Teachers’ professional identity

Even though teachers’ professional identity is not per se examined in this study, the findings of the sub-studies brought up issues related to this topic. When drawing images of a typical teacher, the majority of participating teachers depicted a typical teacher as either an expert with items referring to knowledge or a multitasker taking care of multiple tasks simultaneously. Based on the drawings, it seemed that these two aspects of teachership prevailed in participating teachers’ conceptions of their profession. In contrast, the aspect of consultative interaction with students emerged as a minor constituent of teachership. Thus, a typical teacher was an expert and multitasker rather than an interactional communicator with students.

Another finding that can be related to teachers’ professional identity was the way the cover images of Teacher magazine depicted teachers and teachership. As this study showed, cover images of the Finnish Teacher magazine represented various aspects of teachership – experts, pranksters, recreationists, and pedagogues – but, at the same time, suggested a primary type of teacher across the imagery. The four aspects of teachership mentioned above might provide a reassuring message for many teachers in terms of balance between work and recreation as well as between rational expertise and lighthearted playfulness. In addition, they convey an understanding that teachership has many dimensions; what it means to be a teacher may acquire new shades from situation to situation. However, similar to teachers’ drawings, the majority of the cover images of Teacher magazine depicted teachers as experts, whereas the interaction with students occupied a minor role.

Most of the teachers in the cover images of Teacher magazine were women. The majority of Finnish teachers are also women in reality (Kumpulainen, 2014); thus, the cover images seem to reflect the situation in the work field. At the same time, however, these images communicated a gendered conception of teaching as a predominantly female profession, which might lead hesitant male teacher candidates to reconsider their career choice. Another recurrent characteristic in the images is the fact that most of the teachers were depicted alone. Where were students and fellow teachers? Where were other professionals needed when dealing with challenging circumstances and problems? Images of teachers posing alone in empty classrooms and schoolyards presented teachers as individual and autonomous professionals whose expertise is not collaborative or based on networking but rather individualistic. One may ask whether these types of depictions might add to teachers’ pressure in handling their responsibilities on their own. On the other hand, such pressure may be allayed through images of smiling teachers in the cover images of Teacher magazine. These images communicate a positive attitude and spirit, which may cheer teachers up, foster optimism, and create a message of friendly and positive professionals meeting with heads high the joys and challenges of the profession. However, these cheerful images might have a contrary influence as well. The absence of visible problems might communicate to some teachers that it is not professional or acceptable for teachers to display negative reactions in public.

The main type of teacher detected in cover images of Teacher magazine was identified as a white, heterosexual, healthy, good-tempered, neutral looking, appropriately dressed, slim, and fit woman or man between 30 and 50 years old. The absence of individuals representative of the LGBTQ community, the disabled, people of color, or even sad, tattooed, pierced, overweight, or old teachers attracts attention. Even though sexual orientation and condition of health, for instance, are not necessarily visually perceivable matters, they could be expressed visually if desired. Overall, the teacher imagery communicated by the Trade Union of Education in Finland through the cover images of Teacher magazine turned out to be stereotypical and highly homogeneous, which may be problematic in terms of professional identity for those teachers who cannot identify themselves with the imagery.

5.2.3 Relationship between visual and social representations of teachership From students’ perceptions of “teacher” images in Sub-study 1, there emerged five distinct categories of teachership. Similarly, it was possible to identify three types of

teachers in both students’ and teachers’ drawings in Sub-study 2. In Sub-study 3, four classes of teachers and one main type of teacher were identified. These findings suggest that in the Finnish society, there are social representations of teachership that, on the one hand, influence students’ perception of teachers and, on the other, direct the way students and teachers visualize their conceptions of teachership. Furthermore, these social representations also seem to include visual orders influencing the conceptions of how teachers are supposed to look and behave.

The emergence of a limited number of teacher types in students’ and teachers’

drawings suggests that social representations of teachership guided the participants to draw certain kinds of teacher images. Thus, it may be argued that their drawings visually expressed – or objectified – social representations of teachership. The drawings suggested the existence of partly different social representations of teachership among students and teachers. In addition, visualizing social representations of teachership provided the means for identifying students’ and teachers’ different relationships to teachers’ visual expressiveness. It can be concluded that objectifying social representations of teachership visually made students’ and teachers’ social representations of teachership tangible and indicated matters that might complicate teacher-student interaction.

When students observed “teacher” images in Sub-study 1, the “teachers’” visual features seemed to trigger certain social representations of teachership available to them. Students explained that they associated visual cues of “teacher” images with experiences of prior teachers as well as teacher characters in movies and literature. It seemed this kind of experience and knowledge constructed in social encounters during their life course provided students with a stock of socially shared images, experiences, and knowledge of teachers that they used when making sense of “teacher” images.

