This panel/workshop presents ways that visual methods of investigation, documentation, practice and performance are used in different processes of learning. Drawing on educational settings in journalism, media studies and art education, and also informal learning settings where visual documentation plays a central role, the panel addresses forms of knowledge that arise through visual practices. The limitations of the visual are also addressed, in particular the forms of knowledge that are precluded when visual regimes are considered primary.
Åsa Bäckström, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, draws on her studies of skateboarders to examine the ways they transform visual documentation (both hers and their own) into kinesthetic experience as they refine their bodily knowing in order to become increasingly proficient. An exclusive focus on the visual ignores the other sensory forms so critical to the integrated knowing which is the basis of the skateboarder’s performance.