A visual and intertextual analysis of teachers' experience of school improvement

This paper draws on images created by teachers in a research project designed in investigate how school improvement processes that use separate foci with short term cycles are translated into changed teaching practices. Teachers drew images to represent their understandings of how the processes functioned in their respective schools. The teachers then provided oral interpretations of their representations. These two forms of data provided an opportunity to carry out both a visual and intertextual analysis of teachers' experiences of school improvement processes.  Moss (2011) argues that “in educational research we are just beginning to realise the potential of visuality and the analytic contribution of visual methods to the field of educational research” p. 299. The teachers' representations  of school improvement communication processes provide qualitative evidence in their own right and when placed alongside their interpretations of the images, provide a rich tapestry with which to compare against the education systems' and their school leaderships' understandings and expectations of school improvement processes.