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Visual Technologies as Narrativizing Making Kinds of People in Education

Mon, March 24, 9:45 to 11:00am, Palmer House, Floor: 7th Floor, LaSalle 1

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Objectives
The symposium explores international educational discourse inscribing the experiences of learners and educators by focusing on visual technologies that narrativize making kinds of people. It also examines how these technologies interact with educational practices in a digital society by historicizing visuality in diverse geographical and temporal contexts. In a globalized digital society, education encounters versatile forms of technologies that make kinds of people. Visual technologies, specifically, become more central in myriads forms of visualities from texts and numbers to VR and AI images. Visual technologies perform as affective techniques to produce human knowledge and the ways of thinking through the visuality in a digital society. As forms of visual materials—textbook images, animations, TV and media to numbers and graphs based on statistics—are flourishing with rapid (re)productions of diverse cultural practices, it is crucial to speculate on visual technologies in the educational practices inscribing identities. Thus, this symposium rethinks how visual cultural materials have converged into education by reinforcing, changing, altering, or opposing narratives of normativity and ideals in France, South Korea, and Kenya. Drawing on post-foundational perspectives, each paper in this session commonly addresses these two questions: First, what kind of visual technologies are used and how do they produce certain kinds of people by inscribing cultural narratives? Second, how have visual technologies been used in and interacted with different societies?

Overview
First paper examines television as a new kind of visual technology in early Post-WWII France which contributed to the making of a new kind of literary citizen. Using the example of a TV show for teens, the paper highlights how it was possible to imagine this new citizen first outside the educational field and then threaded into it. This work grapples with the initial impact of visual technologies and hopes to complicate the conversation around the production of students.
The second paper examines the impact of visual technologies in the Korean animation film "General Ttoli," which was influenced by U.S. Cold War-era animation. The audiovisual effects in the animation evoke fear, antipathy, and hostility towards communists, embedding nationalism and anti-communism in the audience. The discourse in the 1970s curriculum portrays democratic citizens as anti-communists and "infantile citizens" who are obedient and docile to the nation. Visual technology in educational resources was used for political propaganda, and its influence continues to shape "infantile citizenship" in the digital society through the creation of deep fake images and videos. This paper historicizes the narrative from the 1970s curriculum and animation film to better understand contemporary digital educational settings, emphasizing the importance of critically using visual technologies in education.
The third paper explores how visual technologies in South Korea's multicultural educational discourse produce specific identities by inscribing cultural narratives. It examines the visual techniques used in education to construct racialized and cultural identities, revealing how these images create classifications and imaginary borders, thereby reinforcing ideas of difference and homogeneity. By analyzing educational materials and digital media discourse, the study investigates how these visual technologies interact with societal norms, often essentializing and exoticizing cultural differences. Additionally, the research questions the paradox of visualizing diversity in a globalized, digitized society while simultaneously reinforcing cultural boundaries, prompting a critical reevaluation of visual strategies that shape perceptions of race and culture.
The fourth paper shows how digitalization creates a new ‘datafied’ teacher by emphasizing evidenced-based professional development. The digital shift occurred in 2016 through the introduction of the Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development (TPAD) system. The paper suggests that while the system purports to promote teacher agency through self-appraisals and departmental evaluations, it conserves the same hierarchies of evaluator and teacher that characterized the earlier observational models. Through a comparative analysis of historical and contemporary evaluation practices, the paper highlights how TPAD reinscribes power relations that regulate teachers under the development rubric.
Together, these papers offer a critical examination of how visual technologies shape the identities and experiences of both learners and teachers by reinforcing or challenging cultural narratives across diverse geographical and historical contexts, highlighting the need for more reflective practices in utilizing these tools within diverse educational environments in a digital age.

Scholarly significance
This session takes a historical and post-foundational lens at education and technology. Starting after WWII, each scholar highlights the implications of new technologies, TV, cinema, digitalization, and takes a critical approach by uncovering how these technologies produce, re-inscribe, regulate, and essentialize kinds of people. These scholars contribute to the fields by unpacking and uncovering assumptions about technologies potential to ameliorate (France and Korea), pacify (Korea) and mitigate (Kenya).

Structure of the session
75 minutes as follows:
Chair’s introduction 2 minutes
Papers 1-4: 15 minutes each 60 minutes
1 Discussants: 8 minutes 8 minutes
General Discussion/Q & A 5 minutes

Sub Unit

Organizer

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant