What image comes to your mind when you hear ‘Blooms Taxonomy’? Most likely it is a pyramid with several different colored levels of knowledge from ‘remember’ to ‘create’, with implied or explicit arrows pointing upward. In fact, this visualization of taxonomy is one of the most popular. Yet, its origin remains a mystery: it was not part of Bloom’s et al (1956) original framework or the later revision (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). On the one hand, pyramids and triangles are a common way of visualizing theoretical models in the social and educational sciences: think of the didactic triangle, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (1943), or Dale’s cone of experience (1946). However, while these models have largely retained their original pyramidal representations over time, Bloom’s taxonomy has evolved into various visual metaphors such as ladders, trees, circles, and flowers. What ideas about knowledge do these visualizations convey?

Developed in the 1950s, Bloom’s Taxonomy was designed to provide a wide range of educational professionals with a simple theoretical model that could be used to address curriculum and evaluation problems (Bloom et al, 1956, p. 1). Essentially a product of behaviorism, Bloom’s taxonomy emphasizes observable students’ behaviors resulting from instructions. Moreover, the very word “taxonomy” represents an attempt to apply models from the natural sciences, particularly biology, to the field of education. In biology, taxonomy refers to the classification of organisms into a hierarchical structure based on shared characteristics. By borrowing this concept from the natural sciences, Bloom’s Taxonomy sought to bring a similar order and ‘scientific’ rigor to educational objectives. A taxonomy, according to Bloom, unlike a simple classification system, must follow structural rules and reflect a “real” order among the phenomena it organizes (Bloom et al, 1956, p. 18). It is a method of ordering phenomena that should reveal their essential properties as well as significant relationships among them (p. 17). Recognizing the difference between classifying phenomena in the natural sciences and more abstract educational phenomena, Bloom noted that educational objectives, when expressed in behavioral terms, could indeed be observed, described, and thus classified.

Bloom’s Taxonomy has not only survived the decline of behaviorism but is still widely used in educational planning and evaluation in different parts of the world, including Europe (Anderson & Sosniak, 1994). Moreover, a new revision, known as Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy, was recently developed by Churches (2008) to account for the skills required in the digital age. Such persistence of the taxonomy can be attributed to several factors. First, its structured approach provides a practical and easy-to-use framework for educators and curriculum designers. Second, its adaptability to different visual metaphors may also contribute to its enduring appeal (see Mitchell, 2005). Third, most research on taxonomy tends to focus on its interpretations, misinterpretations and application in educational practice but ignores its historical origins, theoretical underpinnings, and visualizations.

This study explores the confluence of ideas and practices through which a hierarchy of knowledge is produced and disseminated as scientific facts. Specifically, it examines the assumptions and beliefs about knowledge implicit in the Bloom’s Taxonomy and its different visual representations. In doing so, the study brings together and extends the insights from a growing body of literature on how pictorial and graphic displays of conceptual models, methods or data transform ‘invisible’ phenomena into visible facts (Baigrie, 1996; Coopmans et al, 2014; Jones & Galison, 1998; Latour, 1993, 2017; Lynch, 1981; Pauwels, 2005; Rogers et al, 2021). This means that we regard pictures as an important part of discourses that establish ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 2014) and promote certain ways of thinking, knowing, seeing, and acting in the world.

The study consists of two parts for which we collected and analysed different types of sources. First, to place Bloom’s Taxonomy in its historical and epistemological context, we analysed Bloom’s original work and its revision, collected and consulted the references to which Bloom and his colleagues refer – especially with regard to the choice of taxonomy as a theoretical model – and briefly reviewed the literature on the philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of taxonomies as a classification model in the natural sciences. Second, the search term ‘Bloom Taxonomy’ was entered into Google Images, from which the first 100 relevant images were selected, excluding duplicates, word clouds, PowerPoint slides, and images that did not contain the taxonomy itself (mainly photographs, book covers, etc.). To ‘fix’ the dataset and prevent it from changing we took screenshots of the results pages. This dataset was considered large enough to provide a wide range of images. As noted above, we consider images – or visuality more broadly – to be part and parcel of discourses that shape the ways the world is understood. In other words, we adopt a broad understanding of discourse that includes both verbal, visual and material elements. From this perspective, discourses are articulated through both visual and verbal, images and texts – or what Mitchell (1994) calls “imagetexts” – as well as through the practices by which these imagetexts are produced, circulated, and displayed. Accordingly, in analyzing the collected images, we employed multimodal discourse analysis (Rose, 2016), which involves the examination of the visual content and its context. This approach means looking beyond the surface level to uncover the symbolic meanings, cultural references, and underlying ontologies and epistemologies embedded in the images. We began by cataloging each image’s type and place of publication (institution webpage, media, social media, private blogs, etc.) as well as its visual attributes, such as iconography, layout, design and color schemes, etc. This allowed us to identify patterns and variations in the representation of Bloom’ taxonomy. Subsequent analysis focused on interpreting the meaning conveyed and the assumptions and beliefs implicit in different visualizations of the same theoretical model. We sought to understand how these visualizations function as scientific or pedagogical tools that contribute to particular regimes of truth about education, teaching, and learning. This involved a critical examination of the images within their broader educational and epistemological contexts.

As suggested above and as our analysis shows, the most common visualization of Bloom’s Taxonomy is a pyramid with labels such as ‘knowledge’ or ‘remember’ at the bottom and ‘evaluation’ or ‘create’ at the top. This visualization has become popular, perhaps due to its simplicity and the intuitive way it represents a progression from basic to advanced forms of knowledge. However, Bloom’s et al (1956) original arrangement of six basic educational behaviors into a taxonomy was based on the idea that “a particular simple behavior may become integrated with other equally simple behaviors to form a more complex behavior” (p. 18). In the meantime, the spatial arrangement of the levels of knowledge within the pyramid does not capture this idea. On the contrary, the pyramid’s structure suggests that the simplest level of knowledge as the widest, and the most complex as the narrowest. The problem of different level sizes is somewhat alleviated when the taxonomy is depicted as a ladder or a tree, which both are typical visual metaphors for ordering knowledge. Indeed, they are also commonly used for representing evolution and biological order. In biology, the ‘ladder’ metaphor, stemming from Aristotelian thought, implies a hierarchy in the natural world, with humans at the top. It suggests a linear progression and a static order. In contrast, Darwin’s ‘tree’ metaphor represents the interconnectedness and branching diversity of life, suggesting an evolutionary process without a predetermined hierarchy (Archibald, 2014). Overall, our preliminary findings suggest that when the taxonomy is represented in pictures, it takes on different meanings and suggests other relationships between different kinds of knowledge than Bloom and his colleagues envisioned.

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