Through their eyes: Israeli-Arab students speak up through participatory documentary photography projects

Abstract

PhotoVoice' is a participatory documentary photography tool that empowers youth with little money, power, or status by providing them with opportunities to voice their critique and act for enhancing their realities. Grounded in critical literacy theory, this research tool has the potential to raise students' awareness to problematic issues in their surroundings and enable them to highlight such issues to the wider community. This article describes the journey I embarked upon as a teacher-researcher with my college students to apply such a tool in the Israeli-Arab classroom. After engaging a group of third year future English teachers in PhotoVoice projects, students' PhotoVoices were collected and analysed to explore what issues students addressed and the ways they used to do so. A description of the topics that students chose to highlight and the language used for demanding change is followed by students' as well as my reflections on the process.

Engaging L2 Learners in Information-gap Tasks: How Task Type and Topic Familiarity Affect Learner Engagement

“…However, in the direction-giving tasks the providers expanded on the descriptions, such as with explanations about the functions of different places or buildings. This substantiates Hayik's (2018) findings that picture prompts can promote EFL learners to generate more thoughts, opinions and argumentative discourse. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the practice effect and task sequence (direction-giving tasks before information-seeking ones) might have affected student engagement.…”

Addressing challenges in the practice of critical literacy in EFL classrooms: A new framework

“…Teachers can also create social action projects involving the use of multimodal texts. Some of the good examples include promoting religious diversity through posters (Hayik, 2015a); creating an artwork or caricature to voice criticism on certain issues such as water conservation (Janks, 2014); holding a photography exhibition to raise awareness of local social issues (Hayik, 2018); and posting tweets to criticize and question the social construction of gender (Kunnath & Jackson, 2019). The previous practices of critical literacy suggest how social action can take the form of a small step in students' lives; a step that may lead students take a greater step in the global level.…”

Examining the Intersection of Sociopolitical Development and Transformative Social and Emotional Learning Outcomes: An Integrated Approach in Youth Participatory Action Research

“…Across these studies reporting societal involvement, 22 (100%) described youth disseminating their research findings, a hallmark of YPAR efforts. The most common forms of the dissemination of findings were art/photo exhibits [20,21] and presentations [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]. Dissemination occurred in different settings, including staff meetings [31], assemblies [24], town halls [33], community art shows [34], university symposia [32], conferences [20,27,35], and national community conventions [28].…”