Interactive Research in School – Visual Worlds of the Youth

The presentation discusses the levels of development of pupils in different stages of the educational system in an iconographic mode. The pupils attended the 7th, 9th and 11th class of a saxonian Gymnasium (thus their age ranged from 11 up to 19 years) and created a “Korpus” of nearly 200 pictures drawn in art lessons over a periode of two months. Each participant created two pictures about the topics given and instructed by us: “Ich und Chemnitz” – Myself and Chemnitz (the city were they went to school) and “Ich und Europa” – Myself and Europe. The “Korpus” demonstrates a bundled status quo of individual levels of education and the ability to self-reflect. It extracts the metaphoric and iconographic elements of their graphical answers and gives a glimpse of the variety of possibilities of an methodic visual sociology (of knowledge, information and imagination), that uses pictures not only as methodology (e.g.Geise/Lobinger 2013), but also as a method of interactive, communicative research (e.g. Wetton/McWhirter 1998), i.e. as products of an inner externalization.

The lecture presents graphical answers, rich in information about themselves and their understanding and interpretation, their hometown and Europe. It shows also the exemplary influence of an interactive visual research project, that takes place in an educational setting, which is connected in the specific modes of expression as well as in the content of the pictures.

Furthermore we combined the “graphic interviews” with subsequent workshops and discussions as well as public exhibitions. During the presentation the possibilities of interactive research and the utility for education and research likewise are addressed and we’ll show, how the different actions aim at the three functions of good education (Biesta 2010), for example how the topic of the pictures addresses subjectification, socialization and qualification simultaneously.