Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(7) April 2009 doi:10.1598/JA AL.52.7.3 2009 International Reading Association (pp.

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Picturing a Writing Process: Photovoice and Teaching Writing to Urban Youth

An image-based activity served as a tool to help students and teachers understand the points of view of urban youth and to engage in writing activities.
Kristien Zenkov | James Harmon

s veteran urban English teachers, we have been troubled by the apparently limited value many of our high school students see for our curricula and school in general. We have heard more than a few students complain about the insignificance of the books we use, the literacy tasks we assign, and the very character of the institutions that employ us. In response, we hoped to help our students appreciate our English curricula, and we longed to become teachers like those described by high school student Xidi in his ref lections on a photograph he took of a friend (see Figure 1)teachers who trust youth enough to engage them with our literacy tasks in ways exceeding the expectations of these young adults and society in general:
Teachers Who Trust You This is Tony. He breaks with friends of mine, as much as a couple of times a week in the summer.... Hes very good and hes very into it. He is also in drama club at school. The drama teacher [also an English teacher] lets him do his breakdancing and plan all the dancing in school plays.... Some teachers may not trust you enough to do that. Thats what keeps guys like him in school.

Our goal was to help students develop richer connections to the constructive potential of their English class tasks by illustrating the tasks larger relationships to school. With this objective in mind, four years ago we initiated the Through Students Eyes (TSE) project, which uses a photovoice method to allow middle and high school students of diverse backgrounds and living in poverty to document via photographs and accompanying ref lections what they believe are the purposes of school, the supports for their school success, and the barriers to their school achievement. Through our work with nearly 100 youth, we have become increasingly aware of the implications of this visually focused project for our in-class writing instruction and students development as effective writers. Xidis photograph of a friend breakdancing in front of a neighbors garage is an example of the photographic responses these youth have highlighted this one as an answer to the question of what supports his success in school.

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Figure 1

Teachers Who Trust You

as ours, with a history of high dropout rates, poor schools, and traditional literacy curriculum, school failure spans generations, creating what would seem the new normal (Anyon, 2005). TSE allowed us to explore our students relationships to school and school literacy and to reconsider our pedagogical and curricular practices.

Visual Texts and Literacy

New literacy theorists have reclassified the notion of literacy, expanding it to embrace many texts with which youth are familiar, including cultural media and visual, electronic, and musical structures (Street, 2003). Some investigators have illustrated how teachers might incorporate these aptitudes into their English teaching practices (Morrell & Duncan-Andrade, 2004), but such considerations remain the exception rather than the rule (Brozo & Hargis, 2003). These perspectives on literacy indicate that youths expertise with visual textsincluding photographic images might provide new angles on adolescents connections to school, as well as foundations for teaching methods that advance their appreciation for literacy activities (Marquez-Zenkov & Harmon, 2007). We posited that if these explorations of students relationships to school were conducted by adolescents themselves, using visual media with which they were familiar, they might inform our English teaching practices. Current research reveals that visually based research techniques provide data not available via language-centered procedures (Raggl & Schratz, 2004). The photo evaluation approach has been employed to engage students in analyses of classroom realities, providing insights into youths perspectives on their schooling and life experiences (Marquez-Zenkov, 2007). Photovoice calls on subjects to take and react to images in response to relevant social concerns; popularized by programs like the Oscar-winning documentary Born Into Brothels, about children of sex workers in India (Ewald, 2001), this technique has roots in photo elicitation efforts around the world (Harper, 2005). This visual studies literature reveals connections between image-based elicitation techniques and traditional literacy skills (Hibbing & RankinErickson, 2003). Relevant visual textsparticularly

Note. Photograph by Xidi Zheng.

But it is his written ref lection and the composition, feedback, and editing methods weve used that we count as the most instructive outgrowths of this project. Xidis insight that it is teacher trust that allows adolescents to engage with school suggests that a relationship-oriented approach to teaching might become a foundation of our writing pedagogies. In this article we describe and illustrate this and other implications for writing instruction that weve drawn from these diverse youths visual explorations.

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Contexts and Curriculum

In our urban setting and in many others around the United States, where high school dropout rates regularly exceed 50% and the majority of adolescents are living in poverty, youths criticisms of school and their disengagement from traditional pedagogies suggest a void in the traditional high school curriculum (which many students perceive as irrelevant to their lives) and a reasonable but often deterministic perspective on school (Bridgeland, Dilulio, & Morison, 2006; Orfield, 2004). Literacy seems critical. Recent research reports confirm that waning middle grades literacy achievement is a predictor of these students later choices to drop out of high school (Childrens Defense Fund, 2005). Moreover, in urban communities such

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those produced by studentsmotivate youth to engage in reading and writing tasks, and adolescents proficiencies with these texts promotes their sense of writing and reading efficacy (Van Horn, 2008).

