In this article we discuss a collaborative research project meant to ground community members' voices in curriculum design. We argue that performing collaborative research with students and parents can better inform curriculum design decisions, particularly for communities whose identities, knowledge(s), and ways of being have been historically marginalized. Building from the culturally responsive curriculum literature, we have developed a culturally grounded curriculum development approach. We illustrate the approach through discussing a case of its development and implementation with an educational nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides access to secondary school for Quechua (Indigenous) young women in Peru. This article reflexively reports the process of the NGO's collaborative inquiry project to cocreate meaningful educational opportunities with the students and parents. We then discuss dilemmas of interpretation that arose when incorporating community voices into curricular decisions, and how the collaborative curriculum approach can apply to formal and nonformal learning spaces in other contexts.Indigenous students throughout the Americas face significant barriers to obtaining a quality education, such as inexperienced and inadequately prepared teachers, traveling long distances to attend school, and engaging with learning resources and materials that do not represent their identities and cultures (CEPAL 2014;Levitan 2018;Post 2002; Sumida Huaman 2013). These realities often cause alienation in school, where Indigenous children can be marginalized and "othered" by teachers and peers, in addition to being left out of or stereotyped in texts and lessons in nationally or regionally mandated curricula
Background/Context Photos are a powerful tool for eliciting stories that may otherwise go untold in traditional interview formats. Photo-elicitation type methods vary widely in their ontological, epistemological, and teleological orientations, providing different tools for understanding participants’ experiences and interpretations of those experiences. Photo-cued interviewing (PCI) is an emerging approach that adds to the photo-elicitation method milieu, with a specific strength for understanding varied facets of learning. In this paper, I explore how PCI diverges from existing photo-elicitation type methods and how it can be a useful tool for educational researchers interested in understanding more about student learning, particularly in spaces like study abroad. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study Using a case study approach, this manuscript illuminates how PCI can help elicit and (co)develop stories of learning— specifically, narratives that illustrate the learning that resulted from students’ experiences in study abroad programs. Research Design This study draws from interviews and focus groups with 62 secondary and postsecondary students who participated in a variety of study abroad programs. I perform an inductive qualitative analysis to understand how the PCI method helped to (co)develop stories that illustrated what and how students learned during their study abroad programs. Findings/Results PCI helped to (co)develop stories of learning in a number of ways, including: 1) facilitating students’ initial reflections, 2) revealing impact beyond the experience, 3) merging stories of learning to create new narratives and understandings, 4) adding nuance to preliminary stories, and 5) allowing for more focused storytelling. Conclusions/Recommendations I offer PCI as a photo-elicitation method useful for prompting student reflection and learning, understanding how meaning is made from experiences, and reflexively participating in the interview process as a researcher. I also call for greater use of the PCI method in educational research in order to explicate its uses and boundaries.
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