Understanding OECD representations of teachers and teaching: a visual discourse analysis of covers in OECD documents

ABSTRACT

OECD dominance in the international educational policy discourse in the developed regions of the world, particularly in promoting teaching policy, has been long acknowledged. While many works have explored the organisation’s verbal discourse, no study has considered exploring its visual discourse. To close that gap, we employed a visual discourse analysis on the covers of OECD documents pertaining to teachers and teaching (i.e., TALIS and ISTP). The analysis found that OECD’s covers drew on two discourses, a conservative discourse and a liberal diversity discourse. However, the latter was entangled with constructions which serve to maintain a conservative order.

KEYWORDS:

• ISTP
• OECD
• TALIS
• teachers
• visual discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Izhak Berkovich http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5710-3666

Pascale Benoliel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8896-7889

Notes

1 A teacher-centred didactic approach is conservative in the sense that it is imitation-based (repetition and memorisation) and guided by the needs of society rather than by those expressed by students (Eilam 2003). As such, it aligns with cultural conservatism, which emphasises tradition and seeks to justify and maintain the "natural" order of things (Brown 2004).

2 We performed a post hoc comparison with OECD documents intended specifically for teachers (Teaching in Focus). The covers of these documents (form May 2012 onward) are more static (Briefs No. 1–17 have the same visual strip at the top of the page, and Briefs No. 18–21 have the same full-page cover). We concluded that in many ways these visuals mirror our findings in reverse: they show teacher-student interactions, the teacher is not in front of blackboard or writing on it, the emphasis on mathematics, science, and technology is absent, the teacher does not use digital tools, and the cover presents a mixed racial composition.