# Ice-breaker: Mohamed led an exercise called 'coin introduction' which was quite interesting. Everyone picks a coin from a bag, and talks about any significant event which happend in the year of her/his coin. The event can be personal or historical. However, it took quite a lot of time because we had 15 persons and a woman actually talked like a 5 mins. We should've allotted fixed time to each person. Anyway, it was a good exercise to know someone further.
# Photovoice presentation by Sarah Flickers: Sarah finally showed up for this session, and gave a good presentation on photovoice and using photography for research. We think it helped people to get some general ideas on why they are photographing their community and what they should have in their mind while photographing. Sarah showed some powerful and also controversial photo examples from her previous projects.
# Small group discussion: We made four small groups by four persons + one facilitator. Each facilitator showed two photos from the last week, and talked about them using SHOWeD questions altogether. Facilitators wrote notes and answers from what group members said. We also gave titles to photos.
# Intro to photography by Rodrigo: It was about general explanation about taking photos. Because of time contraints, Rodrigo couldn't give all the technical instructions, so he told people to always carry small manuals with them when they take photos. He also talked about framing photos a little bit.
# Giving homework: Ruth printed out a paper which includes the research question, and she asked people to think about the questions and how they would be able to visualize the questions for the next photo-shooting.
Reflections;
# Showing changes: One of good things about Sarah's presentation was that it showed people some changes photovoice projects made. (i.e. lighting issues, building toilets in South Africa) In this way, people can get ideas of how photovoice can actually make a social change. Our experience in Kenya doesn't really show that visibla & tangible change because it was not aimed at that way (it's more of empowerment), but we thought it would be good to introduce other examples with visible outcome at the end in order to show how photovoice can be powerful tool for community development and social change.
# Some points: Sarah also gave some good points in using photovoice. 1) We should be ethical, thoughtful, and careful when we take photographs. 2) Photography as a research method has the process of listening - dialogue - action. So we have lots of dialogue before we take any action. 3) Photovoice provides power to shape how others think about certain issues.
# Staged photo: Sarah showed a photo which was staged to show violence. A boy was holding a gun (which was said to be fony, but it looked like a real one!) and aiming at audience. We could recognize the boy's face, which can be very controversial and it actually was. This staged photo could give quite an impact, but there is an issue about anonymity. It gave us some room to think about how we could use staged photos in the project, esp research project.
# Small group discussion: Jiha led one group. She showed two photos both of which were not from any members of the group, so it was not easy for people to talk about the photos which are not theirs. We had this photo which shows garbage, and it was kind of common photo that almost everybody took. However, the other photo was showing a big tree and a parking lot which people couldn't really understand the intention of the photo. So they were guessing. To talk about others' photos is good, but we think it would be better for people to talk about their own photos with their own intentions and stories.
Also, we thought that it would be good if people can lead a discussion one by one because we found that people had quite good stories to tell. Besides, to lead with SHOWeD questions would be helpful for people to have more critical perspectives when they see the photos and take photographs.
In Jiha's group, there was a Karen man who didn't really talk much during discussion because of language problem. Ruth told that there would be a translator for Karen refugees next time.
# Still Few photos: Jiha asked people how many photos they took, and most of them told that they took less than 10 photos which is still not many. Some even said that they were afraid to take photos because of consent forms. Maybe some of them are still not familiar with their cameras. Moses didn't know how to take photos with digital cameras so she took photos with video mode. Particularly for older people, it would be critical to give them enough instruction on using camera.
# Giving homework: We couldn't have much time to talk about homework for next week. It was about visualizing the research question, but it might not be easy to some people to understand the question and how to take photos according to the question. We do need more time to talk about homework to help people better understand what they should take. Or we might need to have a big group discussion to debrief what the small discussions got.
# Other exercise: Sarah suggested an exercise with photos. We also have some exercises that we talked about earlier with Rabea, such as community mapping, generating themes using stickys.
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