Let's go outside: using photography to explore values and culture in mental health nursing

Creative and imaginative approaches to mental healthcare education are known to help students explore emotions, empathy and others' experiences, as well as address ambivalence and ambiguity. Very few studies in mental health nursing education specifically utilise photography as a participatory pedagogic tool, with even fewer utilising photography to explore understandings of culture, values and diversity. Photography makes visible complex, collaborative forms of learning and previously unidentified, unarticulated ideas about culture and values. Photography as a critical pedagogic method helps develop critical, politicized understandings of culture and values. Increasing culturally diverse populations means complex and conflicting values have become a common feature in mental health nursing. In education the need to critically examine such topics necessitates creative and engaging pedagogy, and visual methods are readily acknowledged as such. Yet while many studies advocate and demonstrate the value of art-based methods in student learning, very few studies in mental health nursing specifically utilize photography as a participatory pedagogic tool, and fewer still use photography to explore understandings of culture, values and diversity. In this paper, we discuss a qualitative study where mental health nursing students used photography to create images in order to explore their own and often dominant culture and attendant values. Findings suggest that photography makes visible situated, relational and collaborative learning, and surfaces previously unidentified, unarticulated ideas about culture and values. These practices mimic important processes central to mental health nursing practice and contemporaneous understandings of diverse cultures. We argue that photography provides an important resource with which to unearth subjugated knowledge, promote critical understandings of culture and values, and thereby help address inequalities in mental health care.