Teaching, Learning, and the Public: Interpretations of Teachers’ Classroom Images

• Published in: Interchange (Toronto. 1984) Vol. 53; no. 1; pp. 1 - 22
• Main Author: Mosher, Ronna
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.03.2022; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Arendt, Hannah; Classrooms; Discourse; Education; Educational Philosophy; Educational Policy and Politics; Enactment; Jurisdiction; Learning; Pedagogy; Photography; Public interest; Social Media; Teacher Attitudes; Teachers; Teaching; Teaching (Occupation); Classroom images; Arendt; Teacher theorizing; Public pedagogy
• ISSN: 0826-4805; 1573-1790
• DOI: 10.1007/s10780-021-09444-2

This article presents findings from an interpretive study of teachers’ visualized and publicly shared depictions of teaching and learning. Drawing on images posted by teachers on the social media site Twitter, and Arendt’s writing on the public, private, and common, this article examines classroom photographs and their accompanying text as a public professional discourse about teaching and learning, and as an educational discourse of and about the public. Findings show relationships between epistemologically framed classroom events and teachers’ work within pedagogical, politicized, and public contexts. They show pedagogies implicated in hegemonies of the private, possibilities for a public to be pedagogically enacted, and how, through their practice, teachers might pedagogically hold the public as a matter of public concern. This article makes a case for the publicness of education to include a jurisdiction of enactment within teaching and learning, one that makes an experience of the public part of the ways of being in which students and the world newly come to be.