The Through Students Eyes Project

We conducted TSE across three years with approximately 100 middle and high school youth from our Midwestern centers most economically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse communities. Participants included African American, Caucasian, Asian American, and Latina/o young women and men; we and the majority of our adult partners in this project are male and Caucasian. While most youth were on track for graduation, the majority were children of high school dropouts, and students neighborhoods generally were composed of working poor families. Combined, the high schools served almost 200 ethnicities and accommodated the districts English as a Second Language programs; ninth graders in these city schools average below a fifth-grade reading level. In the first version of the project, Jim (second author) involved students from his video production class (an English elective), where Kristien (first author) was assisting as a university teacher educator. As a result of massive teacher layoffs (including Jim) at the end of this school year, we conducted the project on alternate Saturdays over the summer and fall of 2004. The second project occurred during the 20062007 school year in another school, with junior English students taught by a veteran teacher with whom Kristien had collaborated around the supervision of preservice teachers. The final version took place in summer 2007 in an inner-ring urban district high school, where Jim was working as an English teacher and Kristien was coteaching with him. Combined weve worked in these urban communities for nearly 30 years. The project supplied each student with a 35mm point-and-shoot or digital camera. Following a photo walk introduction to the project and camera use instruction, students took pictures for four months to over a year to answer three questions: 1. What are the purposes of school? 2. What helps you to succeed in school? 3. What gets in the way of your school success?

After submitting their film or downloading their digital images, students met every other Saturday at a local library or gallery to examine, discuss, and write about their photos. Generally, 1218 students would arrive across a two-hour block, most often from parttime jobs or when they could get rides. We always provided breakfast, and we were supported at most sessions by local photographers or preservice teachers who had volunteered their time. At these sessions, photographs were chosen by the students, by us, and with the aid of adult volunteers. Two or three youths would generally sit with an adult, with all of the students images spread out on a table; as we moved to using digital cameras, each student would sit at a separate computer, with adults moving between youths to help them choose images and begin to draft ref lections about them. Participants also regularly shared their images and ref lections with peers. Images about which students wrote were identified based on students and adults insights into the relevance of pictures to the project questions, as well as evaluations of photographs quality and participants interest. From more than 8,000 pictures that students shot, approximately 300 photos (28 images per youth) were chosen as the best illustrations of students answers to the project questions. Participants eventually described these photos in paragraph-length writings, which they revised for clarity and writing conventions in one-on-one conferences with us. The most successful writing periods were facilitated times, when adults were able to discuss potential images with students, after which youth would take 1520 minutes to draft ref lections based on the ideas discussed. Young adults always selected the titles for the photographs, sometimes with our input. Our goal was to use these photos and ref lections to engage a wide audience in discussions of adolescents perceptions so that more school constituents would understand these points of view. We produced catalogs of adolescents images, which weve distributed to teachers throughout these two large urban school districts. Weve also exhibited 80 photographs and writings in local galleries, at school reform events and students schools, and in local libraries, cafes, and at the university with which we are affiliated.

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For this article we separately analyzed the content of these 300 images and writings for descriptive and visual topics (Rose, 2001), and we discovered insights about the nature of effective writing instruction for diverse youth. Students perceptions were both critical and constructive, revealing factors that impeded their writing achievement as well as issues and methods that they longed for teachers to consider. We did not ask these students to illustrate observations about our writing pedagogies: This focus emerged after we cross-checked our individual analyses. While students photos were the starting point for this project, our goal was to engage youth in a consideration of their ideas about school. As a result, this articles focus is primarily on students ref lections rather than their photographs. Here we describe four categories of findings and implications related to our writing pedagogies: 1. The art of real questions 2. Begin with who we know 3. Writing for and sharing with a community 4.  Writing time is not measured in 40-minute periods We detail these themes here, using students ref lections and visual data.

