A VISUAL CONTENT ANALYSIS OF SCHOOL IMAGES AND SIGNS: THEIR EFFECT ON HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS Sofia Tsagdi, & Konstantinos Theologou National and Technical University of Athens (Greece) Abstract Visual methods are often marginalized in educational research and have not been employed to collect information about cultural identities of the school and its effect on the students. The aim of this presentation is to examine visual methods for understanding the visual culture of schools and how these images are perceived and processed by high school students in Greece. It reports on a participative research project in four secondary schools in Greece from distinctively different cultural and economic backgrounds. The strategy of research applied in this study is grounded theory and the qualitative methods of research are: structured interviews (4 interviews done and transcribed during one month), scaled questionnaires were distributed (80 done during one month and transcribed) and photography (800 photos done during one month and described) and repeated visits in schools. There were at least 80 students involved at the project during one month. Moreover this presentation draws on content analysis as a systematic, rigorous approach to analyzing documents obtained or generated in the course of research. Finally the presentation will conclude that these approaches provide a comprehensive view of how visual images are produced and interpreted, and of what their potential social consequences may be. The use of visual methods is not without challenges however. Securing ethics approval and school participation along with problems with camera retrieval and protecting participant agency were some difficulties encountered in the current study. For those wishing to pursue less conventional research methodologies in educational settings, this presentation will also highlight potential benefits and struggles. Keywords: School culture, visual images, multimodality, participatory social research, hidden curriculum. 1. Introduction Being a language teacher nearly every text that I looked at and implemented in my teaching, used two modes of communication: (a) language as writing and (b) image. However, when I was to teach and involve my students in activities I realized that I merely focused on language as the only medium that represented fully the meanings I wanted to encode and communicate. Images were used as stimulators of a pre task activity at their most. They were in my mind simply somebody else’s job. The same applied to all the images put around school. Me, as well as most educators, considered them either as purely decorative or a as just a visual aid to attract attention to the text. In our mind it was the text that forged the values, beliefs, customs that hold the social group together. Drawing predominantly on the work of Kress (1997) and others (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996) in social semiotics and multimodality, I thought it was time to unsettle this common sense notion and take things a step further. I began this process by conceptualizing the school environments as semiotic spaces in which human beings, who are the agents of their own meaning making produce multimodal texts —visual, written, spoken, performative, sonic, and gestural. In the act of making meaning and expressing their ideas students/teachers, produce multiple signs in textual and non-textual forms across semiotic modes, drawing on different representational resources in order to succeed in that domain. Furthermore, students shape their understanding of the world not only through the texts we present to them. Rather, they form their ideas through these implicit powerful forces, hidden in images and visuals. Moreover, we must note that the design/presentation of such texts/images is constrained by the genres, languages, and discursive practices that are valued within the broader sociocultural and political context of education and the nation-state. I felt that our duty as educators was to collect these images and analyze their meaning in order to better understand the social cultural forces of a school, since as it is argued that they shaped the organization’s outcomes (Rutter et al. 1979). DOI: 10.36315/2019v2end039 Education and New Developments 2019 187