A teacher’s knowledge and teaching approaches are perishable and require updating to accommodate the needs of students. Many educators are inspired when they discover pedagogical methods that others have used to find success. 

These days roughly half of internet-using young adults ageing 18–29 use Instagram. As a result, the term photographer has opened up a much wider spectrum of possible meanings. The spectrum ranges from phonographer to Photographer where phonographer is someone who casually takes snapshots with the camera on their phone and Photographer being a more learned, elite, authoritative person. 

Most beginning photography students will tend to fall on the phonographer end of the spectrum, with very little understanding of what it would mean to become a Photographer, or what the study of photography as a discipline actually entails. The typical phonographer will not be familiar with aperture, shutter speed, lighting, composition, the history of photography, or what it means to critique an image. They will have little or no knowledge of technical mastery, editing, presentation, or visual literacy. Though they will be very proficient in using photography as a socially communicative, performative tool, they will not realize the creative journey involved in a constant, ongoing practice of deliberately making images to discover and establish one’s distinctive voice. New learners will not be able to identify what is essential to an idea, vision, association or functional characteristic so that it can be communicated, embodied or designed in a medium. When teaching Millennials, it is important to deliver material as if we are teaching our undergraduate self what we didn’t know. Everyone has to start somewhere, and it should be assumed that students are coming into a subject from scratch — intellectual scratch. Photography is multi-disciplinary, complex and diverse practice across time and space, and it would be naïve to assume that all photographers confer the same meaning to photography or even they follow the same practice.

The School of Fototechnik maintains learning-centric approaches to benefit student learning and facilitate students’ self-development of higher-order, thinking skills as well as their transferable competencies.