Featured Research Project

Emily Moser | Visual Inquiry in Türkiye: Using Photo Elicitation to Assess Intercultural Competence

 

Independent Study Advisor: Dr. Rozana Carducci | Course Faculty: Dr. Michael Carignan and Dr. Lynn Huber

 

Emily Moser is a graduate student in Elon’s Master of Higher Education program and serves as the program coordinator for the Center for Engaged Learning (CEL). Her research sits at the intersection of her professional work supporting engaged learning on campus and her academic interest in how global learning experiences can be better assessed and documented. Drawing on her background in art history, classical studies, and visual art, Moser designed a study that uses photo elicitation, a method that invites participants to create and reflect on images as a form of inquiry, to assess the development of intercultural competence in students studying away in Türkiye.

The project is built around the Elon Honors course Inquiry in Türkiye, taught by Dr. Michael Carignan in History and Dr. Lynn Huber in Religious Studies. The course has been running for roughly fifteen years and uses Türkiye as a crossroads of religion, history, culture, and identity to teach honors students the practice of academic inquiry. A key component of the course has long been a written reflective portfolio, and Dr. Carignan has previously used students’ reflective writing to study how the course builds intellectual confidence (see the chapter linked here to learn more). Moser’s project modernizes that assignment. After working with both faculty, she redesigned the final portfolio so that students respond to five reflective prompts using photographs they took during the course rather than written work alone (a process called photovoice). The conceptual basis of the project is the idea that visual reflection can surface things that writing alone may not. When students sit with an image they made in an unfamiliar place, they often access different layers of their experience, noticing what drew their attention, what felt strange or familiar, what they chose to frame and why.

CRGE funding supported Moser in traveling to Türkiye for the first week of the course in the winter of 2025, an experience she describes as essential to her ability to meaningfully analyze students’ portfolios. Having never visited Türkiye before, she was able to witness firsthand how students began engaging with the country’s layered history and culture, observe how Dr. Carignan and Dr. Huber structured the intellectual arc of the course, and work closely with the tour guide who has been part of the course since its early years. While there, she also introduced students to the idea of thinking about their photographs not just as snapshots but as intentional compositions, images that reflect perspective, observation, and meaning-making.

Moser is now in the analysis phase of the project, working through the student portfolios using frameworks of intercultural competence to assess how visual elicitation functions as a tool for measuring and understanding that development. Future directions for the work are wide-ranging. Moser plans to present findings at SURF, publish blog posts through the Center for Engaged Learning, and lead workshops through the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning on visual reflection as a broader teaching practice. Further down the road, she hopes to explore how photo elicitation might be applied beyond individual reflection, as a transferable research and assessment tool across different courses, countries, and learning contexts, including play-based environments. This project represents her entry point into what she hopes will be an ongoing line of scholarly inquiry into global and engaged learning.

Moser is grateful for the support of her independent study advisor Dr. Rozana Carducci, course faculty Dr. Carignan and Dr. Huber, and the many colleagues who have mentored and encouraged this work. She particularly appreciates her collaborators at the Center for Engaged Learning, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, and the Center for Research on Global Engagement who have supported her in various ways including through providing funding for this work.