The Principle of Visuals in the Practice of Dialogue Education

by Darlene Goetzman ~ GLP Partner

Dialogue Education roots itself in Paulo Freire’s work in Brazil. Those readers familiar with his literacy work particularly will remember the use of pictures to depict aspects of the human experience specifically within the workers’ lives (codification). These pictures were used not only to teach reading and writing, but more importantly to distinguish the extent to which people are and may be active agents in their own lives and communities. Of course, this is an oversimplification of this aspect of Freire’s work, but captures the emotive, illustrative and enlightening potential of visuals.

In this issue, you are invited to consider uses, usefulness, types and the visual as a language in its own right, as well as its connection to words and meaning-making.

To kick off your visual perusal, picture this example from Terry Chase at Craig Hospital:

For the Bowel Management patient education class in spinal cord injury rehab I use a variety of visuals to assist in learning, here are just a few:

Books: The Gas We Pass (by Shinta Cho, 1978) and
Everyone Poops (by Taro Gomi, 1977)
Objects: 25' rope = human GI system length
Slinky = peristaltic action of the colon



These keep the group interested and wondering what I will pull out of my bag next!!!

Another definitely more serious, but equally emotive use of visuals is this example from
Ann Blyberg at the Institute of International Education:

The International Human Rights Internship Program (IHRIP), together with its partner organizations, has sponsored a number of international and regional workshops on how to use analysis of government budgets in human rights work, or, put in other terms, how to document governments’ non-compliance with their human rights obligations through analyzing their budgets and tracking expenditure of those budgets. Participants in these workshops (human rights activists and development workers) have to apply and are selected from a large number of participants, so they are already highly-motivated. That said, the topic can be really technical and difficult, and it is easy to get bogged down in legal analyses and number-crunching exercises on Excel. It’s always a challenge to keep the workshop from getting way too dry.

One of the best tools we’ve found is a video, “Right to Information: a Film on Corruption and Leakages in Rural Development Works and their Control”, which is put out by Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan, India. The film follows MKSS as it actually does its work—harassing local government officials for months until they release figures on expenditures; interviewing villagers to find out if they were, in fact, paid what the government accounts say they were; and organizing a community meeting to bring dishonest government authorities to account in a very public way. The film shows aspects of work readily recognizable by participants (lobbying/harassing, interviewing, calling public meetings), because they do similar things themselves. Thus, they immediately connect to the film. It is not slick, which is part of its appeal; that conveys the message that it takes a lot of work, but not huge resources, for an organization and communities to have an impact. It provides clear, visual, images of the very concrete links between government expenditures (or lack thereof) and poor housing, poor health and other abuses in communities (a partially-built house, a interviewee suffering from asthma, etc.) It generates feelings of anger, frustration, pain—and then feelings of relief and triumph! It grounds the workshop through showing work being done, which is great in a program held in a “classroom”—away from where the participants’ day-to-day work actually takes place. There is also quite a bit of wit and humor running through the video, and it ends on an affirmative note: you can make a difference. Lots of affective stuff there—in the middle of a highly cognitive workshop.

The video invariably sparks lots of discussions, questions and enthusiasm. At the most recent workshop, one of the participants made a copy for each participant (the video isn’t copyrighted), and a number said they were going to use it in their work when they got home. Definitely a grounding and energizing part of our workshop!

In a course I taught for Lesely University we used clips from the movie Billy Elliot to examine psychosocial issues in human development.

In this film--set in Ireland during the coal mine strikes--Billy wants to become a ballet dancer rather than taking up boxing as his father wants him to. This movie served as a “case study” regarding the multiple systems we all exist within and are influenced by. Prior to watching a clip, I asked viewers to watch for some specific concept of human development; after each clip we would work to add specific examples from the movie to the theorist’s model. We concluded by integrating the various issues, influences, etc into Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model which delineates a set of nested systems--this allowed us to come back to the whole simply, yet without loosing the complexity of human development. Several graphics of this theory in slide format can be found at: http://www.psy.pdx.edu/PsiCafe/KeyTheorists/Bronfenbrenner.htm#Overheads.

Coming full circle, Freire used visuals to help translate our lived experience into simple, poignant and inspirational visuals. I hope readers will enjoy the articles in this issue of Voices, most importantly use the opportunity to also offer their insights into our exploration of the visual in Dialogue Education.

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