The Cut and Paste Nature of Photography Education

This doctoral project explores the impact of teacher disciplinary backgrounds, pedagogy, curriculum and learning environment on photography education and in turn how learning environment can affect pedagogical choice making. It examines what photography education could look like in the future. It takes a broadly poststructuralist approach, drawing on ethnographic and arts-based research, to address a significant gap in the literature. This gap is in part due to the position of photography education in schools, as it is often taught by non-specialists. The research contributes to understanding through the development of evidence-informed playful pedagogical resources for teachers of varied disciplinary backgrounds and learning environments.

Visual ethnographic and arts-based methods were foregrounded through an a/r/tographic approach and were applied in the form of collage and photography in data generation, reflection, conceptualisation and interpretation of pedagogy, curriculum and the learning environment. Autoethnographic vignettes highlighted observations and the lived experience of the research journey through creative writing, and how the three key areas of teacher disciplinary background, pedagogy/curriculum and learning environment were interlinked. The research sets out four key areas for photography education: Creativity and Expression, Collaboration and Community, Adaptation and Response, Identity and Belonging. These provide a foundational underpinning, foregrounding teacher and student participant voices on photography education, contributing to methodological innovation around participant voices. The research illuminates the impact that liminal spaces and experiences that exist between the three key research areas have on photography education, setting out key considerations for the future of the discipline.