Visual methods and the visual culture of schools
JON PROSSER
This article examines visual methods for understanding the
visual culture of schools. It adopts an institutional culture
perspective to equate the visual culture of schools with the
‘hidden curriculum’ of schooling. A range of visual subcultures
is touched upon including architecture, nonteaching
space and postures of teaching and learning. The
possibility of conceiving the visual culture of schools as a
holistic entity raises the problematic of devising broader
more encompassing visual-centric methodologies combining
mixed methods and cross-disciplinary approaches.
INTRODUCTION
Visual research is concerned with the production,
organization and interpretation of imagery. It draws on
analytical perspectives including sociology, media
studies, psychology and cultural geography to study a
wide range of topics ranging from community, power,
and gender studies, to spatial relationships, and
spectatorship. Over the last three decades visual studies
have come to play a particularly meaningful role in
educational research. Qualitative enquiry, one of whose
main methods is observation, has led to the growing
recognition that observable and tactile information is
important in understanding the everyday realities of
school life. One strength of visual research is it’s the use
of technology to slow down and repeat observations and
encourage deeper reflection on perception and meaning
(McDermott 1977; Mehan 1993). This is important
since visual acuity questions the connotation,
denotation and significance of observations that are too
often taken for granted.
This special issue of Visual Studies, ‘The Visible
Curriculum’, reflects emergent, substantive and
methodological trends in the social sciences and grounds
them in schooling. In his call for papers Eric Margolis
encapsulated the multi-faceted nature of everyday visual
schooling and insightfully reflects its complexity by
posing an apparent conundrum. He asked ‘what is
visible? What is noticed?’ and then juxtaposes this
‘visible curriculum’ with the notion of a pervasive
‘hidden curriculum’. This paper adopts the ‘visible but
hidden’ conundrum as its starting point and goes on to
explore an array of visual methods and examines how
they contribute to educational research. I will argue for a
methodologically framed, qualitatively driven, visually
orientated, mixed-method approach to examining
overarching and substantive educational themes and
research questions which are central to understanding
the quotidian nature of schooling in the twenty-first
century.
‘VISIBLE BUT HIDDEN’ CULTURES OF SCHOOLING
The ‘visible but hidden curriculum’ is important
because it reflects implicit powerful forces that shape
everyday activities and also provides a methodological
rationale for the study of overarching themes in
education. A fuller explanation lies in an understanding
of school culture. In 1963 Halpin and Croft applied the
term ‘organizational climate’ to educational settings,
transplanting longstanding concepts from studies of
organizations (Lewin, Lippitt, and White 1939; Cornell
1955; and Argyris 1958). Subsequently a wide range of
metaphors, for example, climate, ethos, atmosphere,
character, tone and culture were used to evoke the
uniqueness of complex organizations like hospitals,
banks and schools. Ogbonna’s definition of
organizational culture captured the essence of these
metaphors:
… the interweaving of the individual into a
community and the collective programming of
the mind that distinguishes members of one
known group from another. It is the values,
norms, beliefs and customs that an individual
holds in common with members of the social
unit or group. (Ogbonna 1993, 42)
The notion of organizational culture is important to
schooling for three reasons. The first is incumbent in
Morgan’s Zen-like definition: ‘how organisations work
when no one is looking’ (1997, 145). This suggests that
an organization’s culture is embedded in everyday,
taken-for-granted actions based on underlying
assumptions. It is rarely observed or viewed as
problematic. Hence, because school culture is
Jon Prosser teaches International Education Management in the School of Education and is a member of the Leeds Social Science Institute at Leeds University.
He is involved in two ESRC projects: ‘Building Capacity in Visual Methods’ which is part of the Researcher Development Initiative and the ‘Real Life Methods’ a
Node of the National Centre for Research Methods http://www.reallifemethods.ac.uk
Visual Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1, April 2007
ISSN 1472–586X printed/ISSN 1472–5878 online/07/010013-18 # 2007 International Visual Sociology Association
DOI: 10.1080/14725860601167143
‘unquestioned and unconscious’ (Schein 1992, 239) it
forms a ‘hidden curriculum’ that is all the more powerful
because it is visible but unseen. Second, organizational
culture is significant because it influences an organization’s
outcomes. For example, Rutter et al. (1979)
used the term ‘ethos’ to link school culture with effectiveness
thereby raising it on the agenda of educational
researchers. Furthermore, Mortimore (1980, 68) connected
statistical relationships between factors contributing
to school effectiveness and the ethos of a school:
Because … of the stability of the performance
measures, it is likely that an influence more
powerful than that of any particular teacher,
school policies or indeed behaviour of
dominant pupils, is at work. This overall
atmosphere which pervades the actions of the
participants we call ethos.
The third important characteristic of organizational
culture is its methodological beneficence. The increased
use of ‘culture’ over other metaphors was probably due
to its analytic power in understanding school life
(Hargreaves 1999), and because it offers, via
ethnography, an accepted and fertile methodological
framework.
WHAT IS THE VISUAL CULTURE OF SCHOOLS?
