Picturing an Occupational Identity: Images of Teachers in Careers and Trade Union Publications 1940–2000

Abstract

Visual sources in the form of teachers’ journals and careers literature constitute an important part of the material culture of the teaching profession, and demand examination for their impact on occupational identity. The material allows for a range of interpretations and the approach taken here is speculative, in both methodologies and analysis. This paper examines how visual imagery, as a ‘communicative symbol’ and as a ‘social fact’, has actively contributed to the formation of gendered teacher identities. An analysis of the extensive archives available at the Trade Union Congress Library was central in revealing a set of recurring themes over a period of 60 years. This iconography was then located in its wider historical, pedagogical and cultural contexts and possible interpretations of these gendered representations of the occupational identity of teachers suggested.

Acknowledgements

The author is very grateful for the generous help given by Peter Cunningham and Jane Martin on educational matters, and Hannelore Hägele on art‐historical approaches.

Notes

¹ The research involved was part of an ESRC‐funded project, Does Work Still Shape Social Identity and Action?, based at London Metropolitan University, (ESRC grant no. RES 148‐25‐0038), which, over three years, investigated the importance of work as a source of identity in three occupations, banking, railway work and teaching, throughout the twentieth century and up to the present. The approach consisted of archival analysis and the collecting of oral work‐life histories from three cohorts: new entrants to work, those mid‐career and those retired. This was combined with a range of visual methods.

² This collection, under the category Education, contains some fascinating photographs of teachers engaged in political action including schoolchildren’s strikes, occupations of nurseries and the many marches on County Hall in defence of ILEA in the early 1980s. Unfortunately at the moment this archive has not been catalogued due to lack of funds and is only accessible to members of London Metropolitan University. A large amount of historical, visual and textual material has been digitized and is available on the website, http://www.unionhistory.index/. A very knowledgeable librarian, Chris Coates, runs the archive and visits are by appointment only.

³ Cunningham, P. “Teachers’ Periodicals as a source for Professional Practice and Professional Identity.” Paper presented to the SSHA Symposium, Chicago, 2001 (unpublished).

⁴ Much of this work has focused on male manual workers, although Salaman’s study, published in 1974, included architects. See, Hughes, E.C. Men and their Work. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958; Salaman, G. Community and Occupation: An Exploration of Work/Leisure Relationships. Cambridge, 1974; Lamont, M. The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; Sennett, R. Respect: The Formation of Character in a World of Inequality. London: Allen Lane, 2003; Strangleman. T. “The nostalgia for permanence at work?: The end of work and its commentators.” Sociological Review 56 (2007): 81–103.

⁵ Beck, U. The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000; Bauman, Z. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998; Casey, C. Work, Self and Society: After Industrialism. New York–London: Routledge, 1995.

⁶ MacLure, M. “Arguing for Yourself: Identity as an Organising Principle in Teachers’ Jobs and Lives.” British Educational Research Journal 19, no. 4 (1993): 311–22.

⁷ Woods, P., and B. Jeffrey. “The Reconstruction of Primary Teachers” Identities.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 23, no. 1 (2002): 90–110; Woods, P., and D. Carlyle. “Teacher Identities under Stress: The Emotions of Separation and Renewal.” International Studies in Sociology of Education, 12, no. 2 (2002): 169–89.

⁸ Day, C., A. Kington, G. Stobart, and P. Sammons. “The personal and professional selves of teachers: stable ad unstable identities.” British Educational Research Journal 32, no. 4 (2006): 601–16; Nias, J. Primary Teachers Talking: A Study Of Teaching As Work. London: Routledge, 1989.

⁹ Lortie, D. Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, 1975; Zembylas, M. “Emotional metaphors and emotional labour in science teaching.” Science Education 83, no. 3 (2004): 301–24; Isenbarger, L., and M. Zembylas. “The emotional labour of caring in teaching.” Teaching and Teacher Education 22 (2006): 120–34. Acker, S. “Carry on Caring: the work of women teachers.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 16, no. 1 (1995): 21–36.

¹⁰ Steedman, C. “The Mother made Conscious: The Historical Development of Primary School Pedagogy.” History Workshop Journal 20 (1985): 149–63.

¹¹ Riley, D. War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and the Mother. London: Virago Press, 1983: 196.

¹² For example, Phoenix, A., A. Woollett, and E. Lloyd, eds. Motherhood: Meanings, Practices and Ideologies. London: Sage, 1991; Hollway, W., and B., Featherstone. Mothering and Ambivalence. London: Routledge, 1997.

¹³ Arnot, M. “Male Hegemony, social class and women’s education.” Journal of Education 164 (1982): 64–89; Connell, R. W. Teachers’ Work. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985.

¹⁴ Martin, J. “Gender and Education: Change and Continuity.” In Education, Equality and Human Rights, edited M. Cole. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006: 22–42.

¹⁵ Dillabough, J., “Gender Politics and Conceptions of the Modern Teacher: women, identity and professionalism.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 20, no. 3, (1999): 380.

¹⁶ Ibid., 387.

¹⁷ See footnote 13.

¹⁸ Weber, S., and C. Mitchell. “Drawing Ourselves into Teaching: Studying the Images that Shape and Distort Teacher Education.” Teacher and Teacher Education 12, no. 3 (1996): 307.

²¹ Panofsky, E. Meaning in the Visual Arts. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970: 66.

¹⁹ Burke, P. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001; Joyce, P. Historical meanings of Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987: 17.

