Picturing Culturally Relevant Literacy Practices: Using Photography to See How Literacy Pedagogies Matter to Urban Youth

Abstract

This article reports on the findings of a photography and literacy project the authors conducted with 117 diverse city students. Relying on a critical pedagogy framework, the foundations for this study include research on cultural relevance, literacy, and visual sociology. The authors used Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and photo elicitation methods to allow young adults to document their impressions of the purposes of, supports for, and impediments to school. Through a multi-stage process of analyzing these pictures and writings, the authors discovered insights about what youth believe are literacy pedagogies that are relevant to their cultures and help them to achieve in school.