There are cases for convergence and divergence of visual
culture and school culture. Educational research
typically relied heavily on number and word-based
methodologies and their different epistemological
assumptions to shape education policies. Quantitative
researchers thus view school culture as a holistic entity
and use multi-level modelling to correlate various
measures of school effectiveness. In contrast, qualitative
researchers, including visual researchers, tend to view
school culture as a dynamic system of distinct subcultures
(Prosser 1999). This paper will attend to what
constitutes visual culture and suggest available visual
methods and their contribution to understanding.
‘Visual culture’ is useful term because it encompasses
and combines three key elements – ‘visual’, ‘culture’,
and ‘schooling’ – each worthy in themselves but in
combination sufficiently distinctive and powerful to
warrant further critical reflection. Arguably, the ‘visual
culture of schools’, is as important as word and numberbased
constructions of school culture. Image-based
methodologies can inform education policy. The first
element in a visual centric method gives primacy to what
is visually perceived rather than what is said, written, or
statistically measured. The second element ‘culture’
draws attention to taken-for-grantedness and the
unquestioned and unwritten codes of habitual practice.
The third element ‘schooling’ is process orientated and
provides the context in which visual culture is situated
and enacted. The three elements combine to give a
working definition of the visual culture of schools:
the ready-made standardised visual scheme
handed down by previous generations of
teachers and authorities as an unquestioned and
unquestionable guide to all observable events,
rituals, situations, objects, materials, spaces and
behaviours which normally occur within
everyday schooling. It is the trace and markings
of the past, present and probably the future
hidden curriculum. (Adapted from Schutz 1964)
It’s important to recognize that the visual culture of a
school is a combination of generic and unique elements.
Generic visual culture describes observable, inscribed
and encrypted similarities of schools in terms of visual
norms, values and practices, which constitute taken-forgranted
visual schooling. However, because schools
comprise individuals, agency and the capacity to
(re)interpret generic visual culture, school people create
their own unique visual culture. To paraphrase Marx,
people make their own schools, but not just as they
please. The visual culture of schools reflects teacher
folklore i.e. ‘all schools are the same but different’. The
next section examines methods for studying the visual
culture of schools.
VISUAL METHODS AND THE VISUAL CULTURE OF
SCHOOLS
It is unclear the extent to which research questions shape
research design and the adoption of specific visual
methods. It is uncertain, for example, whether visual
researchers identify visual-centric research questions and
then select from the range of visual methods to answer
those questions or vice versa. Contemporary visual
studies examine the meanings and significance of the
production, consumption and circulation of material
culture; crosscut by thematic concerns e.g. race, gender
or communication. To examine topic-method decisions
relative to contemporary practice, this paper will explore
the dynamic relationship between visual-centric topics
and visual sub-cultures of schools and then reflect on
how they shape and are shaped by methodological
practices. The aim, via an illuminative range of topicmethod
rich exemplars, is to generate a range of
insightful emergent method and methodological issues. I
will focus on school architecture, non-teaching space, and
teaching and learning without suggesting that they
14 J. Prosser
exhaust the constitutive possibilities of the visual culture
of schooling.
The most versatile and able visual researchers are
sufficiently flexible to apply their skills across a wide
range of research questions and situations, which entails
combining ‘researcher created’, ‘participant generated’,
‘researcher found’, and ‘representational practices’. This
continuum of approaches includes postmodernism,
critical theory, cultural studies, semiotic, sociosemiotics,
and visual symbolism, used to interpret
existing images, and visual ethnography and visual
sociology to generate additional imagery. An underlying
aim is to address problems stemming from overt
privileging of verbal and written words, which are
pandemic in quantitative and qualitative research. More
importantly, in combination they offer a powerful tool
to the study of the visual culture of schooling.
SCHOOL ARCHITECTURE
Architecture operates as a set of pathways and
constraints, facilitating and frustrating parts of the
educational mission. Do´nal O Donoghue’s study of
spaces for masculinity ‘‘‘James always hangs out here’’:
Making space for place in studying masculinities at
school’ in this issue demonstrates the kind of knowledge
about the meanings of physical spaces visual research
can bring to the table. Architecture also operates on a
symbolic level, for instance, Kai Mah’s exploration of
‘The Ontario Educational Exhibition of 1876’ also in this
issue unveils architecture as physical/visual
representation of colonialism. Visual research can
contribute to understanding both the symbolic and
the physical meanings of the built environments of
schools.
In the UK, the government is committed to refurbishing
the entire stock of High Schools by 2020 through its
‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme (BSF
2006). At the opening of a new school in 2004 Prime
Minister Tony Blair (2004) proclaimed:
Of course, what goes on in a school is far more
important than the buildings themselves. But
the one contributes to the other, and today we
are celebrating a stunning new generation in
school design …. All built around the needs of
students, teachers, and the wider community.
Curiously, visual research has played little role in the
study or design of school architecture. I will examine
briefly powerful forces that contribute to its noninvolvement.
While in the early 19th Century
educationalists like Joseph Lancaster prescribed specific
architectural forms for schools, and included perspective
drawings in their writing, later in the century architects
no longer consulted educationalists, believing that
school design was merely a matter of applying accepted
architectural practice (British and Foreign School
Society 1817). Robson1
(1911) an architect who
designed school buildings early in the twentieth century
chastised his colleagues for failing to link architectural
practice with educational aims. Maclure (1985)
reflecting on the period 1945–73, later reiterated
Robson’s ‘fitness for purpose’ theme. However, merely
linking building design to educational theory ignores
architectural and educational concepts and practices
that are influenced by changes at different rates in each
area. Dudek (2000) noted that modernization in school
building takes place in the UK at roughly 35-year
intervals due to economic and political transformation.
