School spaces and identity
In this chapter we present a ‘story from the field’ that is drawn from a three-year research study exploring the relationships between schooling, students’ spatial
practices and identity formation. The study builds on previous research that links curriculum to identity construction and acknowledges that space and spatial practices play a constitutive role in the construction of individual and group identities (see, for example, Benko and Strohmayer, 1997; Goodson, 1998; Hur-ren, 2000; Schutz, 1999). An important aspect of the study involves high-school students using digital cameras to photograph significant spaces in the school. A collection of these photos then becomes the basis for individual tape-recorded interviews in which students describe their understandings of the significance of the photos for how spaces are negoti-ated in the school.
Our study, which is part of a larger regional study, is situated in a public high school in a Western Canadian city with a growing ethno-culturally diverse school population. Visitors to the school are immedi-ately struck both by the obvious ethno-cultural diversity of the school and by its unique geography.
It is a sprawling, windowless, single-story structure with a maze of hallways containing classrooms, laboratories, a library, a theatre, art studio, gymnasium and other facilities. At the centre of the school sits a large rotunda, which functions as one of the main gathering places for students.
Collaborative research
While the research on students’ spatial practices sought perspectives from teachers, school counsel-lors, administrators and support staff, the major source of data was gathered from the students themselves. The research question was presented to classes of students who were in their first year at the school and who represented the variety of available programmes including the International Baccalaureate and academic and general diploma programmes.
Students who agreed to participate completed surveys asking them to rate school spaces on scales of most to least preferred and most to least frequented. They were also asked to provide additional anecdotal information on school locations that were of particu-lar significance to them. Following the survey, a small number of student volunteers were provided with digital cameras and invited to take a collection of photos of significant spaces in the school. These images then became the basis for individual tape-recorded interviews in which students described their understandings of the significance of the photos for how spaces are negotiated in the school.
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Students as photographic researchers
The students have proven to be enthusiastic photo-graphic researchers. They were comfortable with visual culture and enjoyed using the digital camera to photograph familiar spaces in the school. For us, working with students as researchers opened up some interesting questions of collaboration. Teather (1999) suggests that power relationships emerge out of how we are positioned or located relative to others in space and place. This insight helped us to realize that, as university-based researchers, we have entered the school with questions that are derived from theories about the relationships between spaces, social interac-tions and identity formation. To this extent, we cannot help but relate to the school site, teachers and students as objects of investigation. For the students our questions and invitation to participate in the study became an opportunity to make explicit what they implicitly know about the spaces in the school, who it is that ‘hangs out’ there and with whom. Having taken up our initial invitation to participate in the research students became co-researchers with us, choosing freely the aspects of school space upon which to focus without the imposition of meaning by us as outside researchers. Nevertheless, we realized that power relations again became a factor as we began to share interpretations of the meanings of these spaces.
In choosing which places to photograph students recognized that they were not simply recording unmediated realities of the school space. It was clear to them, right from the beginning of the research, that they were already making interpretations about the meanings of places as they selected the areas to be photographed. Students were consciously making decisions about camera angles and about who or what to include in the picture in an effort to connote a range of social and cultural meanings. One example of this construction of meaning was the way in which they intentionally used connotations of darkness and light to convey the desirability or undesirability of certain spaces. One student took a picture of the library to illustrate why the library is a place she and her friends like to be. In discussing her photo she explained that ‘the library is popular because of the natural light, bright colours, big tables and lots of work space’. In a building with no exterior windows, natural light, which shines through by virtue of a skylight that is located in the ceiling in the library, is a rare commodity. This student then went on to describe another series of photos which she had taken
of the many school corridors to show how darkness and lightness contributed to the physicality and aesthetics of certain hallways that encouraged or discouraged students from being in these spaces.
Most students surveyed identified the rotunda in the centre of the school as the most socially active place in the building. Without exception, each student photographer chose the rotunda as an example of a significant school space. One student described the rotunda as ‘just a big open space where everyone gets together’. Another said ‘it’s the centre of everything and you can get to any place from there’. Further discussions with student photographers suggested that the rotunda was a complex social space, function-ing as a kind of microcosm of the school. They described how identifications of and with groups of students were played out in the rotunda area. The student researchers explained that in the public space of the rotunda you could observe how students would group together along racial lines, ‘the blacks tend to gather around that corner’; or make associations of common interests, ‘the ‘‘jocks’’ are over there’; or represent social status, ‘that’s where the popular girls are’. But the student researchers also noted that these lines of identification can be fluid, individuals move between groups, but such movements also receive public notice in the open space of the rotunda.
