The Influence of Commercial Image Banks on Teachers’ Design of Teaching Materials

Author(s):

Anna Annerberg(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

16. ICT in Education and Training

Format:

Paper

Session Information

16 SES 08 B, Teacher Competency, Designing Learning Materials, and Music Production

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-24

09:00-10:30

Room:

W4.21

Chair:

Jo Tondeur

Contribution

New conditions and functions for teachers in an environment saturated with digital technology impose new prerequisites for teachers’ work practices (e.g. Lankshear & Knobel, 2013). The use of images in education is a topic that concerns teachers all over Europe. This study highlights a problem that might also have a common, European, solution.

The creation, or design, of teaching materials is an increasing part of teachers' everyday work (Annerberg, 2016; Selander & Kress, 2010). Teachers’ dependence on the Internet, and commercial search engines like Google Search, as sources for images when designing teaching materials is problematic in the light of previous research that draws attention to the consumerism values promoted by the corporate image banks dominating the Internet (Machin, 2004). This study aims to problematize how teachers’ use of digital resources when designing teaching materials interacts with their understandings of specific teaching situations. The study is part of a major longitudinal study which investigates teachers’ literacy practices from a New Literacy and a Critical Discourse perspective (Clark & Ivanič, 1997).

Method

Presented here is a case of a PowerPoint presentation, containing 27 images, designed for teaching by a teacher and used in a classroom, as well as distributed via the school´s Learning Management System. The case was chosen from a three year long study of upper secondary school teachers´ writing practices in a Swedish school implementing digital technology. The teacher´s talk on her intentions regarding the presentation and her working process, was analyzed using thematic analysis (see Rapley, 2011). The images of the chosen presentation were analyzed by using the concepts: modality and representational structures (Björkvall, 2009; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; van Leeuwen, 2005).

Expected Outcomes

The results show that both the teacher’s understanding of the teaching situation and students’ motivation, as well as the digital resources available, contribute to the domination of decontextualized images, provided by corporate image banks like Getty Images. This, in turn, contributes to a strong emphasis on teacher–student relations, which risks suppressing the subject content of the presentation. Thus, the study highlights the importance of the relationship between the teacher and the students, a relationship that clearly influences the design of teaching material. While commercially produced textbooks does not need to consider any personal relationship, teachers who are designing such materials need to take this into account. However, lack of awareness of interdiscursive influence seems to be problematic. The analysis of the images used in the presentation indicated that the images contained few processes and several images with close up views of smiling faces gazing directly at the viewer were common. A strong focus on the relational shaping aspects of the presentation raises questions on the opportunities for students to broaden their understanding of the subject matter, which is also an intended purpose for using the presentation according to the teacher. At the same time the images chosen by the teacher share characteristics with images on Internet forums representing similar content (Thompson, 2012), and the use of commercial-like images could be viewed as a way to incorporate students' out-of-school literacy practice in education. The result of this study implies a need for non-commercial alternatives for teachers to access images.

References

Annerberg, A. (2016). Gymnasielärares skrivpraktiker. Skrivande som professionell handling i en digitaliserad skola. Örebro: Örebro University. Björkvall, A. (2009). Den visuella texten. Multimodal analys i praktiken. Stockholm: Hallgren & Fallgren. Clark, R., & Ivanič, R. (1997). The Politics of Writing. London: Routledge. Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading images. The grammar of visual design (2. ed). London: Routledge. Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2013). A new literacies reader. Educational perspectives. New York: Peter Lang. Leeuwen, T. van (2005). Introducing social semiotics. London: Routledge. Machin, D. (2004). Building the world’s visual language: the increasing global importance of image banks in corporate media. Visual Communication, (3), 316. Rapley, T. (2011). Some pragmatics of qualitative data analysis. In D. Silverman (Ed.), Qualitative research. Issues of theory, method and practice. Selander, S., & Kress, G. R. (2010). Design för lärande: ett multimodalt perspektiv. Stockholm: Norstedt. Thompson, R. (2012). Looking healthy: visualizing mental health and illness online. Visual Communication, 11(4), 395–420.

Author Information

Anna Annerberg (presenting / submitting)

Dalarna University

School of Education, Health and Social Studies

FALUN

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