²⁰ Prosser, J., ed. Image‐based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers, London: RoutledgeFalmer, 1996; Prosser, J. “The Moral Maze of Image Ethics.” In Situated Ethics in Educational Research, edited by H. Simons and R. Usher. London: Routledge 2000: 116–32; Rose, G. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2007; Trachtenberg, A. Reading American Photographs: Images as History. Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill & Wang, 1989.

²² Baxandall, M. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1991; Freedberg, D. The Power of Images. Chicago, 1989.

²³ Williamson, J. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars, 1978.

²⁴ Harper, D. “Meaning and Work: A Study in Photo Elicitation.” International Journal of Visual Sociology, 2, no. 1, 1984: 20–43; Harper, D. Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

²⁵ Grosvenor, I., M. Lawn, and K. Rousmaniere, eds. Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom. New York: Peter Lang, 1999; Rousmaniere, Kate. “Questioning the Visual in the History of Education.” History of Education 30, no. 2 (March 2001): 110.

²⁶ Burke, C., and H. Ribeiro de Castro. “The School Photograph: Portraiture and the Art of Assembling the Body of the Schoolchild.” History of Education 36, no. 2 (2007): 213–26; Margolis, E. “Class Pictures: Representations of Race, Gender and Ability in a Century of School Photography.” Education Policy Analysis Archives 8, no. 31 (2000). Available at: http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n31/; Lawn, M., and I. Grosvenor. “‘When in doubt preserve’: exploring the traces of teaching and material culture in English schools.” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 117–27 (p. 11); Grosvenor, I. “From the ‘Eye of History’ to ‘a Second Gaze’: The Visual Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education.” History of Education 36, nos 4 & 5 (2007): 607–22.

²⁷ Depaepe, M., and B. Henkens, eds. “The Challenge of the Visual in the History of Education.” Pedagogica Historica 36, no. 1 (2000): 11–17.

²⁸ Nóvoa, A. “Ways of Saying, Ways of Seeing. Public images of Teachers (19^th and 20^th century).” Paedagogica Historica 36, no.1 (2000): 21–51.

²⁹ The Daily Express is a conservative, middle‐market British newspaper, one of the leading tabloids in the 1960s, selling around two million copies. ‘Giles’ (1916–1995) worked for the Daily Express from 1943 and has been regarded as one of Britain’s favourite cartoonists of the twentieth century.

³⁰ There is an equal British iconography, if not as extensive as that depicting ‘caring’ women teachers, describing the male, authoritarian schoolmaster of which Chalky is just one example. It is apparent in the literature published by the National Association of Schoolmasters, which had the motto ‘Men teachers for Boys’, and formed in 1923 after breaking away from the NUT. The NAS campaigned to increase the number of schoolmasters teaching at post‐infant level as there was widespread concern that women, who dominated the primary/elementary system, were feminizing boys. They also opposed equal pay with their other main aim being ‘The separate consideration of the claims of schoolmasters, in order to secure the recognition of their greater social and economic responsibilities’ (NAS Annual Report 1931–2).

³¹ Thanks to Peter Cunningham for this expansion on my original reading.

³² Ward, P., and M. Baker. Teacher: A Picture Career Book. Lutterworth Press, 1965.

³³ Ward and Baker, Teacher, 3.

³⁴ Priestley, B. Your Career in Teaching. Daily Express/Cornmarket, 1970; Miles, M. …And Gladly Teach: The Adventure of Teaching. A Carousel Career Book. Transworld, 1973.

³⁵ These are held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

³⁶ Victor Lasareff’s 1938 study of iconographical types of Virgin and Child demonstrated the historical origins and ‘progressive humanization of Divinity’ over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This, he suggested, prepared the ground for the sensuous realism of Renaissance painting.

³⁷ Sir Denis Mahon is an art historian and former trustee of the National Gallery. He began collecting Italian Baroque paintings in the 1930s and has loaned most of his collection to a number of public galleries around Britain including the National. He has bequeathed his pictures to these various galleries on his death with the proviso that they do not charge admission fees to the public.

³⁸ Finaldi, G., Kitson, M., Discovering the Italian Baroque. The Denis Mahon Collection, 1997, London, National Gallery Publications, p156.

³⁹ Warner, M. Alone of All her Sex: the Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. London: Pan Books, 1987.

⁴⁰ Sheingorn, P. “‘The Wise Mother’: The image of St. Anne teaching the Virgin Mary.” Gesta 32, no. 1 (1993): 69–80.

⁴¹ Available at: http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/lynnnicholas/lynnnicholas.htm (accessed November 2007).

⁴² Buettner, S. “Images of Modern Motherhood in the Art of Morisot, Cassatt, Modersohn‐Becker, Kollwitz.” Women’s Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1986): 14–21.

⁴³ Broude, N., and M. D. Garrard, eds. The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994.

⁴⁴ Edge, S., and G. Baylis. “Photographing Children: the Works of Tierney Gearon and Sally Mann.” Visual Culture in Britain 5, no. 1 (2004): 75–90.

⁴⁵ Walkerdine, V. School Girl Fictions. London: Verso, 1990.

⁴⁶ The Assistant Masters and Mistresses Association, formed from the merger of the Incorporated Association of Assistant Masters in Secondary Schools (1910–1978) with the Association of Assistant Mistresses (1884–1978), existed between 1978 and 1993 when it became the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL). The ATL did not affiliate to the TUC until 1999.

⁴⁷ Doss, E. “Toward an Iconography of American Labor: Work, Workers and the Work Ethic in American Art, 1930–1945.” Design Issues 13, no. 1 (1997): 53–66.

⁴⁸ Burke, C., ed. History of Education, Special Issue: The Body of the Schoolchild in the History of Education. History of Education 36, no. 2 (2007): 165–71.