Transformative Pedagogy with Innovative Methodology: Using Photovoice to Understand Community College Students’ Needs

ABSTRACTCommunity colleges, as open access institutions, shoulder most of the responsibility in serving marginalized individuals accessing higher education. Therefore, community colleges play a critical role. But what are new and incoming community colleges students’ needs, in their own words? In this project, we explored an innovative component of a first-year seminar course wherein we asked students to document their unique needs using photographs and words. After situating our study within the extant literature, we present four findings and concomitant implications from a photovoice project in which we were involved during the spring of 2016.