PowerView – Increasing Equality Between Students and Teacher/Researcher in YPAR Projects by Using a Camera

Introduction
Conducting a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in schools is challenged by traditional asymmetrical power relations between adult teacher-researcher and young student-participants inherent in the school setting. In this paper, we present the PowerView - a new method we developed and examined that can reduce power hierarchy in YPAR projects. Based on postcolonial theory and the work of Bhabha (1998) and Foucault (1969), we implemented the concept of 'Reversal the Gaze' by asking the students participants to turn their cameras toward the researcher and capture images that represent their point of view. That act created a new space in which students were given the opportunity to subvert traditional power relations in the research classroom.
Goals and Methods
We examined the PowerView method during 15 Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) projects that served as the basis for a YPAR study. The research combined qualitative methodology and case-study design with a critical ethnographic approach.
Results & Conclusions
Our findings suggest that the use of PowerView technique created a new space in which students were given the opportunity to subvert traditional power relations in class. One of the main arguments raised by the students after the shooting session was that people relate to objects according to their association and tagging, and therefore there is a built-in difficulty in photographing a teacher/instructor. Turning the camera toward him, they describe, caused them to experience a contradiction between the class situation familiar to them in school, a situation in which they serve as objects, and the teachers are the observant and disciplinary subject (Giroux, 1988) and the sense of power given to them by the camera. Nevertheless, all students, without exception, described a sense of change in power relations in the classroom between them and the researcher/instructor.