The question I wanted to address then was how do pupils perceive learning? What are their views on the activity which forms such an integral part of their formative years, both formally through the education system and informally in their everyday lives? As professionals, we make assumptions daily about what is best for our students, but rarely provide them with the opportunity to feed back the way they view their learning. What strategies do they employ, what do they enjoy, what do they find efficacious and what tedious? How do they see their learning landscape? As uncharted territory to which they're exposed by experienced guides, or an adventure playground they're free to explore?
The starting point for this then could easily have been to survey student opinion or conduct interviews of various flavours, but the notion of attempting to capture their learning through a camera lens seemed to offer a much richer opportunity. My idea was that pupils would have a camera for an extended period of time, capturing photographs which illustrated the variety of ways in which learning was woven through their lives and had significance for them. Although I had the grand idea of '365 Days of Learning', knowing how tough some of the participants on 365 projects found it to capture images every day, I suspected it might not be easy finding students who could commit to that. Also encapsulated in my initial idea was that somehow the images should speak for themselves. That the message contained in each photograph, when combined with all its partners, would fuse into a natural learning story for each student. Could this be done?
Reality of course kicked in when I conducted a pilot study[1] to iron out some of the wrinkles. So in the interests of practicality and completing this study, the timescale over which images were to be captured would be scaled back. And since those capturing the images were living, breathing, speaking people, it made no sense to exclude their voice from telling the story of their learning, rather than leave it open to the interpretation of whoever might view their catalogues of images.
[1] http://unchange.pbworks.com/w/page/23759847/IC2%20Change%20Project-Ian