Research News And Comment

Fridman Research News and Comment
Reflections About Images,Visual Culture, and Educational Research
by Gustavo E. Fischman
From 1990 to 2000, the field of educational research saw the emergence of several works that critically inquired into aspects of, and topics related to, visual culture and education. Analyses of film, television, advertising, and popular culture in the works of Karen Anijar(2000), Mary Dalton (1999), Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997), Henry Giroux (1994, 2000), bell hooks (1995), Gene Maeroff (1998), Antonio Novoa (2000), and Joseph Tobin (2000) brought attention to the significant impact of visual culture on schools, students, and teachers. In addition, researchers produced compelling projects in which the phenomena associated with visual culture were not only analyzed butalso incorporated into academic production, as in the work of Eric Margolis (2000), who explored the use of photographs in educational research; Ian Grosvenor et al. (2000), who reflected on the use of photographic evidence in historical research; Robert Coles and Nicholas Nixon (1998), who produced a collaborative photographic and textual exploration of life in schools; Diamond and Mullen (1999),who explored the possibilities of arts-based research; and Sandra Weber and Claudia Mitchell (Weber & Mitchell, 1995; Mitchell & Weber, 1998), who analyzed teachers’ and students’ drawings in relation to the influences of popular culture on teachers’ identities.1 Despite these noteworthy efforts, education as a field of inquiry has tended to avoid the examination of visual culture and the necessarydebates about the epistemological value of images in educational research (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998; Paulston, 1996, 1999). Instead, a review of some of the leading journals in educational research, such as E d u c a ti o n a l R e s e a r c h e r , H a r v a r d E d u c a tional Review, Teachers College Record, Review of Educational Research, Journal of Educational Policy, and Comparative EducationReview, illustrates that considerably
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more energy is spent in seeking an adequate balance between words and numbers.2 Although the publishers of these journals recognize the importance of images and visual culture in contemporary forms of communication—as it is demonstrated by the consistent use of graphic images and distinctive layouts of text to advertise productsand services—very rarely is the same attention extended to academic production.3 Moreover, in general, journal editors and conference reviewers expect, and sometimes even demand, that researchers translate the visual complexity of research problems or fieldwork experiences into words and numbers that are collected in notebooks and will serve as the basis for further transformation into research andpedagogical theories or methods.4 Given the preeminence in academia of the dictum “publish or perish,” the general lack of attention to visual culture among researchers relates not only to the sense of competency associated with maintaining accepted forms of scholarly transmission but also to the expense associated with the use of images in research journals.5 Nevertheless, I contend thatdismissing or ignoring visual aspects in educational research go beyond the economics and pragmatics of publishing associated to tenure and promotion. In this article I propose that these tendencies could be equated with a blind spot in the sense of representing “a portion of a field that cannot be seen or inspected with available equipment” and also “an area in which one fails to exercise judgment ordiscrimination” (American Heritage Dictionary, 3d ed., s.v. “blind spot”). Granted, blind spots may be temporary; the areas of the field that cannot be seen now may easily be detected later. In that sense it is possible to argue that the disregard of visual culture should be an easy

obstacle to overcome, but as the Spanish philosopher Jorge Larrosa points out, “[I]t is always interesting to know...