Visual and Verbal Rhetoric about Teachers in Chile: An Opera in Two Acts.

This research explores a methodological approach combining visual and verbal rhetoric as investigative resources to analyse teachers’ social status in Chile. Traditionally, visual and verbal rhetoric have developed independently in sociology, with minimal interaction. The study proposes a sequential use of both, analysing verbal rhetoric through interviews elicited by images that represent visual rhetoric developed earlier (Danesi 2017). This approach seeks to understand how teachers, from an agency perspective, respond rhetorically to the visual portrayals of their profession, as depicted by universities and the media in virtual environments.

The method we used adopt an abductive approach (Thornberg 2022), considering for initial codification and analysis of visual rhetoric the iconographic characteristics of social status of professions, obtained from empirical literature; but leaving (retaining) open the possibility that these icons may adopt a different configuration inside of verbal rhetoric that Chilean teachers, and open also to listen emergent semiotic clues.

For the visual rhetoric analysis, two image banks were created with a random sample, comprising images of teachers from university websites and virtual media press selected in 2023. A method adapted from Greenwood et al. (2018) was used to analyse images and elaborate 4 visual rhetoric regarding the teaching profession. Eight representative images from these categories were chosen for the next phase.

In the second phase, photo-elicited interviews were conducted, during which teachers selected and ranked images based on preferences or social status clues and legitimacy. They were also asked to explain and reflect on their choices and analyses.

This methodological exercise allows us to propose that visual rhetoric is a valuable tool for photo-elicitation. It activates interpretive frameworks that, once recognised, can reveal their contingent and constructed nature, enabling teachers to develop rhetoric efforts that erode or explains societal consensus, fostering persuasive agency to construct their own sense of legitimacy.