\u201cImages + Words > Words alone\u201d<\/p>\n
Every pastor who gets ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) is required to take at least one unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE). For me, this involved 120 hours in a hospital setting, with a small group of other students doing chaplaincy training together. CPE is a painful journey for many seminarians because the training involves deep internal group work: exposing old wounds among our colleagues for the sake of their transformation, and learning to discover how childhood experiences inform our pastoral responses to suffering. Personally, I was very grateful for this requirement because of the learning model in which we participated. CPE is based on an action\u2014reflection model. On Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays we would do clinical work all day, visiting patients in their hospital rooms. Then on Tuesday and Thursday we would do group work and analyze the verbatims we had to write following each visit. So, we would go and do<\/em>, and then reflect on our doing<\/em> in order to gain clarity and make corrections. In the famous words of John Dewey (source unknown): \u201cWe do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.\u201d The action\u2014reflection model of learning is an experiential way to learn and therefore is not just about transferring knowledge as it is transforming the person so that the ministry flows out of the personhood rather than simply the memory. Aspects of this model are clearly at work in our program at Portland Seminary, which is one reason why I signed up.<\/p>\n As I began to read Pink, I found myself eager to get going on doing the visual ethnography assignment of our advance (which isn\u2019t for another several weeks), and to use this book as reference for that assignment and reflection as I go. As a novice qualitative researcher, I found myself mired down in the reading by the conceptual explanations of paradigmatic issues that surround this type of social science research. I wanted to get going on the assignment without having any real knowledge of what I\u2019m doing, and then use the book to guide me along the way, and then to use this post partly as a reflection on that work.<\/p>\n Pink\u2019s book, Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, media and representation in research<\/em>, serves as a textbook for to conducting ethnographic research. The book is helpful in the general philosophies of the qualitative research field, along with emerging understandings and implementation of visual methods. Unlike earlier texts, Pink brings an awareness of the \u201ctheoretical underpinnings\u201d of visual ethnography in order to understand \u201chow those images and the processes through which they are created are used to produce ethnographic knowledge.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/p>\n We all know too well the old adage, \u201ca picture is worth a thousand words,\u201d which speaks to both the power of image to convey a message more fully than can words alone, as well as the real danger of misinterpretation of images. Pink begins by conveying the relevance of this type of qualitative research: \u201cImages are \u2018everywhere.\u2019 They permeate our academic work, everyday lives. They inhabit and inspire our imaginations, technologies, texts and conversations.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n The book consists in three parts. The first part of the book deals with the conceptual framework and ethics involved in this type of research. The most valuable aspect of part one for me was found in the first chapter with Pink\u2019s brief treatment of the topic of reflexivity and subjectivity in the research process. According to one scholarly reviewer: \u201cThe reflexive approach to research is the acknowledgement that the researcher\u2019s subjectivity is a central component to the conceptualization and production of the research process.\u201d[3]<\/a> It\u2019s important to keep this subjectivity in mind.<\/p>\n Part Two of the book dealt with producing knowledge. <\/em>This was important for me to become familiar with the relationship between textual and visual evidence. The idea being that visual research neither replaces textual research, nor does visual research merely translate to text, but there\u2019s an integral relationship between the two that is meant to compliment and serve the other.<\/p>\n Part Three of the book is titled: Visual Images and Technology in Ethnographic Research<\/em>, and these chapters deal with the common mistake in our highly-imaged but still written culture of placing a higher value judgment on the written word over the visual image. As an aside, I would turn to Michael Pasquarella\u2019s book, Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Procalamation<\/em> to hold in conversation on this topic as it relates to the theological implications of using multi-media in preaching.<\/p>\n With a decent grasp of the contents of the book and this method of research, I began constructing my visual ethnography of the Cape Town Advance. I want to tell the story in five brief chapters (or themes): The Land + Beauty<\/em>, New Friends + Colleagues<\/em>, Suffering + Hope<\/em>, Unexpected Encounters<\/em>, and the Dignity of Human Story<\/em>. These are the themes that give the advance lasting meaning for me. I created files for each of these categories, then looked through all the pictures I had taken along with other visual representations, and chose the most meaningful images for each category.<\/p>\n Having studied the assignment description: Visual Ethnography Learning Synthesis \u2018Story\u2019 Post for Face-to-Face <\/em>Advance, I still did not really knowing which tool is best to use for this assignment. By the samples and word count requirements, it looks like Microsoft Word is what is expected for this assignment to be considered academically acceptable. But through online research, I\u2019ve seen these on youtube as video slide productions. This is a more delightful approach for me, so, at the moment I am using Keynote in order to make this into a video slide production to share with my friends and my church, though I realize I will need to do the assignment as expected, once we get a full briefing from Dr. Clark. At the moment, I\u2019ve collected about twenty five images and a video, I\u2019ve categorized them, and have begun to reflect and write alongside the images. What I am discovering is that the images themselves are brining richness to the writing that would otherwise not be there, and the writing gives deeper meaning to the images. I am looking forward to completing this project and experiencing those of my colleagues.<\/p>\n The author of Doing Visual Ethnography<\/em> presented this book a resource tool for conducting visual ethnography and not as a manual to guide a researcher on how to realize a visual ethnographic study. For that the researcher must turn elsewhere. What must be remembered going forward in qualitative research is not only that a picture is worth a thousand words, but also that every picture has a story to tell.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n [1]<\/a>Sarah Pink,\u00a0Doing Visual Ethnography<\/em>\u00a0(London: SAGE Publications, 2013),\u00a0loc: 236,\u00a0Kindle edition.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Sarah Pink,\u00a0Doing Visual Ethnography<\/em>\u00a0(London: SAGE Publications, 2013),\u00a0loc: 102,\u00a0Kindle edition.<\/p>\n