Educational practice changes more rapidly, suggesting
that building to match educational theory and practice
is implausible. In addition it has been argued that post
1945 cost cutting took priority over all other issues
(Bennett et al. 1980; Slessor 2004).
In July 2006 the Commission for Architecture and the
Built Environment (CABE), a statutory and advisory
body to the government, audited a representative sample
of 52 of the 124 schools completed between 2000 and
2005 as part of the BSF programme. Their central
research question was ‘How well designed are the new
secondary schools being built in England today?’
They found that 52% of the schools reviewed were
categorized as mediocre or poor, 31% were partially
good, and 19% were good or excellent (CABE 2006, 3).
A consultative approach by architects has been mooted at
in the past (Saint 1987; Bennett et al. 1980; Dudek
2000); nonetheless it is clear that the design of school
space would benefit from visual research and user
input.
The creation of teaching and learning environments is
normally viewed as the domain of architects, builders
and planners who focus on ‘functionality’, ‘build
quality’ (CABE 2006, 3) and, ‘resources’, ‘project
management’, ‘timescales’ and ‘risk management’ (BBC
News 2006). The government procurement body is
similarly concerned with efficiency, value for money,
and fitness for purpose issues. Despite islands of good
practice (Sorrel and Sorrel 2005) only lip service is paid
to end-user consultation (Woolner et al. 2005). Rarely is
thought given to the views of communities for whom
schools are built. Contemporary school design is thus a
wide-open field for visual researchers. Educationalists,
Visual methods and the visual culture of schools 15
sociologists, geographers, psychologists and others could
provide data to school architects, builders and planners.
Emancipatory and participatory research such as photo
voice and photo elicitation can gather valuable input
from teachers, pupils, and others who actually inhabit
the built environments. Good examples of these
possibilities include the children’s drawings of learning
and open spaces in Tabriz, Iran (Gharahbeiglu, this
issue), in the UK (Burke and Grosvenor 2003) and
Shohel and Howes who employed photography as a
research tool in Bangladesh schools (also in this issue).
Current architects’ practice is normally to design, build
and then move on to the next project without looking
back. However post-construction evaluations in the
form of qualitative longitudinal studies have the
potential to provide architects with insights into how
their buildings are adapted as needs change.
NON-TEACHING SPACE
Non-teaching spaces are areas of schools where no
formal teaching takes place although as O Donoghue
makes clear, many a lesson is given. Here I will consider
Headteacher’s space, teacher’s space and pupil space to
demonstrate the use of visual methods to examine
significance of those spaces. As with most visual
methods ‘close reading’ by researchers of visual material
is compared to respondents’ meanings in a process to
produce interpretation and establish of emergent themes
and substantive concepts. This section briefly examines
methods that constitute visual studies of non-teaching
space.
Teachers’ and pupils’ everyday behaviours shape and in
turn are shaped by school culture which is manifested
visually in the built environment as well as the patterned
behaviours that constitute social structure. Nonteaching
spaces make an important contribution to
school culture because they are taken-for-granted and
deeply embedded in the teaching and learning
behaviours of generations of teachers and pupils. Like
many I retain a strong normative visual recollection of
days as a pupil. The memory of school dinners, and
assemblies, the distinctive smell of changing rooms,
soul-less corridors and adventures in remote corners of
the playground are evoked even now by certain films,
books, noises, smells, or tastes. Non-teaching spaces are
important because they are less formal than classrooms,
are rarely the centre of attention and ‘behind the scenes’
rather than ‘front of stage’ (Goffman 1956) and
therefore where actors feel out of the spotlight.
Moreover, they constitute elements of hidden curricula
and how ‘organisations work when no one is looking’
(Morgan 1997, 145).
FIGURE 1. Photograph
of a headteacher’s office.
16 J. Prosser
Cultural Inventory
School culture is closely linked to school effectiveness
and improvement (Stoll 1998; Deal and Kennedy 1983).
Head teachers are key shapers of school culture. As part
of a broader data collection strategy a visual study of the
content and layout of a headteacher’s office yields
insightful data. Proxemics2
provides important data
about individual or group space and relates directly to
membership or status: the amount and kind of space
accorded a member of a cultural system reflects status in
the structure of that system. Teachers and pupils
acquire, mark off, and protect their territory. The most
common form of proxemic data gathering used by
visual sociologists is referred to as ‘cultural inventories’:
…a cultural inventory can go beyond material
items to become a detailing of human
functions, the quality of life, and the nature of
psychological well being. The photographic
inventory can record not only the ranges of
artefacts in a home but also their relationship
to each other, the style of their placement in
space, all the aspects that define and express the
way in which people use and order their space
and possessions. Such information not only
provides an insight into the present character of
people’s lives but can also describe
acculturation and track cultural continuity and
change. (Collier and Collier 1986, 45)
The content and layout of a room reflects the user of the
room and provides insights into how the occupant
would like others to behave in ‘their space’. This
perspective is supported by Meighan (1981, 65) quoting
Khol: ‘The placement of objects in space is not arbitrary
and rooms represent in physical form the spirit and
souls of places and institutions. A teacher’s room tells us
something about who he is and a great deal about what
he is doing’.
