Photo-monologues and photo-dialogues from the family album: Arab and Jewish students talk about belonging, uprooting and migration

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyses two concepts that merge critical educational theory and practice: photo-monologue and photo-dialogue, based on a workshop of Arab and Jewish students in Israel focused on family albums. The photo-monologue consists of a photograph and a quote by or in the name of a person seen in the photograph. The photo-dialogue is a group discussion of photo-monologues. All photo-monologues created by the students and the author, who facilitated the workshop, included the themes of belonging, uprooting and migration shared by both Jews and Arabs in Israel in ways insufficiently addressed in scholarly or daily discourse. The photo-monologues were discussed from a critical pedagogy approach, which stresses acknowledgment of cultural and historical differences and silenced personal-political hi/stories, as well as creating new knowledge through student-student and student-teacher dialogue. This knowledge is both factually and qualitatively different from that provided by the official curriculum, giving collective voice to traumatic family histories and offering the potential of building trust and bringing students of diverse origins closer together. Based on insights from these discussions, the article proposes the photo-monologue and photo-dialogue as vehicles for broader critical educational discourse that merges the personal and the political, particularly in complex socio-political contexts like Israel.