Duography in the Classroom: Creative Engagement with Two-sided Mobile Phone Photography

The potential of mobile devices to support learning has been explored for some time; however, little attention has been paid to arts education and the active creation of content on mobile devices as a facilitator of learning experiences. Further, new features of mobile phones such as dual cameras open new possibilities for supporting learning in creative contexts. In this paper, the authors investigate 'duography', a novel kind of 'two-sided' photography, for mobile phones in an art class. The study involves 17 adolescents, and their art teacher, over the course of 12 weeks. The objective is to convey creative competencies by means of the affordances of new mobile phones. The authors analyse a rich set of student created 'two-sided photos' to unpack the potential of this novel learning tool for technology-mediated art education. The authors illustrate how duography can mediate creative engagement by providing a frame for reflective discussions and negotiations on different perspectives and multiple meanings of artefacts. The authors conclude with a set of strategies for designing mobile teaching tools for arts education.