conditions and meanings of childhood—for themselves and the Columbus Park children. After the HGSE students viewed and discussed the photos, they listened to what the children had to say about the images. Many were surprised by what they learned, and some expressed discomfort about the gap between what they had imagined about a photo and its meaning and what a child had meant to convey. For example, one child took a photograph of a $20 bill, which evoked a wide range of initial impressions and reactions. Was this picture taken to convey status or success or a value placed on materialism? Was the money a gift? For what was it being used? HGSE students were surprised to learn that it was a child's allowance and even more taken aback to learn about the chores required of the girl to earn this money—including sorting and folding laundry everyday for her four brothers. Students began comparing their childhood lives and responsibilities with the girl's. This raised questions about what roles gender, class and culture might be playing in the children's experiences of childhood and schooling.
At its core, the practice of ethnography is about negotiating a cross-cultural encounter—becoming familiar enough with another way of life, another way of seeing the world, another set of conditions and demands—so that the educator can report and reflect upon an unfamiliar "other" in a way that the "other's" actions and beliefs are acknowledged, recognized and open to self-scrutiny. The curricular materials for this unit asks educators-in-training to stretch themselves; to cross over cultural and social divides, especially class ones; and, perhaps, to become more aware by making interpretive stumbles along the way. Having said all this, however, it is important to stress this exercise's limitations. I do not mean to suggest that viewing the photographs and listening to the children's explanations is a replacement for doing the more difficult face-to-face work of negotiating harsh and mundane social realities that place untenable demands upon low-income and poor children and their parents. But we need to find creative ways for preparing educators for this task. Q: How can pedagogy adapt at schools like HGSE so that these sorts of projects can become a valuable research and educational tool? A: Schools of education must provide more occasions for educators-in-training to bridge between cultural borders and social divides. We need to do this in ways that avoid a voyeuristic or reductive sense about the force of social inequality and the role culture plays in education. This requires partnerships with real schools; sustained involvement and collaboration with real people whose life conditions and experiences, cultural views and values may be at odds or different from the educator-in-training's. This is all the more urgent as the teaching force becomes increasingly homogenous—white, middle-class and female—and the student population becomes increasingly racially and culturally heterogeneous. At the same time, these projects also need to offer real educational benefits and skills to schoolchildren who participate. Inviting children to become image-makers—to represent themselves on their own terms—is one, among many, of these benefits. For More Information
HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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