Seeing Immigration: Preservice Humanities Teachers, Visuality, and Ethical Text Selection

Visual texts are ubiquitous in our world and in classrooms. This ubiquity leads to a false sense of knowing and understanding of the content and context of images among teachers and students. This study engaged preservice teachers (n = 27) in focus groups aimed to elicit dialogue with curated image arrays on immigration as focalizing artifacts to explore one research question: How do preservice teachers position themselves and one another in visual text selection in reference to immigration issues? Findings highlight the need to engage preservice teachers in more frequent critical analysis of images, to develop their content knowledge, bring forward assumptions that may impact visual text selection, and to support their developing understanding of criticality in visual literacy. We share recommendations for teachers, teacher educators, and researchers.