Literacy through Photography

Learning Through Photography program: Emanueli and I went into town to meet Elena and Katie from Literacy through Photography (LTP), a Duke-based program that works with pictures to think critically about the environment around us. It’s a really neat program! Durham and Arusha are apparently sister cities. An art teacher from Arusha Secondary School named Pepe went to Durham in 2005, loved the LTP program, and wanted to start it in Arusha. This is the 2nd or 3rd year that reps from LTP in Durham have come. They do lots of teacher trainings and then guide teachers to implement them in the schools.

Basically, what LTP does is tries to stimulate creative thinking and critical thinking to learn about a topic. For example, they have a staged process where they give children a topic and have them write down all the words that remind them of that topic. Then they draw what they think of when they envision the topic. Finally, they work together to take pictures that symbolize the topic. The idea is to engage the student rather than just having a teacher lecture from his or her notes.

LTP contacted Sustain Foundation about the work we are doing this summer and we hope we can integrate it into our initiatives. It was a great meeting and Emanueli, who was an art teacher, was very excited about it and we spent the whole way home brainstorming ways to use LTP in our health assessment and with our scholars. One way we could incorporate LTP into our program is to take some health related pictures to our one on one interviews or focus groups and talk about the pictures (where they look at every detail, down to the button on someone’s shirt). This is called photo elicitation.

Another way we are hoping to use LTP is to connect our scholars program with the health assessment. We would use LTP as the second day of our scholars retreat and use the writing, drawing, and taking pictures stages to think critically about health in the community, with topics such as mental health, problems in the community, staying in shape, food practices, hygiene, first aid, HIV awareness, etc. The scholars could work in small groups\teams to create pictures. In terms of the health assessment, we don’t really have a lot of time to do the full process in focus groups or interviews but could take the pictures that the scholars took to the focus groups (with church leaders, parents, village leaders, etc) and have them do photo elicitation to get them thinking about the community critically. The fact that the pictures were created by students living in Sakina to show different health issues will force the community members to accept what’s going on in Sakina and not dismiss it as another community’s problem. We may also want to bring in pictures from the outside of things like clean water, etc. (ideal conditions or very not ideal conditions) to get them thinking about how these conditions are similar or different in Sakina.

LTP has a blog that you should check out!
http://literacythroughphotography.wordpress.com.

Vocab word of the day:
Tutaonana baadae – see you later