Using participatory video to explore teachers’ lived experiences

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Date
2010Author
Olivier, Tilla
De Lange, Naydene
Wood, Lesley
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Teachers who work in economically and socially disadvantaged environments have first-hand knowledge of
the challenges that can impede teaching and learning, yet their voices are often ignored when researchers
and policy-makers attempt to address such issues. In this article we describe how we attempted to
make teacher voices audible via an intervention based on participatory visual methodology. A two-day
participatory research-as-intervention workshop enabled twelve teachers from economically and socially
disadvantaged township schools to produce videos that examined some challenges applicable to their
praxis. The process of producing the participatory video offered the teachers the opportunity to learn
more about themselves and their educational contexts, and to position themselves as “teachers who care”,
as they collectively identified pertinent issues affecting their practice, decided on how to represent those
issues visually and how to further use the finished product as a tool for teaching and/or community
engagement.