The process and product: crafting community portraits with young people in flexible learning settings

Community-based alternative education is situated on the margins in relation to mainstream education. Young people attending these learning sites are often characterised as ‘disengaged learners', who have fallen through the cracks of the traditional schooling system. The aim of this project was to use participatory visual methods with students at flexible learning sites to develop a community portrait of these settings and the young people who attend them. This paper explores how photography in particular, within a frame of liberation arts, can work to democratise the knowledge production process by involving young people as ‘co-portraitists’. Students across three separate sites worked to create a visual narrative that displayed both individual and collective experiences, culminating in a piece for a local exhibition. Finally, this paper explores how community portrait making may open up spaces for dialogue and project the voices of young people in flexi learning schools.