The last decades have been marked by a significant expansion of theoretical and methodological approaches in the studies of the history of curriculum and, more broadly, of education policy (Kalervo et al., 2015; Pinar et al., 2014). However, as a consequence of the pronounced linguistic turn, the field is dominated by an understanding of policy as “discourse, text,and most simply but profoundly, as words and ideas” (Pinar et al., 2014, p. 7). In other words, the emphasis lies on the verbal dimension of policy formation, transformation, enactment, and evaluation, while the visual, nonlinguistic ornondiscursive dimension remains largely unexplored. Although there recently has emerged increased interest in understanding the role of numbers in shaping educational policy (Pettersson, 2020), pictures and images have not received much attention so far. In other words, ‘the pictorial turn’, outlined by Mitchell (1994) in the 1990s in relation to human sciences, has not yet had any significant impact on the study of education policy.

This paper aims to extend existing approaches to the analysis of education policy by highlighting the importance of various forms of visualization in creating and contesting values and norms embedded in policy. More specifically, we examine how pictures used in textbooks for elementary school children reflect and shape what society considers as “sacred values”. To do so, we analyze the pictures from Soviet and Swedish primers published between the early 1960s and the early 1990s. Despite political and ideological differences, both countries saw the development of “one school for all” during these decades. Attention to elementary school textbooks, and primers in particular, stems from the fact that they are intended for children who cannot yet read. With their ability to communicate complex issues in an easy and understandable way, pictures play a more pronounced role than texts in primers. Thus, primers create a kind of “vocabulary of the world”, expressed through pictures. Reflecting pedagogical ideals, these pictures show how school children are expected to think and act, and what society should be produced through education.

By taking a closer analytical look at the pictures that were produced and reproduced in primers in different cultural contexts, we want to demonstrate the complex ways in which images have the power to shape knowledge, visualize educational utopias, and make the values codified in curricula intelligible.

References:

Kalervo, N. G., Matthew, C., & Bendix Petersen, E. (Eds.). (2015). Education policy and contemporary theory: Implications for research. Routledge.   

Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture theory: Essays on verbal and visual representation. Univ. of Chicago Press.   

Pettersson, D. (2020). A comparativistic narrative of expertise: International large-scale assessments as the encyclopaedia of educational knowledge. In G. Fan & T. S. Popkewitz (Eds.), Handbook of education policy studies: School/university, curriculum, and assessment (Vol. 2, pp. 311–329). Springer Singapore.    

Pinar, W., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. M. (Eds.). (2014). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses: Vol. 17. P. Lang.