The Art of Real Questions

The most significant finding weve drawn relates to the use of visual texts and open-ended, authentic questions as sources for writing. These youth were initially challenged by the unrestricted nature of the task of addressing questions with visual responses: They were accustomed to mixing media (e.g., images and text) in their out-of-school literacy practices, but they were not as familiar with blending these modes in schoollike activities. We did not recognize until after we had begun to discuss images with students the extent to which we would need to engage with them in elicitation processes (e.g., conferences) to help them move past the obvious themes of their images and engage in richer inference-making processes. Ultimately, these youth appeared to find this writing process freeing, and we came to understand that images that they

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have taken are powerful tools for helping them write descriptive and analytical paragraphs. Many of these young adults started with fairly obvious photographic responses to the projects questions. For example, several students took pictures of peers f lashing gang signs, noting that they didnt feel safe in school, because gangs used passing periods as recruiting opportunities. But once these adolescents brought their full range of photographs to our sessions and allowed us to ref lect with them, they began to explore less explicit responses and more metaphorical ideas. The projects open-ended questionssupported by one-on-one and small-group discussions and writing conferencesprovided youth with the freedom to develop wider and more personal sets of ideas. In this project and our classroom writing instruction, we have learned that our students are more willing to engage with writing tasks if we use images as starting points and an ongoing focus. While we believed that we were aware of the realities of young adults lives and open to including these as authentic writing topics in our classes, the projects open-ended questions allowed our students to document in new ways the issues with which they were concerned. These included the ultimatums these youth often faced as a result of their work in our classrooms: They frequently felt pressured to choose between their school responsibilities and their focus on networks of friends and family members. Writing about these stresses was an easy task for them, and it was clear that they were able to explore these topics if they had visual stimuli on which they could rely. Another of the issues about which youth were motivated to writeand document via images was the sheer number of daily responsibilities they encountered. Often these competing and even overwhelming duties included school-sanctioned activities. While these young adults participated in school extracurriculars in large part so they could interact with peers, the resulting social pressures simultaneously supported and impeded their engagement with school and its writing tasks. Markuss photograph of a young couple at a school danceaccompanied by the following writingillustrated the range of commitments youth encountered and the role these socially

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driven extracurriculars played in challenging their orientation toward schools literacy activities:
Having Fun First thing Monday morning, I wake up at 5 oclock and get my sister up and ready for school, get her down to the rapid station by 6:00 and then I come back and make sure that my younger brother and another sister get up and dress by 6:45. My younger brother and I catch our bus and we get to school about 7:30.... During athletic seasons, I go to practice after school, then to work at 5:30. Then, I head home at 10:00 and get there about 11:00. Before going to bed at midnight, I help my mom with her daycare business and clean around the house.

better illustrate what they wanted their teachers to know about themif we are to engage them in writing tasks.

Begin With Who We Know

The second theme that became evident was the foundational role of teachers relationshipsand youths relationships with other individualsin supporting student writing success. These young adults valued teachers who interacted with them as people and who cared about them as more than one of the dozens of students teachers meet in a day. They dont want us to be their friends but rather to respect them as human beings and to engage with them in richer ways. Teachers relationships with students were almost synonymous with youths relationships to writing tasks. Samanthas image of her softball teamcoached by her English teacherillustrated the power of such relationships for young adults willingness to engage with school writing tasks. While every educator may not need to interact with their students in the boundary-crossing way that Samanthas coach did, they need to appreciate the relationships they develop with adolescents and the peer networks that result from these teacher-facilitated extracurriculars as supports for students writing engagement:

Speaking Out Graffiti is an underground urban art form that deserves more credit than the terms of vandalism and misused art.... I think its a way to establish identity, especially in communities where people are looked at by their ethnic background, economic status, and neighborhoods, rather than by their individuality. Graffiti is art, and there is careful planning put into it. There are sketches, math, physics, point perspectives, and freedom of expression put into every piece.

Figure 2 Speaking Out

These youths observed that teachers often discount their out-of-school activities when these might be starting points for meaningful teacherstudent interactions and writing instruction. Adolescents disclosed that literacy activities with explicit relevance for settings beyond the school walls promote their school achievement, and having their out-of-school identities honored by classroom pursuits buttresses their school engagement. Tying these open-ended questions to visual stimuli allowed our students to

Note . Photograph by Tim Courey.