Figure 1 is a photograph of a headteacher’s office and a
socio-semiotic and critical reading can be usefully
employed. Evans (1974), for example, suggests that the
general layout of a Headteacher’s room could represent
at least five degrees of authoritarianism. The cultural
inventory raises questions about the significance of
particular artefacts. Why, for example, are there six
different types of bible on the shelf; what is the
significance of the Royal Air force memorabilia on the
back wall; and who sent the cards near the window and
why? Answers provide insights into the headteacher’s
values, beliefs and attitudes, which are central in shaping
the school’s culture. The room contains information on
the level of technology, on the headteacher’s aesthetics,
and the function of the room. Artefacts and proxemics
provide important data in that they express and reflect
that person’s values and cultural patterns. Initial close
reading of the image provided a researcher’s etic
comprehension, but the image can also be used in photo
elicitation to discover participant’s emic meanings
(Collier and Collier 1986; Harper 1987, 2002; Schwartz
1989).
Teacher Space
Teachers spend much non-teaching time in the
staffroom. Visual research methods have been used in a
study of staffrooms and cultural inventories have been
used to examine individual working spaces and teacher
geo-political affiliations during break times
(Hammersley and Atkinson 1983; Ball 1987). Margolis
(1999) who examined collections of archived
photographs of classes of children in American state
schools is a case in point. By adopting a socio-semiotic
approach he established that the images misrepresented
the past and conveyed significant bias. Given that the
archives are primary sources for teacher and student
studies in the USA this is a significant finding.
In this case, by considering a school notice board, I will
illustrate the ‘researcher found data’ approach. This
FIGURE 2. ‘Testing Umbrellas’ – a cartoon found on a staffroom notice
board.
Visual methods and the visual culture of schools 17
aspect of visual research employs semiotic, socio-
semiotic3
or symbolic interactionist analytic skills. Close
reading of found images within a given context is an
important strategy capable of producing valuable
insights into the hidden but visible curriculum of
schooling. Notice boards in staffrooms in the UK are
part of an internal and external communication system,
situated in a semi-private and exclusive space where the
sole audience is teachers. The contents, identified by
headings commonly used in schools – ‘Timetable’,
‘Daily Notices’, ‘Letters to Parents’ – are mostly
maintained by the senior management team. The
cartoon depicted in Figure 2 was found on a staffroom
notice board. It caught my eye because it was visually
different from the main notice board under an unusual
heading ‘NO COMMENTS’ and hung in a small corner
of the staffroom where groups of teachers congregated
for informal discussions over mugs of tea. I wondered
what the message of the cartoon was and how staff
understood it.
At the top right men with candles on their head enter a
tunnel, emerging later with an umbrella. A man lights
the candle, umbrellas are hoisted and a rain machine is
activated. If the water does not dowse the candle the
umbrella passes the test and is retained. I concluded that
it suggests loss of individuality, elimination of the
human spirit, boredom and an unhealthy relationship
between humans and mass production techniques. In
my reading I noted the story sequence begins in the top
left hand corner and progresses in an anticlockwise
direction. The circular movement suggests working lives
are akin to a treadmill existence. Loss of individuality is
emphasized by the fact that the men are all bald,
overweight, and dressed alike. The watering machine
dwarfs the diminutive men indicating the central role
machines play. The device is big, solid, and complex
suggesting dominance. The task of testing is undertaken
earnestly; all the workers are studious except one who is
showing the inspector that his candle is still burning and
smiling enthusiastically. However, this close reading
affords little insight into the situated meaning.
The moment an image is ‘read’ as though it were text
assumptions are made – what Barthes terms deja-lu or
‘already read’. But images are polysemic; they have
multiple meanings. Adding context on the making or
usage of the image extends interpretation but the
standpoint of the observer cannot be ignored. Enquiries
established that the head of the science department had
pinned the cartoon to the board and he was
subsequently interviewed. He and the staff interpreted
the cartoon in a quite specific way. A clue to their
reading is the signature ‘W HEATH ROBINSON,’ at one
level it denotes the artist’s name, but on a different level
it connotes ad hoc solutions to a problem. This
particular artist produced a body of work postulating
zany and ridiculous solutions to basic or nonsensical
problems. In the UK, his name is synonymous with ad
hoc or quick unrealistic solutions to problems. The
FIGURE 3. Mapping
playground space – pupil
likes and dislikes.
18 J. Prosser
teacher’s interpretation lies in the changes to the
educational system they were experiencing.
The school was newly formed. All the schools in the area
had undergone recent reorganization due to a change in
education policy by the Local Education Authority. The
UK 1944 Education Act sorted all eleven year olds into
three types of schooling based on academic ability. The
Local Education Authority decided to move from three
types of schools to one comprehensive school. Teachers
in the new school were not only new to each other but
were required to learn new curriculum and adopt new
teaching techniques for new pupil abilities. They were
given three days of training which one teacher described
as ‘Totally inadequate – a course given by tired teachers
to tired teachers’. Teachers equated the umbrella-testing
factory with the course whose objective was assisting
teachers negotiate the tricky process of ‘becoming a new
school’. After the cartoon was posted staff used the area
as a meeting point. The cartoon and its locale acted as a
focus point for their discontent. Much like the pictures
Paulo Freire used to elicit ‘generative themes’ in
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1973) the cartoon
empowered staff to give voice to their concerns, which
led to further support mechanisms being provided by
the local education authority. This helped them manage
the ongoing and complex change process that is part and
parcel of establishing a new school culture. Situated
close reading of ‘researcher found data’ coupled with a
photo elicitation approach was an illuminating research
method in this visible but hidden curriculum.
