Assignment Instructions/ Description
PhotoVoice Project
Part 1: Taking Pictures
Each student will plan to share at least three photographs that illustrate themes related to her/his own ideas and observations about mental well-being and suffering. These photos will be shared and discussed in the small groups and then used as the basis for an individual paper (5-7 pages) in which the themes are elaborated.
PhotoVoice (PV) is a participatory-action research method (PAR), first developed by Carolyn Wang, PhD, for researching complex aspects of people’s experience and telling stories about those experiences. PAR methods are a cornerstone of community-based public health interventions and attempt to refigure/rebalance the usual arrangements in a research project in which the researcher studies others who do not participate in identifying the questions to be researched and are not in control of the interpretations made of the data collected and the stories told about that data.
You are to prepare five (digital) photographs that provide visual representations of your responses to the following questions:
1. What is crazy?
2. What does gender, race, class, or culture have to do with promoting or impairing mental health?
3. Is my community promoting mental health or illness?
4. How is mental illness stigmatized in my community?
You’ll upload your photos to Canvas on the due date. That evening everyone will have 2 minutes to talk about 1-2 photographs he or she feels are most significant or that he or she likes best. Next, everyone will frame stories about – and take a critical stance on – their photographs in terms of the PhotoVoice acronym: SHOWeD or PHOTO:
What do you See here?
What is really Happening here?
How does this relate to Our lives?
Why does this situation, concern, or strength exist?
What can we Do about it?
Third, participants will codify the issues, themes, or theories that arise from their photographs. You should particularly focus on issues because photovoice is well suited to action-oriented analysis that creates practical guidelines. You would be well advised to take notes during the group presentations, because these discussions may serve as the basis for your paper.
Part 2: PhotoVoice Writing Assignment
After you have presented your photos and discussed them with your group, each student will write a 5-7 page paper. This paper should contain four sections.
Introduction – Describe the community where you took photos. What’s your relationship to this community? How did you decide where to go take images?
Photo Descriptions – Share the photo stories and the themes you identified as a group. Answer the questions raised in the photo-taking directions. Here I would include brief descriptions of all 5 images and what you were thinking when you took them. Then I would focus on the 1 or 2 images that you discussed in detail with your group. Recap the findings from the SHOWeD exercise. Were your images similar or different from the others in your group? Why or how were they different? Did you have any assumptions before you started? Were these assumptions founded, or unfounded? What surprised you during this experience?
Policy Implications – Connect the themes you identified in your photos that are relevant to public policy. Write this section as if you were in the position to inform and influence key informants regarding your community’s mental health policy. Who do you want to share this information with? How would you share what your learned? What other information do you need to make your case (e.g., statistics, prevalence of mental illnesses in community, resources). Connect the themes you saw with the research you conducted to make your case. What policy recommendations have you drawn after participating in this assignment?
Conclusion: Include a short conclusion where you summarize your main findings. What did you learn from this exercise?
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