The study led by School of Education scholar Karin Roa delves into understanding the current low status of the teaching profession and its impact on attraction to teaching careers.
. Karin Roa, an academic of the School of Education, is investigating the presence or absence of social status characteristics in the images of kindergarten teachers disseminated by various societal actors, including universities, state institutions, and individuals on social networks such as Instagram. The study seeks to deepen the understanding of the current low status of this profession and its impact on the attraction to teaching careers.
The research is based on the award of a Fondecyt initiation project entitled, "Social Status in Visual Rhetoric in the Early Childhood Education Profession: An Interdisciplinary Study,"funded by ANID.
This new research is in addition to her current project as principal investigator "Visual and verbal rhetoric about teachers in Chile: a study on social representations about the teaching profession," funded by a Spencer Foundation Grant (United States). In this study, the researcher examines the status characteristics that are visually disseminated in public communication about elementary and middle school teachers in Chile, seeking to understand, from the perspective of social status, the phenomena that explain the declining interest in the field of pedagogy.