PhotoCLUB: Designing a virtual community using digital photography to empower marginalized youth (2011)
The literature on the use of technology for education has focused primarily on mainstream academic settings. Our work represents a shift from that focus and presents creative options for simultaneously enhancing both the educational and psychosocial development of marginalized youth. This paper will describe our PhotoCLUB project that we are conducting at Freedom House, a domestic violence shelter in New York City that specializes in serving women and children who are domestic violence survivors with disabilities. As a crisis shelter, Freedom House can only house residents for a maximum of 135 days. This limit poses significant challenges to the resident youth who, due to their transient circumstances, are not attending school consistently and who often experience this shelter as their only source of belongingness in a supportive community. Freedom House uses state-of-the-art accessibility technology throughout the shelter and is committed to using technology to the greatest extent possibility to support their services for their residents. We introduced our PhotoCLUB program at the shelter with the following aims in mind: (1) to provide a means of engagement and creative expression for youth residing in the shelter; (2) to encourage the youth to collectively explore their educational and life goals by using digital photography to capture images of their “ideal possible selves”; and (3) to work collaboratively with the youth to design an online community that will allow them to remain connected to the PhotoCLUB and its members beyond their 135-day stay at the shelter. In this paper, we will present various photographic images taken by the youth participants along with the specific strategies they developed for achieving the educational and personal goals represented by their ideal possible selves. We will also describe the participatory process of collaborating with the youth to create the online virtual PhotoCLUB community.
Alisha Ali PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University within the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her research investigates innovative approaches to serving the educational and psychosocial needs of low-income communities in urban settings. Dr. Ali’s recent projects have examined factors related to depression in low-income women, including the effects of poverty, violence, and discrimination. Among her current research is a series of projects, funded by the Allstate Foundation and the American Psychological Foundation, examining the psychosocial impact of economic empowerment programs for families residing in domestic violence shelters. She is also the creator of the New York-based PhotoCLUB project, a digital photography program aimed at supporting the attainment of educational and personal goals of high-risk youth. Findings from the pilot evaluation of the PhotoCLUB program have demonstrated positive academic and psychosocial effects among the youth participants. PhotoCLUB is being implemented as an after-school program in various settings in New York City, including shelters, schools, and low-income housing projects. Dr. Ali also recently completed a longitudinal investigation of the effects of a poverty transition program on depressive symptoms of program participants and found the program to be highly successful in reducing depression. Dr. Ali is editor, along with Dana C. Jack, of the book Silencing the Self Across Cultures: Depression and Gender in the Social World published in 2010 by Oxford University Press.