Teaching Photography as a Visual Language

It is interesting to me that those born since the digital revolution; the students whom populate our schools, colleges and universities seem to have the hardest time in re-imaging the role of photography in the world today. At least that is my experience when speaking to them about their understanding of photography as a subject to study within some form of further or higher education. Theirs is an understanding defined and sculpted by established education’s need to grade, mark and rate both work and students throughout their learning journey. As with so many of the creative arts the study of photography is too often placed within the same results based criteria as any other subject from maths to biology, from a modern language to geography. This causes fundamental issues for the student who decides to continue their study of photography outside of that criteria. It has been in the process of trying to solve these issues that I have chosen to use the metaphor of ‘learning a language’ in my own teaching when attempting to explain what photography can be and what it can give a student in transferable creative and life skills