Research that we need: re-centring of immigrant youth and their families through photovoice projects

In this article, we will highlight an overview of a project that we facilitated with colleagues that encouraged immigrant youth and members of their families to share photographs that they took and stories that they wrote with fellow students in their school, their teachers, with members of their own student and cultural communities, and with members of the larger community that they were a part of. Using Photovoice as a primary organising mode of research, we sought to move from the paradigm that positions researchers to stand at a distance from those that they work with but instead work as on-the-ground facilitators of a process that encourages students and their family members to share their own stories about their lives, their truths about the ways in which they were treated at school and in their local communities, and their hopes and dreams for their education outcomes in the U.S. This article ends with a focus on one part of the overall project – our work with Spanish-speaking immigrant parents – and implications of this Photovoice project for educational researchers and educators working in the field of education.