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While many teachers may believe that we are helping youth by not engaging with these real-world issues as writing topics, these young people are already considering these on a minute-by-minute basis. Our students images often allowed them to write more readily about these concerns. Finally, these youth took pictures of their own forms of artistic expression to illustrate responses to these questions. Tim selected a photograph of a friends graffiti tag (see Figure 2) and shared that he thought it important to include these activities in the school curriculum:

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Its About Passion Team sports, in many ways, help you succeed and to accomplish your goals. If I didnt have softball, there would be something missing. Every day before I go to school...I am thinking about softball. I am thinking about plays, about Ms. Zak, my coach, and about how to help another player when they are having a bad day. Softball is such a big part of my life...[and] some of my teammates might drop out of school without it.

their literacy achievement. With the following paragraph he described a picture of Elvis sitting in a classroom (see Figure 3), throwing what many would suspect was a gang sign:
Friendship This is one of my only best friends besides Markus. We always said that we were going to build a dynasty and nothing could break us up. And with the recent problems Elvis is having, we try to be there for him and one another if we have a problem. So the symbol Elvis is showing in this picture means a lot to us. We dont want to lose another friend to death, streets, or jail.

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Samanthas ref lection exhibits that although these socially oriented pursuits occur only during a few months, youth continuously rely on the networks these activities enable. Teachers who develop deeper relationships with students and who engage with them even during one sports season might call on these connections to support young adults engagement with writing tasks. Through their photos and writings these urban youth revealed how their perspectives on writing tasks and literacy practices both inf luence and are impacted by an array of individuals. These include more and different people than many teachers might have known in our own adolescent lives, such as school support staff, new and unexpected friends, and younger students. Accompanying the following ref lection, Reeces image of a security guard and one of his teachers illustrated the constructive role of these relationships:
Another Great Teacher When I look at this picture I see two different lives: I see a happy security guard, Michelle, and I see Mrs. Miller.... For people who know Mrs. Miller, this is not the teacher weve seen over the years at [our school]. Shes usually happy all the time.... Students who have graduated still come back to get advice from her. [It] would be a shame to see a good teacher like Mrs. Miller all of a sudden quit. I feel this can affect students because thatll be another great teacher we would have lost along with her support, honesty and friendship.

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Instead this sign was a triangle representing the trinity of Elvis, Reece, and a third friend, Markus who was another of the TSE participants. Reece and Markus were still in high school, pursuing that elusive diploma, and on track for entering college the next year. By asking Reece about the role of his peers in his school engagementand enabling him to illustrate this rolewe were able to help him think more deeply and write in more detail about these inf luences. Finally, one of the means through which we came to build relationships with participants was individual conferences. These most often began with discussions of the images youth believed related to the projectguiding questions. Through these interactions, it became increasingly clear thatat least for these young women and men, many of whom had not experienced much writing task successwriting instruction and composition are largely independent affairs. While we had learned through our own schooling and teaching experiences that most classroom instruction should be whole-group and teacher-directed, our students found the greatest writing success through these oneon-one moments. But even this fact was complicated: While our one-on-one interactions around youths images promoted their writing achievement, these young adults also longed to share their work with broader audiences.

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Again, connections with an extended network of adults in schools might both support youth engagement with writing tasks and serve as writing topics students are willing to explore. Reece was also aware of the impact he and his peers were having on each other, their survival, and

Writing For and Sharing With a Community

The youth of our project consistently described and illustrated how they would be more motivated to write if they could share their efforts with the younger

Trying to Be LeBron [T]his picture...shows that your education can take you further than a basketball. Every day I watch kids come to the recreation center and pretend to be basketball players such as LeBron James...thinking that this can be the way to riches and fame.... I tell them every day that school is more important than trying to be LeBron. I tell them to be yourself, and that education is the key to success instead of basketball.

The Glue in My Life Without my grandma I would not be a senior in high school. I would not be at school every day trying to complete all of my assignments. I wouldnt be filing for financial aid or even scouting for colleges. My grandma is the glue in my life.... She tells me that I should just suck it up and go on even if sometimes I think I cant and I will come out on top.

While Markus played regularly with these children, he also urged them to consider the value of school and to pursue their academic responsibilities with the same verve they were committing to hoops. He suggested that these younger students might be a legitimate audience for his writing efforts, and that image-driven writing about his hopes for these early adolescents futures might be emphasized in our English classrooms. The audiences for whom our high school students write also might include the broad range of adults who inf luence their lives, relationships to school, and literacy choices. Amanda photographed her grandmother

Amandas grandmother encouraged her literacy achievement, recognized Amanda for her English class accomplishments, and sweated the details when it came to completing English homework, a financial aid application, or writing a college essay. Each of the TSE projects included public exhibitions of youths photographs and writings. Adolescents have shared their efforts in gallery spaces packed with friends, family, school personnel, and members of the community. Sharing their work with broader audiencesoften of people these adolescents barely know, such as the photographers and preservice teachers who

