The "Nuts and Dolts" of Teacher Images in Children's Picture Storybooks: A Content Analysis

A recent children's book shares the story of a teacher. Miss Malarkey, home with the flu, narrates her concern about how her elementary students will behave with and be treated by the potential substitutes available to the school. Among the substitutes represented are Mrs. Boba, a 20-something woman who is too busy painting her toenails to attend to Miss Malarkey's students. Mr. Doberman is a drill sergeant of a man who snarls at the children: "So ya think it's time for recess, HUH? " Mr. Lemonjello, drawn as a small, bald, nervous man, is taunted by the students with the class iguana and is subsequently covered in paint at art time (Miss Malarkey Won't be in Today, Finchler, 1998). In this text, which is representative of many that have been published with teachers as central characters, teachers are portrayed as insensitive, misguided, victimizing, or incompetent. We perceive these invalidating images as worthy of detailed analysis, based on a hypothesis that a propensity of images painting teachers in an unflattering light may have broader consequences on cultural perceptions of teachers and schooling. Our ethnographic content analysis herein examines 96 images of teachers as they are found in 62 picture storybooks from 1965 to present. It is our perspective that these images in part shape and define the idea of "Teacher" in the collective consciousness of a society. Those of us in teacher education realize our students come to us with previously constructed images of the profession. What is the origin of those images? When and how are these images formed and elaborated upon? It appears that the popular culture has done much to form or modify those images. Weber and Mitchell (1995) suggest that these multiple, often ambiguous, images are ". integral to the form and substance of our self-identities as teachers" (p. 32). They suggest that ". by studying images and probing their influence, teachers could play a more conscious and effective role in shaping their own and society's perceptions of teachers and their work" (p. 32). We have supported this "probing of images" by analyzing children's picture storybooks, examining their meanings and metaphors where they intersect with teachers and schooling. It is our intention that by sharing what we have learned about the medium's responses to the profession, we will better serve teachers in playing that "conscious role" in defining their work. We submit that children's picture storybooks are not benign. Although the illustrations of teachers are often cartoon-like and at first glance fairly innocent, when taken as a whole they have power not just in teaching children and their parents about the culture of schooling, but in shaping it, as well. This is of concern particularly when the majority of the images of teachers are negative, mixed, or neutral as we have found in our research and will report herein. Gavriel Salomon, well known for his research in symbolic representations and their impact on children's learning and thinking, has this to say about the power of media: Media's symbolic forms of representation are clearly not neutral or indifferent packages that have no effect on the represented information. Being part and parcel of the information itself, they influence the meanings one arrives at, the mental capacities that are called for, and the ways one comes to view the world. Perhaps more important, the culture that creates the media and develops their symbolic forms of representation also opens the door for those forms to act on the minds of the young in both more and less desirable ways. [italics added] (1997, p.13) We see Salomon's work here as foundational to our own in this way: if those images children and parents see of "teacher" are generally negative, then they will create a "world view" of "teacher" based upon stereotype. The many negative images of teachers in children's picture storybooks may be the message to readers that teachers are, at best, kind but uninspiring, and at worst, roadblocks to be torn down in order that children may move forward successfully. …