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Pictures are rarely used as the principal research material in research on the teaching profession. This article presents the central analytical concepts and method development of such a study. The research material consisted of pictures that art student teachers created from a given theme: Who are you as a teacher? The theoretical frame combines gender theory and sociocultural theory with pictorial semiotics and discourse analysis. The central concepts are exemplified by pictures created by student teachers. The article concludes with a comparative pictorial analysis and interpretation. The research focused on gender issues, associated manly with bodily representation and reflexivity. The aim of the article is to present the method and its relevance for research in education and other disciplines.

This article investigates the mediation of teachers in a reality-TV program, how gender, femininity, masculinity and emotions interact in a school fiction. The reality-TV program, Klass 9A, consisting of 13 episodes, was broadcasted in Swedish television during spring 2008. In the program, viewers could follow a high school class during the fall semester 2007. The class teachers were replaced by “eight of Sweden’s foremost educators” (the TV-producer´s words) to help the pupils improve their scores from low level to the third best class in the country during that semester. In that sense this was a Makeover-television and in analyzing the teachers, they are treated as constructions of the producers. Theoretically and methodologically Sara Ahmed’s concept of emotions are used – what emotions do between people, giving and constructing attributes. Three teachers, two men and one woman, are exemplifying the analysis. The (male) math teacher’s pedagogical strategy is love, an approach he both articulate and perform. Love as a teaching method appears as an exercise of power, a patriarchal and biblically informed performance and a powerful discipline tool. In the sport subject, the (male) teacher act to a high degree as a coach, engaging in a democratic sport leadership. He is doing it with empathy, in a way feminine, but without loosing his masculinity, secured by his traditionally male subject sport. The female teacher (Swedish language) is doing masculinity, disembodied by how the producers represent her, but is embodied in the end of the semester, by being represented as sentimental and caring when it comes to the final test. In that sense she is castrated, made less powerful and brought back to the conception of female teachers as carrying. The program supports the conception of missing male teachers in school and a longing for old time discipline.

Reflecting on the implementation of a pre-study may be decisive for the design of a following main study. This text consists of a reflective process where the researcher's different choices are examined and problematised. The reflections take place within the framework of a pre-study and in relation to the aim of that study. They also take place in and through the written language, i.e. in the process where "the language turns back on itself to see the work it does in constituting the world" at the same time as "the subject/researcher sees … the object of her … gaze and the means by which the object is being constituted" (Davies et al., 2004:360). By doing this, different consequences can be discussed in relation to gender, the art subject and methods as well as the academic context and become understandable. The text may thus be regarded as an investigative and critical text with the ambition to understand and create meaning, both on an overarching and an individual level, about what the researcher has experienced. The reflections chiefly concern the gathering of material, choices of methods and the resistance that occurred in these two areas. The choices of methods refer to selected as well as forgotten methods and how this forgetfulness includes pictures' elusive information in an academic context. The writing process brings the researcher's situated knowledge to the fore.