Pupil Space
Pupils create sub-cultures in schools. Playground space
is one pupil territorial domain and therefore the place
they were most likely to feel confident and empowered.
It is also one of the spaces where bullying takes place.
Hence space, how it’s used and it’s meaning for children,
is a key sensitizing concept, not merely a threedimensional
backdrop to social action, but the context
for complex and often competing interactions. A
sophisticated analysis of space and place in children’s
view of schools can be found in O Donoghue’s article in
this issue. Playground study can employ a combination
of visual methods and theoretical orientations to elicit
and interpret data. Methods include researcher
generated images; found images such as old school
photographs and architectural drawings; video as record
of complex interaction and/or used for photo elicitation;
participant generated images such as children’s drawings
and photographs; researcher generated maps and
photographs; and of course researchers’ observations.
One theoretical approach is to document what children
actually do (video, photographs, sketches) and use
techniques of member checking and photo elicitation to
check researcher interpretations with children’s
meanings. An alternative approach is to invite the pupils
themselves to take photographs (Schratz and SteinerLoffler
1998), make paintings (Gharahbeiglu, this
issue) or draw maps with coloured pencils (see
Figure 3). These participant constructed images tap into
children’s abilities and enthusiasms (Clark and Moss
2001).
The man in Figure 4 is Jon Prosser (acting as a
researcher’s assistant) standing in ‘no-man’s land’ on an
empty playground. The picture-taker is Steven, a nineyear-old
boy, and I’m being instructed by him to move
to an exact location which marks the outer limits of his
Year 5 soccer pitch and the start of the Year 6 soccer
pitch. This is important since if his ball incurs too often
on the Year 6 pitch it will be ‘booted’ over the wall.
Steven was revealing the visible but hidden territory of
his playground. This ‘walk and talk’ method shifts data
collection from research ‘on’ to research ‘with’ and ‘by’
children. Such participatory methods are becoming
central to contemporary visual research.
If playgrounds are not to be viewed as ‘neutral
backdrops’ then understanding of evolving meanings of
contested space such as playgrounds requires a
combined visual and historical perspective to be
embraced (Depaepe and Henkens 2000). Playground
spaces are transient. Their significance for children’s
play is dependent on a combination of interactive
factors that change over time. The capacity to access
differing sets of historical documents and readings of
playground surface contribute to understanding why
FIGURE 4. Limit of Year 5 soccer pitch and the start of the Year 6 soccer
pitch.
Visual methods and the visual culture of schools 19
FIGURE 5. Victorian school built in 1872.
FIGURE 6. Photograph of the boys’ soccer pitch.
20 J. Prosser
children choose to play they way they do in particular
settings. The capacity to study, for example, original
architectural plans, subsequent records kept by a school,
and markings on playground surface are all insightful
(Prosser and Loxley 2002).
Figure 5 is a Victorian school built in 1872 typical of
the National School design of this period. Armitage
(2005, 541) described the impact of this design on
playground shape as producing a number of ‘nooks and
crannies’ that provide ‘…in effect small ‘‘rooms’’, and
this is exactly how children use them’. Visual researchers
can use techniques such as ‘re-photography’ to explore
social change and the evolution of the buildings or site.
The photograph of the playground (Figure 6) is a
modern view of the school depicted in Figure 5. In
reducing the ‘nooks and crannies’ and replaced them
with uninspiring (to children) straight lines, the
resultant play space (according to the children) was
diminished.
Figure 3 is a girl’s map of the playground marking the
‘likes’ (where she felt safe) and ‘dislikes’ (the boy’s
soccer pitch). By oscillating between researcher-found
historical data, close reading of the playground surface,
students’ drawings of ‘liked’ and ‘disliked’ play space,
and a student questionnaire, an ‘equality’ issue emerged.
The majority of girls in the school (94%) were ‘upset’ or
‘very upset’ at being left with second rate play space. It is
widely recognized and accepted but unquestioned in
school tradition that girls work around playground
space dominated by boy’s soccer pitches. As a result of
the evolutionary ‘improvement’ in school buildings the
girls had lost their ‘nooks and crannies’ space to straight
lines and irregular paving stones and the boys had
gained yet another soccer pitch. Three years after the
study was undertaken the school moved to a new
location and building and the gender inequity, in terms
of amount and quality of play space, were redressed.
Mixed method approaches can be powerful initiators of
educational change.
FIGURE 7. Seating arrangements in a primary school. Methods for exploring material choreography of classrooms, for example, the arrangement of bodies or
objects in space also requires mapping or documenting techniques. Gerhard Jaeger, a Belgian educational researcher, for example, produced a catalogue of
seating arrangements in Primary schools. The position of the furniture reflects different activities: rows for maths, clusters for art, circle for circle time and so on.