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members of their communities for whom they are often responsible. City high school students frequently adopt caretaking roles for children out of necessity (to supplement the support provided by adults), the desire to find success in their own lives, and the longing to spare these youngsters the isolation these teens encounter. In the photographs they took and the ref lections they drafted, these young adults shared a resignation about their inabilities to engage with school literacy activities. But they expressed hope that they could serve as mentors for their young family members, interrupting the cycle of school failure. Teachers might encourage students to ask about the literacy achievement of the children who share their homes and neighborhoodsand we might learn more about the importance of these inquiries if we call on youth to depict these with both photographs and writings. The children our high school students encounter via their numerous part-time jobs also comprise an authentic audience for adolescents writings and photographs. Markuss image of a middle schoolaged boy at a recreation center where he worked was accompanied by the following ref lection:

Figure 3 Friendship

Note . Photograph by Maurice Tripp.

at the local breakfast/lunch counter she managed and where Amanda worked. She described the role her grandmother played in her life and schoolingsomeone about and for whom we might ask young women and men to write:

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assisted us on those many Saturdayshas created important moments for them, as members of society, artists, writers, and social critics. But, of course, these writing, revision, and sharing activitiesand, perhaps more important, the inclusion of youths livesoften do not fit neatly into our high school schedules.

Writing Time Is Not Measured in 40-Minute Periods

Perhaps the most noteworthy insight about writing instruction weve drawn relates to the time during and across which we worked with youth to draft and revise their writing efforts. While our students often cannot write on demand in the way that school schedules require, this project revealed that if we engaged with young adults over longer periods of time they would find more writing success. Given the lack of writing achievement with which many students were familiaras well as the number of out-of-school responsibilities with which they were bombarded they often dont have the mental space or actual time to consider our school writing activities. When we provided youth with more one-onone attention, more time to consider how and what they might write about a given photograph, and opportunities to interact with peers around their images and ref lections, they were both more able and more motivated to write and make revisions. While many

English teachers are cautious about group projects considering these to be questionable uses of instructional timeyouth are frequently more comfortable with these activities and regard them as supportive of both life skills and their engagement with our writing tasks. Jons image of a school clock (Figure 4) and this written ref lection suggest how primary the social qualities of youths lives must be if English teachers are to promote city students writing task success:
School as Prison The clock on the wall ticks down the sentence of the class. Its a constant reminder that schools can act as prisons when teachers dont teach, when students are forbidden to collaborate on what they are taught.... [T]o be completely restricted from speaking during a class defeats the purpose of school. In school you should be taught and able to collaborate on the things you are told by the teacher. Getting an education means that you get some time to learn what your peers comprehend and to compare notes.

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Figure 4 School as Prison

Group-focused activities provide adolescents with chances to check their understandings of lesson content with other trusted individualstheir peersbefore teachers assess them. Students ref lections and images revealed that urban English teachers might provide youth with extended periods of time to draft and revise their writing efforts, after interactions with these members of their social circles, who may or may not have known literacy task success in their own educational experiences. Jons ref lection on the impact of his fathers sermons about school accompanied an image of his dad with a just-caught fish:
He Pushes Me to Succeed My dad gave me his pole after he caught this fish and I caught something immediately.... My dad only has a high school diploma, but he took education into his own hands by reading books and writing.... He pushes me and tells me that I should go to college and get a good job. It gets tedious hearing him talk about it, but if he didnt always nag me about it, Id probably slack off. Just like he shared the fishing pole with me... he shares the idea that education is needed to lead a good life.

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Note . Photograph by Jon Holt.

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These youth were grateful that we and other adults in their lives spoke with them about the importance of school and about simply showing up for class. And when we allowed students to write over longer periods of time, they found greater writing success and ref lected more deeply on their images. Finally, these young women and men need compassionate adults who will pay attention to them over time, without discriminationwhen they are ready to disclose what they are thinking, doing, and failing to understand. In one young mans words, If teachers listened to us about life, wed listen to them about school. It seems reasonable, then, that if English teachers listened to students about their outof-school lives, these youth might listen to us about the literacy tasks we are assigning. And if we organized our instruction around these more inclusive and responsive structures, over a more extended period of interactions, then they might listen to us about the importance of their writing efforts.

and pedagogies upon such f luid, student-centered processes. Our quest was to help youth to value writing, other literacy activities, and school in general, and to see their success in these tasks and institutions. Asking students to picture and write about their relationships to school is one way to begin to make this happen. Such practices represent challenges to current forms of writing instruction, and the realities of school schedules and assessment pressures might make such practices seem difficult to implement. But Samanthas image of and ref lection on a young man sitting on a bicycle and holding a bookbag suggests that these pedagogies offer potential for our youths school and writing task engagement and achievement:
There Are Possibilities This young man is an artist in the community. He is living proof that not everything is bad in our society. He is an inspiration, not only to me, but to the younger kids. He shows us that there are possibilities out there.

