'How I see things' is a new series of posts from guest contributors. The idea is to present an individual viewpoint about some aspect of photography education. The way we teach is intimately connected to our experiences, our knowledge and our interests. We are delighted that Meg Wellington-Barratt has kindly agreed to kick us off with a thoughtful post exploring her own photography education, her experiences as a student and teacher, her research interests and a plea for more and better photoliteracy in schools. 

I started out wanting to photograph animals. Travelling around the world capturing wildlife was the dream. As a teenager I was besotted with American punk rock and the culture that accompanied it. Then it was extreme sports. I carried disposable cameras everywhere, compelled to photograph and not really knowing why. ​

The photographic education I received was mixed, mostly because I wasn’t a brilliant student. Studying A-level Photography was the key to developing my knowledge of genre, technique and image analysis. I had no breakthrough moment, no big ideas and I still wasn’t sure if it was something I wanted to pursue beyond school. Like most 17-year olds, I was pretty lost. I’m glad of this experience now as a teacher because I can empathise with students’ struggles.
​
I fell into photography as a degree choice and decided to combine it with psychology at a middle of the road university. I received no help with UCAS and, coming from a small seaside town, it was an unwritten rule that we had to leave quickly or resign ourselves to being there forever. I chose the former, rushed my university options and attended no open days. Despite not having flashy facilities, or being top of the league table, we were given the bones of an excellent photographic education - we were taught to stop and look. Tom Wood was one of my visiting tutors and, after a gruelling group critique, he invited me on a shoot in North Wales. He turned up to the shoot with 3 decorators’ lamps and camera kit in a Tesco trolley. He doesn’t drive, so seeing him lugging this kit with him to a student charity shop photoshoot really helped me pay attention. He took every moment of every shoot as seriously as the last and placed no more or less value on this day despite the grim weather. I was full of admiration for this. Gobsmacked in fact. It was there and then I started to take my work much more seriously. He spoke to me at length about my degree project, a study of my grandmother. I read in an article recently that photography students often focus on safe spaces or stories before trying out their skills on unfamiliar subjects. This is what I did. I lacked confidence and was dragging my heels. Tom Wood said, “She won’t be here forever”. With that, photography became my obsession.

I adore photobooks. Currently, I love Stephen Gill’s books. I attended his excellent talk at Martin Parr’s BOP festival in Bristol. It helped me understand his process. The Pillar was a Christmas addition to my growing library and is as valuable to me as Tom Wood turning up with his trolley. I feel photography departments should all have a copy of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Students are always in awe of Goldin’s images when they are first introduced to her work. It means so much more to them seeing it in a book than on screen, although it’s good to remind them that the project started life as a slideshow with music! Photobooks always inspire students. Choices about types of paper, scale and binding help students see that photobooks can be a vehicle for delivering their visual stories.

I don’t see as many photography exhibitions as I would like to. The last one that I really enjoyed was last year’s Format Festival in Derby. I enjoy a group exhibition much more than a solo exhibition. I enjoy thinking about curators’ choices, how context affects the meaning of photographs. Craig Easton’s Sixteen was poignant and benefited from an unusual location. It screamed first job, first social experiences, first memories as a teenager. Seeing the work of Kensuke Koike at Format helped me get a stuck student out of a rut. I approach exhibitions as both a photographer and a teacher. I am thoroughly looking forward to seeing Hannah Starkey at the Hepworth Gallery.

I feel that students get the most inspiration from looking at physical books and photographs, seeing work in exhibitions and experiencing life. However many Pinterest boards they look at, however many photographers I give them, the most powerful influence is often something they’ve discovered, seen or been through themselves. I highly recommend students listen to Ben Smith’s A Small Voice podcast. I discovered it last year and it has really helped fill a gap. The process and experience of a photographer making work is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. Hearing them talk candidly for an hour with brilliant host Ben is particularly refreshing. I often have it on in the background during A-level lessons. The best thing about discovering it late is that I have so many back episodes to get through! The Daniel Meadows episode was an enjoyable listen, as was Ian Weldon’s. The Photographer’s Playbook is a brilliant resource for students who want to expand their practice, but it works equally as well for students who have no ideas and for me when I’m short on ideas for assignments. Photography magazines are a widely overlooked resource too. They combine the fresh practitioner perspectives and thematic curation with tactile presentation and decision making. I subscribe to British Journal of Photography, Foam, and Source but there are dozens more.