The ethics of taking pictures
While student-produced images of the school reveal a particular physicality of space, in the first year of the research the most salient features (for the purposes of our investigation these were the social aspects) had been absent from the photographs. This was a major frustration that threatened to dampen the potential for using photographic images in research. Privacy legislation and increasingly stringent requirements of research ethics have made the use of photographs of students highly problematic. In Canada, most prov-inces have enacted legislation that requires public institutions and organizations to explicitly define, in advance, the uses that will be made of information, and to restrict the information only to these uses.
Research funding bodies, as well as public institutions like schools and universities, have interpreted this legislation to mean that all persons depicted in research studies will have to provide informed con-sent and be guaranteed anonymity. Obviously, this interpretation places severe restrictions on the use of photography in research, particularly on studies such
as ours, which places cameras in the hands of students.
Taking seriously our responsibility for assuring informed consent and anonymity, we encouraged the student researchers to take photos of places, not of people. Yet as the research progressed, we more keenly appreciated that it is the social elements more than any other that have a tendency to attract or deter student presence in particular school spaces. Gruenewald (2003: 5) confirms this observation, as he draws upon critical geographies of space to conclude that, ‘places are social constructions filled with ideologies, and the experience of places . . . shapes cultural identities’.
Viewing the initial sets of photos and discussing them with the students, we were struck by the irony of (mis)representing the school as a place without people.
While people were missing from most of the photo-graphs, they were not absent in the minds of the students taking the pictures or in the actual spaces of the school. Clearly the solution for our research would have to be something other than following a restrictive ethics based solely on protection from harm.
A provisional solution has been to digitally alter the faces in the photographs of the students so they cannot be individually identified. A longer-term sol-ution must be a deeper consideration of the ethics and politics of representation in the use of photo-graphic research. As university-based researchers our obligations are not limited to harm prevention; we are also responsible for ensuring fair representation and for the development of practices that will help to build genuinely democratic collaborative relationships with research participants. We are resolved to be guided by this deeper sense of obligation as we go forward in the next two years of the research on students’ spatial practices.
Interpretive possibilities in photographic research
As we work with high-school students and staff to understand the relationship between schooling, spatial practices and identity formation, we are following two lines of inquiry. The first is semiotic, that is how are the students themselves, primarily, going about repre-senting the meaningful spaces in the school? How do the photographs work to convey meaning, and what kinds of conversations are occasioned by the various pictures taken by the students? The second line of inquiry is hermeneutic, having to do with interpretive theory and its particular application to visual culture.
Our use of hermeneutics is inspired by Heywood and Sandywell’s (1999) suggestion that hermeneutics might be employed as ‘an analytic attitude toward the field of experience in which visual experience is approached as a socio-historical realm of interpretive practices’ (p. xi).
The practical implication of visual hermeneutics for our research is that we are alerted to the fact that understanding is a creative process. As collaborators in this research project on spatial practices we are not simply interpreting what is already there in the photographs; rather we are also producing different meanings by virtue of our contrasting predispositions, or fore-structures of understanding. Thus we notice that students are already predisposed to identifying school spaces in terms of comfort/discomfort, or finding the places inviting/uninviting. They produce these meanings from the perspective of inhabiting the school. Contrastingly, as a university-based research team, we are already predisposed toward understand-ing spatial practices more theoretically in terms of how these contribute to citizenship and identity formation.
In this connection, we notice how our attention is drawn to the school’s concerns for safety and orderly conduct. In our conversations with the students we point out the security cameras, the bulletin boards that focus on character education, the use of piped-in music over the school’s intercom and the signs posted in the corridors which discourage loitering and encourage the efficient movement of traffic in the hallways. The effect of visual hermeneutics is to produce a complex and nuanced interpretation of spatial practices that supports the semiotic engage-ments of the students taking pictures of school spaces.
Reflections on photographing school spaces As we reflect on our past two years of research, we understand more clearly the potential and limitations of using photography to help make sense of students’
subjective experiences of school spaces. We realize that photographs offer more than just a ‘historical rendering of the setting and its participants’ (Bogdan and Biklen, 1982: 103), and that, like all images, photographs are socially and technically constructed and ‘often reveal unconscious beliefs behind the picture-taking process itself’ (Taylor, 2002: 123).