Picturing Possibilities
Through TSE, these young women and men have revealed much about what they believe about the writing instruction practices that are one focus of our professional lives. In city schools, where many youth reject traditional literacy opportunities as questionably relevant interruptions in their lives, English educators might contemplate any avenue through which we can promote student engagement. Visually based methods can serve both as sources for helping students and teachers to understand the points of view of urban youth and as tools in our writing activities. By providing this projects participants with a means to see what enables and impedes their school and literacy achievement, we hoped that our English teaching practices might become more relevant to these city students lives. This research has extended studies of how teachers can consider the cultural contexts of urban youths lives in their instruction and has illustrated theories of multimodal literacy. We believe that these findings demonstrate both how and why it is imperative that English teachers allow youth to share stories of their relationships to school and its literacy practices, and also that we build our curricula

References
Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement. New York: Routledge.

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In response to this project and these youths perspectives we now more often integrate issues of schooling and social justiceincluding analyses of our communities tenuous relationships to school into our curricula. School is as real a topic as any for our students, and they know a great deal about their own and family and community members attempts to navigate its complexities. The use of images clearly supported these young adults abilities to paint pictures with words, so digital photography has taken a more critical role in our teaching, especially with those students who are reluctant writers. Finally, regular writing conferences that allow us to make repeated and long-term personal connections with youth have become a common practice as we work with their images and ideas: Our students have responded to these intimate adult coaching experiences with writing products and levels of engagement that we could not have anticipated. Theyand wehave seen some important new possibilities.

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Bridgeland, J.M., Dilulio, J.J., & Morison, K.B. (2006). The silent epidemic: Perspectives of high school dropouts. Washington, DC: Civic Enterprises. Brozo, W.G., & Hargis, C.H. (2003). Taking seriously the idea of reform: One high schools efforts to make reading more responsive to all students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 47(1), 1423. doi:10.1598/JAAL.47.1.3 Childrens Defense Fund. (2005). The state of Americas children 2005. Retrieved January 14, 2009, from www.childrensdefense .org/site/DocServer/Greenbook_2005.pdf ?docID=1741 Ewald, W. (2001). I wanna take me a picture: Teaching photography and writing to children. Boston: Center for Documentary Studies/Beacon. Harper, D. (2005). Whats new visually? In N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 747762). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hibbing, A.N., & Rankin-Erickson, J.L. (2003). A picture is worth a thousand words: Using visual images to improve comprehension for middle school struggling readers. The Reading Teacher, 56(8), 758770. Marquez-Zenkov, K. (2007). Through city students eyes: Urban students beliefs about schools purposes, supports, and impediments. Visual Studies , 22 (2), 138154. doi:10.1080/14725860701507099 Marquez-Zenkov, K., & Harmon, J.A. (2007). Seeing English in the city: Using photography to understand students literacy relationships. English Journal, 96(6), 2430.

Morrell, E., & Duncan-Andrade, J. (2004). What youth do learn in school: Using hip-hop as a bridge to canonical poetry. In Mahiri, J. (Ed.), What they dont learn in school: Literacy in the lives of urban youth (pp. 247268). New York: Peter Lang. Orfield, G. (Ed.). (2004). Dropouts in America: Confronting the graduation rate crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Raggl, A., & Schratz, M. (2004). Using visuals to release pupils voices: Emotional pathways to enhancing thinking and ref lecting on learning. In Pole, C. (Ed.), Seeing is believing? Approaches to visual research (Vol. 7, pp. 147162). New York: Elsevier. Rose, G. (2001). Visual methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Street, B. (2003). Whats new in new literacy studies? Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 7791. Van Horn, L. (2008). Reading photographs to write with meaning and purpose, grades 412. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Zenkov teaches at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA; e-mail kzenkov@gmu.edu. Harmon teaches at Euclid High School, Euclid, Ohio, USA; e-mail jharmon@euclid.k12.oh.us.

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