Visual methods and the visual culture of schools 21
TEACHING AND LEARNING
This section will concentrate on visual research methods
that aid understanding of the complex, dynamically
inter-related, and subtle elements, that underpin the
visible but hidden curriculum of the classroom. The link
between past and present classroom practice is
important because potentially it provides an insight into
aspects of visual culture that are outmoded but
inexplicably remain in use. As historian P. Burke (1992,
19) pointed out, ‘Without the combination of history
and theory we are unlikely to understand either the past
or the present’. Over the last decade, there has been an
upsurge in interest in understanding the culture of
classrooms. Grosvenor, Lawn, and Rousmaniere (1999),
Margolis (1999), Grosvenor (1999), Lawn (1999) Lawn
and Grosvenor (2005) and C. Burke (2005), conducted
studies of the social history of schooling through visual
methods demonstrating that historians can draw on a
wider methodological palette. Their historical studies of
visual material and technology of schooling employed
literary criticism, social theory, socio-linguistics, and
utilized the ideas of Barthes, Benjamin and Foucault.
They demonstrated that visual historians are able to
provide an important perspective enabling modern
researchers of classroom practice to separate the
commonplace from the out-of-place.
A good starting point to understanding the visual
culture of present-day classrooms is to view them devoid
of teachers or pupils. The cultural inventory method
described earlier facilitates cataloguing the material
culture of classrooms. One approach is to construct a
systematic and comprehensive photo-inventory
(Secondulfo 1997), of ‘data rich’ arrangements. Analysis
of the images is guided by research questions, for
example, ‘what are the similarities and differences
between classrooms in a school’ or ‘what is the temporal
nature of displays in a classroom’. Two differing
analytical frameworks can be employed at this point. If
generalizations across classrooms or between schools
are required, a visual content analysis that is
quantitatively driven is useful (Bell 2001); if the unique
visual culture of a classroom is important then
ethnographic content analysis, whilst still being
concerned with enumeration but which has a more
reflexive twist to it, may be effective (Bryman 1995). A
coding strategy offered by Jaeger’s drawings (Figure 7)
is useful for generic comparisons of seating
arrangements whilst a ‘talk and draw’ approach
(Figure 8) is useful to elicit unique classroom cultural
practice.
Visual methods can aid the study of classroom
interaction. I took the photograph (Figure 9) and accept
it as equally revealing of the photographer’s standpoint
as it is about the observed. It was used in photoelicitation
where images are employed as part of an
interview. The aim was to explore the significance or
meaning of the image with the teacher (see Harper
2002). The teacher depicted explained when he saw the
image ‘End of a long term …. I was knackered’
(vernacular for extremely tired) before moving on to
describe the particular form of observable but hidden
teacher-stress in his school. Photo-elicitation promotes
respondents’ and not the researcher’s agenda, aids recall
and triggers unanticipated reactions beyond what could
normally be expected from interviews.
FIGURE 8. Pupils drawing. A ‘talk and draw’ approach is useful for
exploring pupils’ perspectives. An 8-year-old child has focused in his
drawing on the side of a room. The researcher’s finger is questioning the
significance of five dashes on the page. The boy explained they
represented pupils’ shoes on the top of the blackboard. It was routine, it
turned out, that when a child needed to borrow a pen or pencil from the
teacher they were required to exchange it for a left shoe (to be returned
when the borrowed item was returned). ‘Walk and talk’ and ‘draw and tell’
techniques (Clark and Moss 2001) are useful not only for identifying pupils’
own agenda and priorities but also their perspectives on power, control
and the visible hidden curriculum.
FIGURE 9. ‘Knackered’.
22 J. Prosser
Ogborn et al. (1996) and Kress et al. (2000) used
qualitative methods in applying semiotic and sociosemiotic
analysis to interpreting multi-modal forms of
communication in classroom settings. Educational
kinaesthetics, proxemics, spatiality, and children’s
geographies (Holloway and Valentine 2000; Nespor
1997) are theoretical constructs developed though
applying combinations of visual and non-visual research
methods. Unfortunately these methods have rarely been
applied to educational or classroom settings. There is,
however, an increasing enthusiasm for sophisticated
methods of visual acquisition, documentation and
analysis.
Visual methods, importantly, slow down the act of
looking but equally they make for efficient and effective
analysis of complex data. Video has long been used to
record classroom interaction (Dowrick and Biggs 1982;
Anning et al. 1990). Recent improvements in technology
and software4
led to an upsurge of interest in video
feedback (Tochon 1999, 2001). They facilitate
transcription, coding and qualitative analysis of digital
video. Keywords can be assigned to clips allowing
sorting and rearrangement of data, creation of
collections of interrelated clips, exploration of
relationships between applied keywords, data-mining,
hypothesis testing, and the sharing of data with
colleagues. When powerful software is used in
conjunction with other visual and non-visual methods
and focused on a set of purposeful research questions,
lessons for classroom practice can be significant (for
example see Armstrong et al. 2005).
The Visual Display of Information in Science
Education
This section will consider representation of ideas and
theory in a science class where information that
represents scientific data and concepts effectively is
important. As Lynch (2006, 195) argued:
A characteristic feature of scientific activity is
the production of visual displays of objects,
processes, relationships, and theoretical
constructs. Scientific publications often include
illustrative photographs, diagrams, graphs, and
other data displays. Visual displays are not only
valuable as illustrations in scientific texts; they
are irreplaceable as documents that enable
objects of study to be perceived and analyzed
initially. Such displays systematically transform
specimen materials into observable and
mathematically analyzable data. Objects and
relationships that initially were invisible
become visible and palpable as a result of highly
technical skills and complex instruments.
