Between curriculum complexity and stereotypes: exploring stereotypes of teachers and education in media as a question of structural violence

Abstract

The paper highlights four tendencies in the media reporting of teachers and education: (a) recurring patterns of defining education in crisis, (b) mantling responsibility as exterior spokespersons for education and teachers, (c) excluding teachers’ and educational researchers’ knowledge and experiences in the media and (d) simplifying the notion of a good and bad teacher through stereotypes and dualistic frameworks that overlook task and relational complexity. In this paper, I explore how the simplifications of teachers and education that are often presented in the media can be interpreted as structural violence. In the light of these tendencies, research on structural violence helps to remind us that: (a) teachers are unwillingly forced into a paradoxical (in)visibility, (b) they are squeezed in-between two pressuring external demands, namely the complexities in their professional assignment that are politically steered and stereotypes of the good and bad teacher produced by, in this case, the media, (c) they risk wasting time and energy on addressing prejudices that have nothing to do with the specific work they are expected to do and (d) the logic of binary stereotypes is a power issue that brands teachers into a position of permanent failure.

Keywords:

• curriculum complexity
• media
• education
• teachers
• stereotypes
• structural violence

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Erratum

Acknowledgement

To begin with many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their heartfelt interest in the topic I am dealing with as well as for their insightful and constructive comments to improve the content of the article. Thank you also Sue Glover Frykman, who, as a language editor, certainly contributed in strengthening the clarity of the points I want to make. Furthermore, I could not have find time finishing the article without the wonderful support from my research colleagues Anneli Frelin and Jan Grannäs who beside their brilliant support in the writing process of the article, invited me in as a guest researcher at University of Gävle. Subsequently, I owe much to the University of Gävle, for supporting my research and would like to direct a special thanks to the institution as a whole. Finally, I would like to turn my warmest gratitude to the research group STORIES and members in the Curriculum Studies Faculty seminar at the University of Gävle for their vivid and fruitful discussions, which are necessary to stimulate critical thinking at an institution.

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Silvia Edling

Silvia Edling, Faculty of Education and Business Studies, University of Gävle, Kungsbäcksvägen 47, Gävle 80176, Sweden. She is an assistant professor and guest researcher at University of Gävle in Sweden, Her research primarily highlights issues of social justice, moral and ethics, curriculum studies, teacher education and educational environments. Edling’s most recent article publication in English is “Doing good?: Interpreting teachers’ given and felt responsibilities for pupils’ well-being in an age of measurement. Teachers and Teaching”.