Using Photovoice as a pedagogical tool
Posted on October 17, 2024 by Dr Bridget Kelly
Dr Bridget Kelly takes us behind the scenes of their latest publication 'Using photovoice to engage students in a non-major microbiology course' published in Access Microbiology.
Hello there, I’m Dr Bridget Kelly, a lecturer in the Department of Life and Health Science, at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland. I’ve been lecturing in microbiology and immunology for the past 11 years and am always looking for innovative and creative ways to adapt my teaching to engage and excite my students. In this blog, I’m going to give an overview of my recent paper on photovoice as a pedagogical tool for students who study microbiology as a non-major subject as part of their degree.
There are numerous different reasons why it has become increasingly difficult to engage students in higher education. Students have part-time jobs, extensive family commitments and many different extracurricular activities, as well as distractions associated with the lure of social media. As a result, the ability for students to critically think about the subjects that they are studying has also been waning over the past decade.
In order to tackle these issues, I decided that I would do something different from the normal written assignment on a particular recent microbiological advance. I wanted to find something that could spark student interest and engagement in a novel way. So, I decided that I would use a technique known as photovoice as a student assignment. Photovoice is a participatory research method where photos/videos/images are used to capture emotions or feelings on a topic. It has been used extensively in social science settings where individuals offer social commentary on a social situation. Photovoice has already been used in many educational settings, to assess how teachers and students experience various aspects of their education. Over the last few years, it has been used as a tool to improve teaching and learning, but not extensively in science subjects.
For their photovoice assignment, I asked undergraduate students, who study microbiology as a non-major subject, to take two photographs of “what microbiology means to them” as well as writing a narrative piece on the photograph. Students were given guidance on what to write for their narrative piece, as well as a grading rubric to allow them to focus on what was relevant for this assignment.
I was delighted with the diversity of photographs and the narrative pieces that the students submitted. Once the end of the semester exam for this microbiology module was completed, corrected and processed, students were invited to participate in a focus group to assess their experience of using photovoice.
Overall, from qualitative analysis of the focus group data, the students felt that using photovoice was a positive experience and an overarching theme of choice emerged, where the students were given the choice to photograph what microbiology in our world meant to them. This choice gave students an opportunity to be creative in what they photographed, and also allowed them to use their critical thinking and research skills.
As part of this study, I did not get to analyse the photographs the students took and the associated narrative pieces, but it would be very interesting analysis to do in order to see what rich information can be gleaned about how the diversity and breadth microbiology is understood by this group of students, who were studying for a biosciences degree. In the future, I would also like to extend the use of photovoice to non-science students that I teach at Dundalk Institute of Technology, such as agricultural science students.