Carving out research in photographic education is difficult. There isn’t a whole lot out there but I knew I wanted to contribute my own work to the field. I originally started a practice-based PhD exploring themes of domestic representation in family albums, but quickly became lonely and disenchanted. It was working in schools and colleges that spurred me on. I have taught the subject for eight years now, and it was what I was seeing in the classroom (or not seeing perhaps) that helped me decide to research photography education.

There are no set models for teaching photography and most of what exists is based on art and design practice or historic pedagogies. Photography is so important for students but not only as a standalone subject. Students need to be able to analyse and interpret the imagery they see every day, and photography skills help them do this. Equally, learning how to analyse photographs helps make them better photographers. I am interested in the process of photographic education - what is taught, who is teaching it, what the students are taking photographs of and why. There are several related strands.

For example, a recent paper I have been working on explores the use of photography across the wider curriculum. Another examines the educational backgrounds of the teachers teaching the subject. I plan to work with Source Magazine’s Graduate Photo Online to conduct research into themes and patterns across higher education student work. The collector/obsessive in me wants to know everything, so a doctorate helps to placate this need.

As a teacher of photography, I notice daily what students lack in terms of knowledge and skills and this encourages me to try and fill these gaps with my research discoveries. Students sometimes cannot interpret meaning in imagery, even on the simplest level, and it is my belief that this has come from a desensitisation caused by the sheer number of pictures they are exposed to. A new level of visual literacy, or photoliteracy, is needed. It is also my belief that if photographic literacy was embedded properly and thoroughly across the wider curriculum, then it could pave the way for photography teachers to work together to build a strong and suitable model that suits both the needs of the wider education field and most importantly, photography students.

To be honest, I've never been a very big fan of lesson plans. This is a bit ironic given that we decided to call the set of resources on this website Lesson Plans. Of course, they aren't really lesson plans at all but schemes of work or sets of provocations with accompanying resources. I do plan all my lessons but I rarely teach from a set Scheme of Work and, as an incessant tweaker, I enjoy the process of designing lessons from scratch each week (not the most efficient practice I agree). Nevertheless, I base these lessons on an over-arching Programme of Study which enables me to stick to an agreed timetable of structured activities and largely prevents my colleagues tearing their hair out with frustration.

This year, with the various changes to subject specifications, we at Tallis were asked  to revisit our Programmes of Study at KS4 and 5 ensuring that they were fit for purpose. In an earlier post, I described why we made the decision in the visual arts to go linear. We no longer offer the AS qualification in photography or art. This summer has felt quite different with only the A2 students being moderated. This meant that we needed a Programme of Study that would sustain students for two years, support those who arrived in Year 12 with little experience of the subject but also stretch and challenge those who had done GCSE photography and needed to move on quickly.

The structure we were given by senior leaders for our new Programmes of Study was as follows:

