Categories: GSI Online Library, Teaching Effectiveness Award Essays
By Emily Thompson, Anthropology
Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2025
One of the central challenges I encountered while teaching The Image and the Archive: The Power and Politics of Visual Anthropology was helping students develop critical reading and writing skills in response to visual materials. Many students initially approached images as self-evident, un-biased reflections of the “real”, struggling to engage with photographs as socially constructed and historically situated objects that require critical interpretation. This issue became particularly evident in their first reading responses, where they aesthetically summarized images rather than analyzing how images are also capable of shaping frameworks of power, memory, and knowledge.
To address this challenge, I implemented a structured, multi-stage writing exercise designed to cultivate analytical engagement with visual materials. This exercise unfolded over two class sessions and a take-home writing assignment. In the first class, students selected and shared a photograph of their own choosing, explaining why they chose it and what they initially found significant about it. I then presented them with a series of photographs from colonial and other archives without any context and asked them to write a short response describing what they saw. In the next class session, I had them form small groups where they shared and discussed their responses, comparing interpretations and identifying how different perspectives shaped their understanding of the image. Each group then collaboratively refined one response to present to the class, facilitating a collective engagement with visual analysis. After a brief discussion, I introduced theoretical frameworks from Elizabeth Edwards and Tina Campt, emphasizing how images function as sites of power, affect, and contestation. Students were then tasked with writing a response to their initial photo they chose to share, this time incorporating insights from the readings.
To assess the effectiveness of this intervention, I analyzed student responses over time. Initially, many relied on observational descriptions, but as they revised their work, their writing demonstrated a shift toward deeper engagement with the socio-political dimensions of photography. In-class discussions also revealed increased confidence in articulating arguments about how images actively shape knowledge and historical memory, and small group work encouraged them to challenge their original ideas about the “objectivity” of images. Additionally, peer feedback indicated that students benefited from seeing alternative ways of analyzing images, sharing their own images with their classmates, and participating in small group conversations, reinforcing the course’s emphasis on interpretive multiplicity.
Ultimately, this structured approach successfully guided students toward more critical, nuanced engagements with visual anthropology. By scaffolding their analytical writing and fostering collaborative discussions, the exercise not only addressed the initial issue but also created a classroom environment in which students actively grappled with the ethics and politics of visual representation and felt empowered to connect the issues to their own lives and images. This method could be adapted for courses across disciplines—including history, media studies, and art history—where students analyze visual and material culture, encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to critical visual analysis.