Twenty-fourth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

During the school year 2014-15 an educational program aimed to familiarize children with the museum was implemented in three public kindergartens of Athens, with socioculturally different student populations. The goals of the program were to create a learning context that utilizes children’s experiences and requires their active participation in the learning process, and to contribute to the mitigation of social inequality with respect to cultural goods, given that many of the participating students had never visited a museum before. During the visit children took photographs of exhibits they had chosen. They were asked later to relate these photos to objects, persons and images of their immediate environment and to photograph them as well, creating thus photography diptychs. Our paper focuses on the analysis of these diptychs. We examine what objects children chose to photograph, how these fit into their daily lives and how they relate to their subjective experience. The associative use of photography brings out children’s voices and thus becomes a means for understanding their different social worlds and their active role in the learning process.