Regular readers and NSEAD members will know about the thinking we've done this year here at PhotoPedagogy Towers about Threshold Concepts for Photography, a version of which has appeared in AD magazine. We think Threshold Concepts are important because they identify the big ideas in our subjects. We think it's important for colleagues to debate and determine these big ideas, separate from Assessment Objectives and the whims of the incumbent Secretary of State. In short, Threshold Concepts are what we (as professional teachers) agree are the foundational ideas in our various disciplines. "Powerful Knowledge" is Professor Michael Young's phrase and describes an order of knowledge that is different to the everyday wisdom brought to schools by young people. It is a controversial term, in some respects, since it contains an implicit criticism of what has been termed "progressive" approaches to education. However, my Head co-authored the book 'Knowledge and the Future School' with Professor Young so it's no surprise that "Powerful Knowledge" appears in our new Programmes of Study document! Whilst I'm not convinced about the term itself, (what is powerless knowledge?) I support the notion that disciplinary knowledge (the kind we get when we are taught subjects) is an important element in education and students can benefit from being explicitly taught stuff and thinking hard about it. There is then a direct link with threshold concepts - those troublesome nuggets of complex knowledge that take a while to assimilate and 'master'. We might call this the Content of the curriculum, although in a subject like photography or art this is often quite a complex issue. Finally, we have "Fundamental Skills". If "Powerful Knowledge" is the Knowing What, "Fundamental Skills" are the Knowing How. For us, this includes not only procedural issues (processes/techniques) such 'How to make a cyanotype' but also connects with intellectual skills like 'How to conduct strategic research' and our Habits of Mind (e.g. 'How to stick with difficulty').

We've been hard at work for the last couple of years testing a variety of mini projects with Year 12 students. Many of these have been shared in the Lesson Plans section of this website. In the last couple of weeks we have begun to shape our new Programme of Study. As always we've written it in Googledocs so we can keep it as a live document, editing, tweaking, adjusting collaboratively as we go. We are happy to share the document with other colleagues outside school, knowing how valuable it is to connect with professionals in other contexts and with different experiences and expertise to our own. This is what the first half term looks like:

Here's a link to the whole document. It's very much a work in progress so please forgive any typos and don't be surprised if it continues to change over the coming weeks. Our plan is to have something that we are pleased with by the end of term.

Hopefully, you can see how the three elements knit together: Powerful Knowledge, Threshold Concepts and Key Skills. In terms of the two year programme it breaks down like this:

Autumn 1 - An introduction: What is photography? Mini projects begin.
Autumn 2 - Mini projects continue, each dealing with a specific historical/contextual issue and giving students opportunities to develop their own work in response. Objective vs Subjective approaches to photography.
Spring 1 - Photo Exchange and the beginning of the extended Photobook project.
Spring 2 - Photobook project continues, the launchpad for the Personal Investigation.
Summer 1 - Personal Investigation continues, supplemented by occasional provocations E.g. Inside /Outside, Mirrors or Windows? etc.
Summer 2  - Personal Investigation continues.
Autumn 1 - Personal Investigation continues.
Autumn 2 - Personal Investigation continues. Students begin finalising their responses and pulling together their accompanying essays.
Spring 1 - Personal Investigation concludes. Component 2 The Externally Set Task begins (1st Feb)
Spring 2 - The Externally Set Task continues
Summer 1 - The Externally Set Task concludes (shortly after Easter)

The first two terms of Year 12 give us an opportunity to tackle the notion of photography in terms of relative objectivity and subjectivity. Alongside an introduction to the chemical darkroom as a kind of experimental space, where the magic of light can be observed and captured, we attempt to juxtapose the Modernist tradition (straight, objective, documentary) of photography with approaches that celebrate photography's ability to represent subjective experience. We also attempt to tackle issues surrounding the ethics of photography and an awareness of the difference between photography as art and all the many forms of photography that belong to other domains - the law, medicine, surveillance, war etc. We hope that an awareness of the history and theory of photography (still hotly contested) will help students see their own work in context.

We are live testing this type of structure with our current Year 12 students and making tweaks to the Programme based on what we have learned with them. So far, the basic structure seems to have worked well, giving students a good grounding in the subject (without the distraction of the AS exam) and allowing them to develop their own practice and interests. We are particularly pleased with the Photobook project. It has been a great platform on which students can build a sense of themselves as photographers and thus confidently begin the fully assessed Personal Investigation. It also means that each student is responsible for defining the nature of their own investigation through an authentic process of research and practice.

Here are just a few examples of selected pages from Year 12 photobooks: