Reading Education’s Front Covers and Margins

Abstract

Starting with the premise that most institutions often use images to convey different messages about their activities and that schools and school boards are no exception to this, I decided to use tools of discourse analysis to read the wor(l)d of ministries of education from three different Western countries (Canada, USA and France) as depicted by some of the pictures used by these ministries to (re)present themselves to various stakeholders in education. The tools of discourse analysis that I used led me to determine what these ministries had assumed that their audience knew, what meanings they constructed, in what context and what they were doing with the constructed meanings. After analyzing each picture, I concluded that the three ministries depicted for the most part connections between their operations and values like unity, health, wealth, collaboration, family, diversity and education. As a result, I argued that, as such, the ministries left in the margins the underprivileged, people with disabilities and those having negative experiences in schools.