It is important to examine how visual methods provide
an insight into the everyday material culture of
classrooms. Graphical representation reflects both
official representation, like wall displays or diagrams in
textbooks, and unofficial representation, for example
desk and book graffiti. The size and EMPHASIS of font
as well the use of bold, italic and underline and their
arrangement on the page of a textbook are visually
indicative of the writer’s preferred readings. However,
adult devised teaching material does not always lead to
the anticipated reading by children. As Wetton and
McWhirter (1998) demonstrated, age-developmental
appropriate wording and pertinent visual information
are essential if pupils are to understand and learn as
teachers intend. Visual representations lend
themselves to examination as researcher found data.
Socio-semiotic interpretation and image-elicitation with
pupils is a particularly powerful combination for
analysing how visual representations in textbooks are
viewed by recipients and promote or detract from
learning.
Tufte (1983, 1990, 1997) and Kosslyn (1994) are
influential figures in contemporary graphic design
offering guidelines for high-quality representations (see
FIGURE 10. Emergent writing and drawing.
Visual methods and the visual culture of schools 23
Grady 2006). It is easy, they suggest, to misrepresent
data and even humble pie and bar charts, omnipresent
in science textbooks, can fall victim to poor data display
or what Tufte terms ‘chartjunk’. Close reading of science
textbooks graphs should ask: are the representations
‘quiet, and let the data speak for itself’ (Wainer 1997, 11)
or do they display data badly by showing very little data,
portraying data inaccurately or obfuscating the data – all
of which reflect poor design. If words in science
textbooks need to be truthful and accurate then equally
graphic design should be elevated to the level of Tufte’s
golden rule:
What is to be sought in designs for the display
of information is the clear portrayal of
complexity. Not the complication of the
simple; rather the task of the designer is to give
visual access to the subtle and the difficult –
that is, the revelation of the complexity. (Tufte
1983, quoted by Grady 2006, 222)
Figure 10 is a combination of writing and drawing by a
five-year-old. The child developed a primitive concept
map to organize her thoughts. Teachers require the
ability to evaluate such visualizations in order to
improve a child’s ability to both represent and interpret
visual information. Future scientists (and citizens)
will need to interpret colossal data sets and employ
visual representation to communicate complex
concepts.
Visual sociologists have used ‘concept mapping’ to track
and record the way children build concepts and
relationships. Figure 11 is an example of this approach
used to understand a pupil’s perspective of food. It is a
road map showing emergent pathways children use to
connect concepts. It is most commonly used for tracking
the development of children’s learning, as a diagnostic
tool for evaluating progress, and to help them learn how
to think about thinking i.e. aid in metacognition (Buzan
and Buzan 1993; Georghiades 2000, 2004). Concept
mapping is useful as an interview device with children
because it allows them to set the agenda, to decide
what is important, and to work at their pace rather than
the rapid mode expected in semi-structured
interviews where pregnant silences are considered out of
place. A video recording of emergent drawings enables
FIGURE 11. Concept map of food.
24 J. Prosser
the researcher to follow the evolution of a pupil’s
thinking.
Visual researchers note that all imagery is polysemic.
Scott and Jewitt (2003) observed that children’s
observations differ from teacher observations. The
discrepancy comes about, they suggest, because teachers
expect children to link empirical observation with a
scientific concept. Since the children did not have the
same knowledge/concept/experience and used the term
‘pattern’ differently, they literally ‘see’ differently from
the teacher. Scott and Jewitt went on to question
the sequence in science teaching i.e. observation of
natural phenomena followed by scientific concept or
vice versa?
Different contexts lend themselves to different visual
representations and visual methods. Data screens are fast
becoming the means of knowledge transition and in the
near future science lessons will be paperless.
Understanding how pupils read screens through
tracking eye movements is an under used visual method
in educational research, even though there is a highly
developed technology used by advertisers. Visual
perception, human-computer interaction, reading of
class textbooks and computer graphics are domains that
stand to benefit from eye tracking research (Duchowski
2003). Tai et al. (2006) demonstrate the potential by
using eye tracking to identify differences in pupil’s
problem-solving behaviours in science assessment
exercises.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a
major vehicle for representing information in a variety
of ways including images, diagrams, graphs and tables;
enabling change to be shown dynamically as in the
visualization of complex processes. Figure 12 shows a
visual method of accessing children’s understandings of
the use of ICT through interactive whiteboards
developed by Wall and Higgins (2006). They used a
carefully designed template, a ‘semiotic tool’ (Vygotsky
1978), as scaffolding for mediating talk in interviews.
The approach adopted pupil’s visual culture by taking
the form of a cartoon and including simple line
drawings and empty speech bubbles to be filled with
children’s opinions.
These examples are only the tip of the visual method
iceberg. Other factors that make a significant
contribution to shaping the visual culture of classrooms
FIGURE 12. Accessing pupils’ understanding through speech bubbles.
