Combining Photography and Duoethnography for Creating a Trioethnography Approach to Reflect Upon Educational Issues Amidst the COVID-19 Global Pandemic

Abstract

This study proposes a new research design, combining duoethnography and photography into a trioethnography that opens an artful lens through which educational changes, emerging and unfixed problems, and unexplored/unseen values and hopes were examined. Central to this trioethnography was voices of three Vietnamese doctoral students with transnational experiences in Canada and Australia, around three educational topics: researcher positionality, education inequity, and mindfulness in relation to the global crisis within and beyond higher education contexts. Living transnationally in these insecure and rocky times of a pandemic gives us a unique opportunity to contemplate the global educational shifts, moves, and changes in and after the crisis. We formed our discussions in the three circles of the Indigenous approach, in which we shared cultural artifacts, such as photographs, and used them as the catalysts for personal and interactive reflections. Taking up the spirit of duoethnography, we have seen that findings might be emerging from our dialogues and discussions; we gathered three different voices of contemplative educators to juxtapose our diverse perspectives and experiences of how education is changing, evolving, and shifting significantly amidst the COVID-19. In this process, we have shown efforts in progressing the traditional methodological practices of duoethnography through our trioethnographic conversations. Within the back-and-forth conversations, we have seen multiple facets of our narrative experiences through photographs, including personal sophisticated emotions, struggles, hopes, and losses.