From frontrunners, to paper dolls, to fiends: Semiotic analyses of premeditated teacher images
-
Elvira K. Katić
Abstract
Images provide an exceptional medium for drawing out nuances and contradictions that might not become evident in textual or oral discourse. This study examined premeditated images of teachers that were created by preservice teachers in a foundational teacher education course. Social semiotic analyses of these images as well as discourse analyses of accompanying textual descriptions resulted in readings of preservice teachers' conceptions of teachers and the teaching profession. While the constructed teacher images ranged across a continuum of intent from active, positively-oriented renderings to active, negatively-oriented renderings, a significant number of preservice teachers created a teacher representation that appeared stereotypical and superficial, and whose orientation, information value, and other modality cues presented a static, neutral, and somewhat middling individual. Because preservice teachers' conceptions of teachers and the teaching profession play a critical role in understanding and shaping educational culture, it remains important to examine their ongoing evolution within a postmodern world.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Articles in the same Issue
- Théorie du récit et sémiotique: apport d'A. J. Greimas et nouvelles propositions
- Comments regarding Charles Sanders Peirce's notion of consciousness, abduction, and the hypo-icon metaphor
- Purification of medical terms in Turkish: A study on the significance of mother tongue for language and thought
- Terminological equivalence in legal translation: A semiotic approach
- Dissent and environmental communication: A semiotic approach
- From frontrunners, to paper dolls, to fiends: Semiotic analyses of premeditated teacher images
- Wittgenstein as Mastersinger
- Ambiguity and metaphor
- Emotion and community in a semeiotic perspective
- Saussure and the elusive question of the origin
- Towards applied semiotics: An analysis of iconic gestural signs regarding physics teaching in the light of theatre semiotics
- Resistance and rescue in Beauvoir's The Blood of Others and The Mandarins: A semiotic contribution to the thinking of the ‘being-for-other’ existential category
- Communication resources and the consequences of linguistic censorship
- Whewell's metaphorical usage of light and the ultimate reality underlying it
- What do the ten commandments do? A study of lawyers' semiotics
- Narcissus in language: A semiotic contrast of natural and computer language through self-reference
- Multi safe compound constructions: A reply to Anders Søgaard
- On the linguistic expression of subjectivity: Towards a sign-centered approach
- Semiotics and ancient history
- Textual mapping of imitation and intertextuality in college and university mission statements: A new institutional perspective
- Catchments, growth points, and the iterability of signs in classroom communication
- The role of structures in semiotic systems: Analysis of some ideas of Leonardo da Vinci and the portrait Lady with an Ermine
- Biosemiotics: Protoscience, interdiscipline, new biology
- Understanding natural constructivism
Articles in the same Issue
- Théorie du récit et sémiotique: apport d'A. J. Greimas et nouvelles propositions
- Comments regarding Charles Sanders Peirce's notion of consciousness, abduction, and the hypo-icon metaphor
- Purification of medical terms in Turkish: A study on the significance of mother tongue for language and thought
- Terminological equivalence in legal translation: A semiotic approach
- Dissent and environmental communication: A semiotic approach
- From frontrunners, to paper dolls, to fiends: Semiotic analyses of premeditated teacher images
- Wittgenstein as Mastersinger
- Ambiguity and metaphor
- Emotion and community in a semeiotic perspective
- Saussure and the elusive question of the origin
- Towards applied semiotics: An analysis of iconic gestural signs regarding physics teaching in the light of theatre semiotics
- Resistance and rescue in Beauvoir's The Blood of Others and The Mandarins: A semiotic contribution to the thinking of the ‘being-for-other’ existential category
- Communication resources and the consequences of linguistic censorship
- Whewell's metaphorical usage of light and the ultimate reality underlying it
- What do the ten commandments do? A study of lawyers' semiotics
- Narcissus in language: A semiotic contrast of natural and computer language through self-reference
- Multi safe compound constructions: A reply to Anders Søgaard
- On the linguistic expression of subjectivity: Towards a sign-centered approach
- Semiotics and ancient history
- Textual mapping of imitation and intertextuality in college and university mission statements: A new institutional perspective
- Catchments, growth points, and the iterability of signs in classroom communication
- The role of structures in semiotic systems: Analysis of some ideas of Leonardo da Vinci and the portrait Lady with an Ermine
- Biosemiotics: Protoscience, interdiscipline, new biology
- Understanding natural constructivism
