Captured Images: A Semiotic Analysis of Early 20th-Century American Schools

• In Event: 66.075 - Modes, Meanings, and Multimodality

Abstract

This image-based study investigates visual representation of three perspectives: context of school, pedagogy, and teacher-student relationships when viewing photographs taken during the first half of the 20th Century of American Schools. The collection included 1,812 photographs archived in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs collections. A three-layered analysis utilized an initial layer of analysis placing each of the photographs into four predetermined categories: Time Period, Urban-Rural, Wealth-Poverty, Active-Passive Environment. Seven themes emerged through an open-coding process within the second layer of analysis when each photograph was coded using a specific perspective: context, pedagogy, and teacher-student relationship. As themes were extracted, a third layer of analysis utilized a semiotic approach to identifying cultural icons representational of schooling within the photograph.

Author

• Heather Caswell, Emporia State University