Children's Photos of Literacy Artefacts
Ulla Lundqvist and Işıl Erduyan
Our ethnographic story: Teenagers of Arabic heritage taking photos of literacy As part of her doctoral dissertation fieldwork in an urban school setting in Denmark, Ulla asked pupils of Arabic heritage to be ‘language researchers’ (a term they were familiar with) and take photos of literacy artefacts in their homes and other out-of-school places. She said they could photograph any literacy artefact in any language. Subsequently, Ulla conducted group interviews with the pupils to elicit their interpretations and understandings of the photos. Her collaborative data collection was inspired by the research of scholars like Galasiński, Gregory, Heath, Hodge, Jones, Lytra, Meinhof, Pahl and Rowsell (references are in the below-mentioned article).
Through this collaborative data collection, Ulla attempted to grapple with questions like:
-How can linguistic ethnography empower the voices of research participants?
-How can the ethnographer’s interpretations do justice to the complexity of data?
-How may ethnography inspire teachers to create ‘wriggle room’ (Eriksson, 2001) for student participation and learning in school?
-How can ethnography enable researchers to raise critical questions about language in education?
During the workshop series of the Writing Language Ethnographically Collective Project, Ulla invited Işıl to discuss these questions and data with her. There are no straightforward answers to these questions, which Ulla and Işıl continuously consider in their work with writing up ethnographies, but they believe that collaborative data collection is one productive pathway to attend to these questions in linguistic ethnography.
Our output for this exhibition comes from the fieldwork assignment in which Ulla asked the pupils to bring pictures of literacy artefacts from their homes using the disposable cameras she gave them. Many participants brought photos that referred to Islamic faith practices (wall carpets and other decoration artefacts with Quranic inscriptions). One participant took the photo that we present here. The photo depicts a wall carpet with the Quranic verse ‘Ayat Al-Kursi’ (often translated as ‘the Throne verse’) in Arabic calligraphy. The throne verse is the 255th verse of the second chapter of the Quran, Al-Baqarah (Q2: 255). During the interview, the pupil labelled this photo as her best photo, and she enthusiastically taught Ulla what the wall carpet and the verse meant to herself and her family. Thus, the collaboratively produced data provided a window for Ulla and Işıl to understand the students’ conceptions of literacy and faith, and the two collaborated on the writing up of an ethnographic account of these data.
You can see the result of our working process in this article:
Lundqvist, U., & Erduyan, I. (2024). Syncretic literacy practices among Arab heritage students in Denmark. Language and Education, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2024.2308813
Writing Language Ethnographically