In other words, “teacher” images were anchored in shared social representations of teachership. The existence of such multimodal social representations of teachership seemed to be a central precondition of the visual literacy that enabled students to make sense of the images. However, it also seemed that some visual characteristics of “teachers” – for instance, revealing clothing – challenged and opposed students’

social representations of teachership. These incongruent features seemed to test the explanatory power of social representations of teachership. Failing to adapt these incongruent features to social representations of teachership, students categorized them as inappropriate for a teacher.

Similar mechanisms of “triggering” seemed to operate when I perceived and analyzed the cover images of Teacher magazine. The visual characteristics of the images seemed to direct my operations of anchoring, where I attempted to detect the social representations of teachership objectified through the cover images. The process of anchoring activated diverse social representations of teachership accessible to me based on my education, teaching experience, personal interests, and social knowledge, which led me to identify the homogeneity of the teacher images as well as aspects of social representations of teachership that were not visually objectified through the cover images. Hence, the visual tangibility of images seemed able to concretize not only the presence but also the absence of certain imagery and social representations of teachership related to them. On the one hand, visual representations of teachership provided me with the means of detecting social representations of teachership that were either included in or excluded from the cover images – while on the other hand, social representations of teachership available to me provided me with the means

of making sense of the visual representations of teachership and observing them critically.

When proposing that features of visual expressiveness in teacher images acted as triggers that activated certain social representations of teachership, four things have to be taken into consideration. First, triggering is not meant as a mechanical and automatic reaction to visual stimuli. Instead, triggering refers to the process whereby the visual qualities of teacher images activate certain contextually relevant social representations of teachership to be used as resources for sense-making. Second, representations are not understood as individual constructions existing solely in individual people’s minds but rather as social representations constructed in interaction and shared with other members of the society. Third, in the assignment of Sub-study 1, students were told to observe the people in the paintings as teachers. In other words, the assignment itself already activated social representations of teachership. It seemed this advance knowledge made it possible that different visual cues in “teacher” images could trigger more specific social representations of teachership. Fourth, the way of listing separate features of visual nonverbal behavior as triggers activating diverse social representations of teachership serves the purposes of analysis. Even though certain visual cues seemed to exert a stronger influence than others in terms of activating specific social representations of teachership, it is probable that various visual cues acted together and formed an overall impression that, in turn, was associated with certain social representations of teachership. That being said, for some students, one single visual feature sufficed to act as the basis for categorization.

When core notions of social representations of teachership detected among students, teachers, and in the cover images of Teacher magazine are compared to each other, both similarities and differences can be identified. For students, teachers’ relation to students emerged as the key core notion in both Sub-study 1 and Sub-study 2. Thus, the triangulation in terms of different types of data and methods of analysis applied in these studies provided the same result. The way teachers meet, treat, and value students was the key concern for students across the data. For teachers, knowledge-based competence, multiple duties, and pedagogy (in terms of interacting with students) could be recognized as the core notions of teachership. However, the first two surmounted pedagogy. This finding could indicate that pedagogical interaction with students might not be teachers’ primary concern when taking care of the multiple duties required by their profession. Perhaps students’ visual representations of tired and bored teachers speak for this interpretation as well, namely, by showing that teachers cannot invest sufficient resources in teaching and put their full energy and enthusiasm into the pedagogical interaction with students when simultaneously exhausted by other duties of the profession. From the students’ point of view, this is regrettable since the quality of teacher-student interaction seemed to matter the most for them.

Based on the findings, one cannot say whether the cover images of Teacher magazine – which teachers participating in this research most probably get delivered to their homes – had influenced the participating teachers’ social representations of teachership. However, several similarities can be found. Expertise based on knowledge is well represented in both of them. Recreation identified in the cover images of Teacher magazine is not, as such, expressed in the teachers’ data. However, the core notion of a challenging profession, identified in the visual representations of multitasking teachers, might imply teachers’ lack of or longing for recreation. Female teachers are in the majority in both data. In addition, teachers’ visual representations of teachership,

which lacked diversity in terms of ethnic background, gender, and sexual orientation, are highly compatible with the main type of teacher identified in the cover images of Teacher magazine.

Content necessitates form to become tangible, and form necessitates content to become graspable. Categorizing “teacher” paintings based on visual cues, drawing images of a typical teacher, and classifying the cover images of Teacher magazine emerged as fluctuation between visual representations of teachership (form) and social representations of teachership (content). In all of these cases, visual representations of teachership were perceived as or acted as expressions of social representations of teachership. Social representations of teachership, in turn, furnished the visual representations with meanings.

5.2.4 Membership categorization analysis, content analysis, and analysis of