Visual images linked to cultural narratives: Examining visual culture in teacher education

Visual images have emerged in the last century as one of the most pervasive forms of communication—designed to sell everything from commodities to politicians, histories, and identities—yet their influential power is largely ignored in schools. This study was done in response to the need, as identified by scholars of visual culture, to explore the ways pre-service elementary teachers articulate visual images with cultural narratives about meaning and power and to expand reflective practices regarding images in teacher education. Pre-service teachers were asked to select and write essays for a course assignment about an image from fine art or popular culture during a required art education course that I taught in 1998. Participants attended a mid-western research-oriented university whose program focused on teaching for diversity. The art course offered multiple ways for them to critique cultural difference in images by experiencing artists' presentations, readings, art making, videos, and art museum visits.; I used discourse analysis to investigate how 71 participants put images into cultural use by comparing the approaches, themes, and narratives found in their essays with the writings of scholars. I found that scholars identified six approaches and thirty-six sub-approaches to interpret meanings. All of these approaches appeared to varying degrees in the participants' essays, yet only a few explored these approaches substantially. Participants articulated images using twelve themes that focused on ethnicity (34), gender performance (29), relationships (6), and childhood experiences (2). Participants discussed cultural narratives identified by scholars, yet only a few in much depth. Although I have no way of knowing their sincerity, this study suggests that most pre-service teachers are capable of doing the analyses recommended by scholars and seem more likely to investigate images in their future classrooms given what they wrote.; This study suggests that teacher educators should encourage pre-service teachers to investigate the socio-cultural contextualization of images in depth; interview diverse people to expand their interpretations; consciously link images with other cultural texts that support or challenges the networks of meaning and power that they associate with images; and describe the application of researching images in future classroom practices.