A workshop at the DIE (Mexico) with Lesley Gourlay
Lesley Gourlay, Professor of Education at University College in London, was invited to do a workshop at the DIE in Mexico City for the regional RED team and other scholars from Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.
The workshop took place on May 22, 2024 and focused on visual methodologies and what they bring into educational research. It began with a brief introduction in which Lesley talked about her own research and how she came to use drawings, photos and mapping as key parts of the process and immediately she invited each one of the 25 people attending – scholars, doctoral and master students, post-doctoral researchers – to take pictures of significant places at the DIE building.
The photos showed very different places from the building, which meant very different things for people who work there every day, visiting scholars, or students about to finish their programs. Using these resources, Lesley proposed a photo elicitation exercise in which, in pairs, the images were discussed following a set of questions.
Based upon this experience, Lesley discussed how visual methodologies such as working with photos enable the researcher to discover and inquire about things that don’t ‘emerge in a “regular” interview, in which there is very little place for details and nuances.
Using photo elicitation, as Lesley proposes, opens conversations involving embodiment, materiality, space, temporality, relationality and human-technology relationships.
The RED team shared visual productions such as drawings and diagrams produced during fieldwork in Mexico and Argentina, and they were discussed by Lesley and the other participants.
Photo by Alexander Wang on Unsplash