Teaching with Technology

In this second part of using photography in the classroom, we will take a look at how to use photography to understand how well students interact with the landscape around them. It is a perfect way of being able to “hear multiple voices in multiple ways” by advancing the skill of directed observation. One of the issues of teaching upper level course in any subject is how to put the students in the role of being active participants in the learning process where they build on the information obtained in introductory courses. Often, the instructor needs something that is both different and familiar, challenging but something that can be carefully monitored and does not require the students to pursue massive amounts of independent research. A common thread used in incorporating the camera into the classroom is “place – what has happened, is happening, and will probably happen in a place and/or to a place”. Photography can tell a story or even authenticate a description in ways that other medium such as words or statistics cannot. Not unlike using Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), it helps students find a pattern and make meaning of information around them. In the author’s course on Urban Geography, the students are given four assignments. In the first assignment, the students must write a short narrative describing their neighborhood. More than anything, it provides the instructor with a way of evaluating the student’s abilities of observation. This is before the students are introduced to any of the course content. Their writing should be a view of their world from multiple perspectives and describe deeply what they see. After four or five weeks in the course and having obtained some command of the topic, the students are now told to go out to those same neighborhoods and to isolate a concept described in class such as “exclusion, marginality, gentrification, disintegration, identity” and with the camera, photograph some examples. Some photographs presented in the article show how cities deal with homeless individuals by cordoning off entryways to building (preventing them from sleeping there at night) to providing park benches with humps and armrests (preventing the homeless from stretching out). I have run into similar problems at Dulles Airport and their benches that have armrests every two feet to preclude you from ever getting the least bit comfortable while waiting for a flight. Asking students to think about how ideas ground themselves on the landscape helps them develop an appreciation for looking and seeing actively, not passively. The third assignment is a capstone/synthesis project which best demonstrates their command of this new subject called urban geography. Interestingly, there was a mix of photo-essays, audio reports, spliced photos into a form of moving film, maps, literary musings and the traditional research paper. The fourth assignment is to present their findings and to write once again the first paper (assignment #1) from a new perspective on what they learned in the class. Allowing students to “see geography, relate it to their life worlds and be able to connect the theory with practice” takes the students from definitions and meanings of concepts to the point where students come to appreciate geography as multidimensional and integrated (Sanders).
Cited Work:
Sanders, Rickie. “Developing Geographers through Photography: Enlarging Concepts”. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, (2007): pg 181-195. Web.