Iconography and Materiality

This chapter is a hermeneutic exploration of the iconography of the material landscape of education. It examines visual-material representations of these materialities and spatialities as cultural images and aims to provide insight into processes of meaning-making and the attribution of symbolic values to educational artifacts and environments. It argues that an overabundance and endless repetition of such visualizations have led to the inculcation and generalization of a rather specific and narrow yet stable visual-material imagination of schooling, disguising the changing meanings of the material landscape of schooling over time and in different contexts. The chapter first explores three classroom representations – an installation of school artifacts, a dollhouse-like model of a classroom, and a filmset classroom – as an entry into the stereotypical and popular representation of schooling and its constituent components, the icons of the materiality of schooling. The chapter next looks at two photographs of “ideal avant-garde classrooms” and explores how these images might have functioned at the time and in the context of their production as catalysts for the circulation, transmission, and production of meanings with regard to education practices and environments. By looking at these five visual-material representations, the chapter provides insight into the polysemous character of the material landscape of education; the ongoing processes of (re- or counter-)imagining, structuring, essentializing, and symbolizing educational surroundings; and, by way of conclusion, the creation and perpetuation of iconic representations.