COVID-19 Photovoice: Creating College Student Peer-To-Peer Support Groups With An Online Active Learning Assignment
Abstract
This paper describes a photovoice project that created a peer-to-peer support community in online undergraduate sociology classes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings suggest that participation in the photovoice project fostered the creation of a peer-to-peer social support system that assisted college students through a natural disaster because classmates could safely share coping strategies online. Data also suggests that this assignment provided an exceptional active learning experience for educating undergraduate sociology students about collective experiences and the importance of social support systems. Lastly, it also helped build students’ research skills by showing them how a qualitative community-based participatory research method, photovoice, could help achieve positive research participant outcomes during the pandemic.
Keywords: College students, COVID-19, Photovoice, Social Support System, Online teaching pedagogy