A Short Guide to Making a Visual Narrative

What is Visual Narrative?

Visual Narrative is a useful method for providing children identified as being on the autism spectrum with the opportunity to have their voices heard. The opportunity provided by this method is especially significant for this group as their voices tend to be marginalised (Humphrey and Lewis 2008). When photographs are put together in a sequence it is called Visual Narrative. Images alone do not tell us enough and often need words to accompany them. The method outlined here will promote the use of Photo Story 3 to create Visual Narrative. This method could be used in a range of ways within the classroom, beyond the classroom and even beyond the school depending on what information was needed. In my own research, one thing I was interested in was how children experienced different areas within the school and used it to explore this (McGovern 2013).

Benefits of Photographs
Photographs are inclusive way of researching as it allows all children to have a say. Since photographs are visual in nature they are a natural way to empower those on the autism spectrum as they tend to be visual learners (Dunlop et al. 2009). Photographs help to address the social and political imbalance between adults and children and provided a format that allowed children to make a contribution to their community dialogue. Cameras are technically straightforward to operate and allow perspectives to be captured by all with similar levels of technical skill.

Making a Visual Narrative in 3 Steps

1) Children to take photographs with the appropriate structures provided to enable them to complete the task 2) Photographs to be uploaded to the computer to allow children to create their visual narrative 3) Visual Narratives can be created on a number of programmes. It is recommended to use Microsoft Photo Story 3. This can be downloaded for free from http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=11132 If you want to make voice recordings you will also need a headset with a microphone

Photo Elicitation
The Photo Story 3 Programme by Microsoft can be used to create the concept of Visual Narrative. Photo Story provides space for photo elicitation a valuable and underutilised method (Harper 2002). Photo elicitation involves using photographs to evoke comments, memory and discussion. According to Banks (2007, p. 88) with such a method, specific examples of social relations or cultural form depicted in the photographs can become the basis for a discussion of broader abstractions and conversely, vague memories can be given sharpness and focus, unleashing a flood of

detail. A range of methods can be used in Photo Story 3 depending on the child's communicative preference. There is the possibility for typing, speaking into a microphone or getting an adult to type. Be creative about it and use the children to help you generate more methods if possible. When visual narratives have been created with groups of children not on the autism spectrum, the tasks set have been opening ended e.g. children are provided with minimal instructions (Ryan 2008). However, when I used visual narrative with children on the autism spectrum, I structured the task much more than it had been in the previous examples I had looked at this helped to support children who had difficulties with imagination (Wing 1996). Children were given very specific instructions including how many photographs they were expected to take and a time limit was also set. In some cases some children asked if they could do other things as part of the task. Some asked if they could take extra photographs because they had used all that was allowed as part of the initial allocation; this was encouraged as the main purpose of the structure was not to limit what they all could do but to enable all to access the research at some level. Some of the support materials I used can be found below. Please feel free to edit. If you have any questions please feel free to email me @ thomas.mcgovern@stir.ac.uk

Making a Photo Story

Step 1 Take a photograph of at least 6 areas you use the most at school. 14 minutes.

Step 2 Return to Base and hand back the camera Step 3 Upload the photographs to the computer Step 4 It is time to make a story by importing the photos to the photo story 3 programme

What you might say about each Photo? What kind of things do you do here? Is there anything you like about this place?

Is there anything you dont like about this place? Do you have anything else to say about it?

*Remember you dont need to answer all the questions for all the photos.