Image-based participatory pedagogies: Reimagining social justice

As educators and scholars in social studies and art education respectively, we describe two visual methods from our own research and teaching in pre-K to university settings that are embedded in visual practices. We underscore their transformative potential by using Maxine Greene's (1995) ideas of the education of perception as a critical means for opening up a social imagination as well as contemporary theories of visual culture in order to underscore the ways in which encounters with the arts may provoke and transform our and others' understanding of the world. Specifically, we describe our research and teaching with Image Theatre (Boal, 1985) and photo elicitation techniques and discuss the ways in which each of these methods enacts different aspects of the image and offers insights into pedagogical considerations and implications for social justice. We frame these approaches as image-based participatory pedagogies in which images are primary to renewed visions of possibility and imaginative action.