We make the road by walking

Let us think as an example. Give a camera to several people and say: “Record what you want to record, and next week we meet together. The only demand I have is that each group has to justify to all of us the reasons why the group preferred to record, for example, the front of the school, the market, the church.” You can discuss with the group, video by video, trying to grasp the contents of the reality. They were reading through the camera. They were reading reality through the camera. The camera is a reader of reality, but now it’s necessary for us to go into deepening the reading made through the camera in order to put another language in that and to discuss with the group lots of issues that are behind and sometimes hidden. The codification helps the educators and the students to do that. It is a mediation to the discussion. Because of that, the codification was not something to help exclusively the educators. That is, the codification was not an instrument for helping the teacher in his or her speech about the content. The codification is an object to be known, and to the extent that codification represents a part of the concrete reality, in trying to understand or to describe the codification, you are again trying to understand the concrete reality in which you are. (p..88).
Horton, M. & Freire, P. (1990) We make the road by walking: Conversations on education and   social change.
Temple University Press: Philadelphia