We now see how our invitation to take photo-graphs of their school spaces allowed them to become co-investigators with us in the research, effectively allowing them to exercise agency in seeing their 1 9 S E M I O T I C A P P R O A C H E S T O I M A G E - B A S E D R E S E A R C H
school spatial experiences in new ways. Rather than being passive subjects of our study, participants worked with us in interpreting and analyzing the spaces of their school experience.
Notes
1 By way of illustration, take two onomatopoeic words, ‘woof’ (what dogs do), and ‘whoosh’
(what planes do). Both can be spoken in ways which emphasize the link between the sound of
the words and their meaning but often are pronounced in ways which doesn’t make this link explicit. In the absence of hissing sibilants and canine mimicry, the key meanings of these words are still conveyed through difference (one ends in an ‘f’, the other in a ‘sh’).
2 Our research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), Grant 410-2001-1614 (Wanda J.
Hurren, Principal Investigator).
Annotated bibliography
Barthes, R. (1966) ‘Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives’, in B. Astley (ed.), (1997) Reading Popular Narrative: A Source Book. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
For Barthes this chapter is reasonably accessible, although a close reading will reveal the complexity of thought and analysis in play here. Originally from Image – Music – Text (1977), Barthes is at his structuralist zenith here, creating an elaborate system of analysis to explain the operation of narrative.
Barthes, R. (1964) Elements of Semiology. London: Noonday Press.
A key work in which Barthes fully explores the legacy of Saussure and provides much of the ground work to position semiotics as an influential academic discipline. This is a challenging text but will repay careful study.
Chaplin, E. (1994) Sociology and Visual Representation. London: Routledge.
The introduction is excellent in respect of theory and context generally. For the most part Elizabeth Chaplin uses painting and fine art as exemplar material and the quality of writing and the conceptual linkage between image production and sociological theory is very impressive in this work.
Fiske, J. (1982) An Introduction to Communication Studies. London: Routledge.
This book gives an overview and simplified version of semiotic approaches. It is very easy to follow and quite readable. It may not carry all the detail and depth of intellectual argument of Elements of Semiology, but, taken as an accompanying text, it is very useful indeed.
Hall, S. (ed.) (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage.
A readable and comprehensive guide through the complexities of representation theory. Hall and his fellow writers are engaging and provocative throughout and included are many ‘worked through’ examples to show theoretical ideas put into practice. This book combines many illustrations with lucid and theoretically sound analysis of visual artefacts. An ideal place to start to get a grounding in this field.
Prosser, J. (ed.) (1998) Image-based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers. London: Routledge.
The book is a comprehensive guide to different approaches to image-based research, and covers sociological, anthropological and ethnographic styles of working with images. This is vital reading for anyone wishing to use representation theory or visual sociology within their work.
Prosser, J. and Warburton, T. (1999) ‘Visual sociology and school culture’, in J. Prosser (ed.), School Culture.
London: Paul Chapman Publishing.
The book charts the evolution of research into schools and classrooms as cultures. The chapter examines how visual sociology can be used as a tool to examine school culture. Photographs and cartoons are used to illustrate this approach and the writing demonstrates how the theoretical frameworks of visual sociology can be applied to empirical investigations.
Further references
Barthes (1987) Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana Press.
Benko, G. and U. Strohmayer (1997) Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Bogdan, R.C. and Biklen, S.K. (1982) Qualitative Research in Education, 1st edn. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon (2nd edn, 1998).
Goodson, I. (1998) ‘Storying the self: life politics and the study of the teachers’ life and work’, in W.F. Pinar (ed.), Curriculum: Towards New Identities. New York: Garland, pp. 3–20.
Gruenewald, D. (2003) ‘The best of both worlds: a critical pedagogy of place’, Educational Researcher, 32(4):
3–12.
Heywood, I. and Sandywell, B. (eds) (1999) Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual. London: Routledge.
Hurren, W. (2000) Line Dancing: An Atlas of Geography Curriculum and Poetic Possibilities. New York: Peter Lang.
Saussure, F. (1966) Course in General Linguistics. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schutz, A. (1999) ‘Creating local ‘‘public spaces’’ in schools: Insights from Hannah Arendt and Maxine Greene’, Curriculum Inquiry, 29(1): 77–98.
Taylor, E.W. (2002) ‘Using still photography in making meaning of adult educators’ teaching beliefs’, Studies in the Education of Adults, 34(2): 123–40.
Teather, E. (1999) Embodied Geographies: Spaces, Bodies and Rites of Passage. London: Routledge.
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