The Digital Camera Project with Addis Ababa University
2 March. March 2nd is a holiday in Ethiopia and so campus was closed. Dean Tirussew therefore met with us in our hotel, bringing along his 9 year old son, who had taken a number of pictures with one of the digital cameras and had also prepared a short introduction of himself employing the video mode of the camera. One of his thirteen year old cousins had also taken some pictures, and so our first task was to upload the images both boys had taken on a computer for viewing.
The thirteen year old boy, who had a very good eye for composition, took photos of objects around his home such as his desk, a toy placed in a number of different locations, and so on. Dean Tirussew’s similarly took a number of photos of objects around his home: the family computer, awards won by his father, a small traditional coal burner used for making coffee in Ethiopia, and so on. Both children took pictures of only one person: in each case it was an elderly woman (the housekeeper and grandmother respectively).
Having facilitated this short trial with the cameras, Dean Tirussew was enthusiastic about the possibilities of the method for both research and teacher education. He remarked that Ethiopia is a complex setting for formal education because there are multiple religions, tribal backgrounds, and languages. Therefore, children in the same classroom may have highly disparate home contexts. For example, government schools are attended by both Christian and Muslim children; further, while Amharic is the language of instruction in primary schools, it is not spoken by all of the population, so that some children come to school not knowing the language of instruction. Beyond the affordances of digital photography as a research method for offering insight into the home and school literacy practices of children, therefore, Dean Tirussew was also interested in the possibilities of digital photography as a method for enabling children in school to understand each others’ home contexts, as well as for instructors to understand their students’ home contexts. He remarked, as well, that there are initiatives underway in Ethiopia toward education for good parenting, and that this method of data collection may be beneficial in forwarding this project as well in terms of providing visual examples of the sorts of settings in which children are raised, etc.
We noted that students similarly come from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds in British Columbia and that we shared many of the same concerns and research interests in this regard. So it would appear the next step is to draft a research proposal, which is something we will work toward in the next days. At the end of the day we flew up to Bahir Dar for meetings at Bahir Dar University (BDU) on 3 March.