Visual methods and the visual culture of schools 25
such as pupil visual culture (Wagner 1999), teacher
visual culture (Weber and Mitchell 1995, 1996), and the
wider visual culture have been left out of my essay.
However, Richard Chalfen’s article in this issue ‘If tiles
could talk…. the visual life of a senior ceramic tiles
project’ explores the powerful effect of a teacher
initiated and student accomplished visual culture. The
art practice of making senior tiles continued for decades
and became a central visual identity of the school.
Overall, the diversity of visual methods to study school
life is significant and growing in esteem among nonvisual
researchers.
FIGURE 13. The visual culture of classrooms.
26 J. Prosser
VISUAL METHODOLOGIES OF THE FUTURE AND
THE VISUAL CULTURE OF SCHOOLS
This paper examined school architecture, non-teaching
space, and teaching and learning to illuminate the range
of topic-method rich exemplars. The methods included
‘researcher found data’, ‘researcher generated data’,
‘respondent created data’ and ‘visualization and
representation of data’. At this point I will move from
methods toward methodology to reflect on broad
strategies for advancing understanding of how visual
methodologies of the future will make the visible but
hidden curriculum more comprehensible and less hidden.
Visual research is evolving rapidly and the last decade
has witnessed an exponential growth in application. This
has contributed to a robustness and complexity in visual
studies and is to be welcomed. However, as one might
expect this has also led to fragmentation. Viewed
positively fragmentation reflects the increase of specialist
research and refinement of methods. Viewed
pejoratively, fragmentation limits further growth
because it brings breadth rather than depth. This paper
and the special issue on the Visible Curriculum
examined the relationship between visual research subcultures.
Most visual research has been small scale;
conducted by lone or paired researchers tackling a single
theme, which narrows methodological and theoretical
possibilities. If visual studies are to make a greater
contribution to knowledge, the combined strengths of
inter-disciplinary research, which extracts best practice
from plural modes of theorizing, is indispensable. A
more comprehensive visual methodology will be needed
to answer complex, over-arching research questions.
School culture has been viewed as either a system of
loosely coupled sub-cultures or a totality of everyday
values, beliefs and behaviour. It is plausible to view the
visual culture of schools holistically and for visual studies
to address the ‘big’, gestalt-type, research questions:
N What is the visual culture of schools now?
N What constitutes a ‘good’ visual culture?
N What impact does visual culture have on
teaching and learning?
N How can a school manager shape the visual
culture of his/her school?
N How can the visual culture of schools be
changed?
N How can schools evaluate their own visual culture?
N How can international comparisons of the visual
culture of schools be made?
The shift from a sub-culture focus to a holistic-culture
focus requires a change in the present trajectory of visual
methodology away from single method/single discipline/
narrow focus towards multi-method/multi-disciplinary/
broad conceptual focus. Serious consideration must be
given to epistemological assumptions. Assuming that
research questions shape methodology what constitutes
an important and timely holistic topic? A meso-level
study might be designed to answer the question ‘What
is the visual culture of a classroom?’ One of many
possible models to attack this question is shown in
Figure 13.
The Venn diagram represents the overlapping features
that make up the visual culture of classrooms. The outer
circle corresponds to the influence of wider visual culture
since school visual cultures do not exist in a vacuum and
international, national, and local visual cultures
impregnate the everyday fabric of classrooms. The four
inner circles represent the generic visual culture of the
classroom, which embodies norms, rituals, traditions,
and actions. Because teachers and pupils possess agency
and the capacity to create, interpret, and reinterpret
visual culture, they create their own unique visual
classroom culture. The four boxes indicate the sorts of
visual materialities of each of the constituent elements:
pupil visual culture, teacher visual culture, past visual
cultures of classrooms, and future visual cultures of
classrooms.
A methodologically framed, qualitatively driven, visually
orientated, mixed method, interdisciplinary approach to
examining overarching and substantive educational
themes and research questions which are central to
understanding the nature of everyday visual culture of
classrooms is developing. An interdisciplinary mixed
methods approach encourages the establishment of
flexible and diverse research teams capable of a
contrastive and reflexive rhetoric. The most common
logic of mixed methods has spanned the quantitative
and qualitative divide but is insufficient in a study of the
visual culture of schools. Instead, a multiple method
logic, which includes multiple visual methods working
alongside combinations of orthodox word and numberbased
approaches, should be developed. Finally, a
holistic account of the visual culture of classrooms will
necessarily involve close collaboration between pupils,
teachers and researchers.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Stephen for allowing me to publish
his photographs in Figure 4. Also thanks to Gerhard
Jaeger for allowing reproduction of Figure 7 from his
ABC collection website: www.abc-web.be
Visual methods and the visual culture of schools 27
NOTES
[1] In the history of English school architecture, Robson
occupies a formative position. He was the first architect to
be employed specifically to design schools for the London
School Board and during a 30 year period was responsible
for the erection of some 250 buildings.
[2] Proxemics is concerned with spatial relationships as an
indicator of cultural behaviour. Kinesics is concerned
with posture/gesture/body language as a signifier of
culture.
[3] For a discussion of the socio-semiotics of visual
communication see Jewitt and Oyama (2001).
[4] Video software analysis is part of global upsurge in
interest in using software to analyse qualitative data. In
the UK ‘Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis’
(CAQDAS) is a networking project based at the
Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, UK and
funded by the ESRC.
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