Historical images of teachers and their underlying ideologies in Swedish academia: Multimodal discourses from 1950 and 1980

This study aims at exploring multimodal discursive images of academic teachers from 1950 and 1980 in Sweden. Using a discourse-historical approach, linguistic and visual data were analysed in a govern- ment report and three media sources related to a single Swedish university. Findings reveal how four dominant ideologies of academic teaching contributed to constructing eight discursive images of teachers via various stakeholders. Overall, a discursive degradation of academic teachers could be noticed between 1950 and 1980. Also, the image of teachers changed from societal critics in 1950 to political critics in 1980, when the government forced scholars to become all-round labourers processing the new mass of students. In turn, this led to an undecided debate about the scholarly role of teaching researchers . Throughout the material, female academics were almost invisible, and a feminist voice was absent. The image of academic teaching is a gendered issue that deserves further attention.