Digitala speglar : föreställningar om lärarrollen och kön i lärarstudenters bilder
The aim of the thesis is to examine visualized conceptions about the profession of art teachers in the Art Teacher Education Programme. This is accomplished through analysing how art teacher students represent themselves as teachers in digital images and recognize the impact of gender. The pictures are analysed discursively in order to search for the answers to the following questions: What in the teacher’s role is expressed in these pictures? What kinds of figures or representations are chosen? How can these choices be understood? What visual devices are used? The empirical material of the thesis is based on a selection of pictures made by art teacher students during a course in Computer graphics/Digital Image Processing at the Department of Creative Studies in Teacher Education, Umeå University, between the years 2000-2002. There are fifty-nine pictures made by forty-five women and fourteen men. Each student has accepted the conditions of participation in the study. The images may be assumed to give shape to ideas, things taken for granted and expected experiences; and subsequently constitute an arena for problemizing of and reflection on the professional role. The thesis contains two methodological lines that include images, art making as a pedagogical method and analysis as a scientific method. Art making as a pedagogical method is based to a large extent on the work of Jo Spence, an English photographer. Rhetoric, the referentiality of the pictures and their intertextuality in combination with gender theoretical tools formed the basis of image analysis as a scientific method. A combination of gender theories and semiotic and sociocultural theories was then used in the interpretations. Collage and montage largely made up the technical basis of the images, and in the created pictorial spaces most rhetorical devices occurred as intertextual references to genres in the world of art and popular culture, from canonized works of art to films, fantasy and commercial advertising, multiple egos, value perspectives, primary and secondary images, and combinations of different image qualities resulting in the creation of different degrees of fiction in the pictorial spaces. The pictures were divided into two categories. “The profession at the centre of the assignment” depicts a teacher together with other people in a social situation, which refers to a professional tradition. “The personality at the centre of the assignment” emphasizes the depicted individual’s personality or that other cultures can be included in the teacher’s role. What are visualized here are ideal figures, resistance and intimization of the practice of schools. In all the images there is an all-pervading theme, namely to engrave the teacher’s persona in the subject of art or the art and popular culture. The attachment to the subject appears as a central conception of legitimacy and authority. When the personality is at the centre of the teaching assignment, stereotypical representations are used to a higher degree. When the teaching assignment is at the centre, it is depicted as a social group activity for the men, while the women depict the assignment as an individual task, which appears as if different conceptions of femininity and masculinity are constructed in teaching practices. Reflexivity or a searching attitude to the practice also occurs to a higher degree in the women’s images, which in turn is also interpreted as an expected feminine attitude. Women’s bodies are not represented to the same high extent as men’s bodies when the assignment is at the centre. A general discourse on sexualized images may be at work here, but also representations of power or legitimacy.
Source Type:Doctoral Dissertation
Keywords:INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AREAS; Gender studies; digital art; teacher education; art teacher; feminism; image; self reflection; picture analysis; representation?; digitala bilder; lärarutbildning; bildlärare; feministisk teori; självreflektion; bildanalys; representation
Date of Publication:01/01/2007