ABSTRACT
Since the time when video recording made its first appearance, video technology has made huge advances in both ease of handling and extent of general use. Today, video equipment is reasonably priced and available in every school. When we consider the limitations faced by the first educators who worked with video cameras, we can fairly say that, technologically speaking, it is now easy to record in the workplace, and we can ask teachers and students to tape themselves in the school context. The essential advantage of video as opposed to audio recording is that it recreates both the voice and the behavior, the physical context, the direction of the gaze. It allows for “situated research” (Tochon, 1999a), referring to lived experience for the purpose of understanding and reflection. Video education has thus freed itself from an exclusively laboratory-based approach and has broadened to include self-viewing and other viewing in reflection groups on the image. Video pedagogy is a worthwhile approach at all levels of education and in various other professional sectors. It emerged as a process-oriented response to criticisms that the sequential acquisition of skills, centered on performance, is inadequate for developing professional standards. Standards cannot, in the last analysis, be dissected. Video feedback can focus on the whole, situated process.
