Abstract

Photography has an important role to play in Forensic Science for both staff and students not just for crime scene investigations but also to support learning, teaching and assessment. In the 3^rd year module 'Techniques in Human Identification' we have increasingly used photography to support learning through the creation of learning objects, its use in class as part of assessment as students create portfolios of practical work and the addition of quality images rather than scans to teaching presentations, handouts and laboratory guides.

• Students can photograph bones, skeletons, parts of bones they want to help with bone identification, ageing, sexing and metric analysis using the cameras provided, their own cameras or mobile phones.
• Helps those students are not good at illustrating bones, so photographs can printed out and then labelled with reference to an anatomy text.
• Photographs taken can become part of a collection of images available in an online gallery or database. Since starting to teach this module we have taken photographs of students ears now we have a collection of over 140 pairs which can be used for more detailed analysis.
• Appreciation of human variation; photographs are taken from a range of anatomical material so variations can be clearly demonstrated. Many anatomy texts only show one rather than multiple examples.
• The creation of handouts and laboratory guides to techniques with photographs rather than diagrams, or just text, adds another level of sophistication as finished products.

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