The Through Students' Eyes Project

By Author: Beryl
Total Articles: 95
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We conducted TSE across three years with approximately 100 middle and high school youth from our Midwestern center's most economically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse communities. Participants included African American, Caucasian, Asian American, and Latina/o young women and men; we and the majority of our adult partners in this project are male and Caucasian. While most youth were on track for graduation, the majority was children of high school dropouts, and students' neighborhoods generally were composed of working poor families. Combined, the high schools served almost 200 ethnicities and accommodated the districts' English as a Second Language programs; ninth graders in these city schools Cartier Replica average below a fifth-grade reading level.

In the first version of the project, Jim (second author) involved students from his video production class (an English elective), where Kristien (first author) was assisting as a university teacher educator. As a result of massive teacher layoffs (including Jim) at the end of this school year, we conducted ...
... the project on alternate Saturdays over the summer and fall of 2004. The second project occurred during the 2006-2007 school year in another school, with junior English students taught by a veteran teacher with whom Kristien had collaborated around the supervision of preservice teachers. The final version took place in summer 2007 in an inner-ring urban district high school, where Jim was working as an English teacher and Kristien was coteaching with him. Combined we've worked in these urban communities for nearly 30 years.

The project supplied each student with a 35mm point-and-shoot or digital camera. Following a "photo walk" introduction to the project and camera use instruction, students took pictures for four months to over a year to answer three questions:
1. What are the purposes of school?
2. What helps you to succeed in school?
3. What gets in the way of your school success?

After submitting their film or downloading their digital images, students met every other Saturday at a local library or gallery to examine, discuss, and write about their photos. Generally, 12—18 students would arrive across a two-hour block, most often from part-time jobs or when they could get rides. We always provided breakfast, and we were supported at most sessions by local photographers or preservice teachers who had volunteered their time.

At these sessions, photographs were chosen by the students, by us, and with the aid of adult volunteers. Two or three youths would generally sit with an adult, with all of the students' images spread out on a table; as we moved to using digital cameras, each student would sit at a separate computer, with adults moving between youths to help them choose images and begin to draft reflections about them. Participants also regularly shared their images and reflections with peers.

Images about which students wrote were Cartier Replica Watches identified based on students' and adults' insights into the relevance of pictures to the project questions, as well as evaluations of photographs' quality and participants' interest. From more than 8,000 pictures that students shot, approximately 300 photos (2—8 images per youth) were chosen as the best illustrations of students' answers to the project questions.

Participants eventually described these photos in paragraph-length writings, which they revised for clarity and writing conventions in one-on-one conferences with us. The most successful writing periods were facilitated times, when adults were able to discuss potential images with students, after which youth would take 15—20 minutes to draft reflections based on the ideas discussed. Young adults always selected the titles for the photographs, sometimes with our input.

Our goal was to use these photos and reflections to engage a wide audience in discussions of adolescents' perceptions so that more school constituents would understand these points of view. We produced catalogs of adolescents' images, which we've distributed to teachers throughout these two large urban school districts. We've also exhibited 80 photographs and writings in local galleries, at school reform events and students' schools, and in local libraries, cafes, and at the university with which we are affiliated.