ABSTRACT
Increasingly today conceptualizations of public schooling rest upon the influence of dominant and dominating images rather than on more authentic understandings of the complex realities of classroom life. We create our interpretations of what is, what was, and what should be based on what is presented within the mainstream “news” media and what we see in the movies and on television. This especially holds true in the ever more powerful contemporary social/cultural/political/economic/pedagogical settings of standards-based educational reform,1 most clearly, perhaps, within the current move toward high-stakes standardized testing, a regime in which both the cultural knowledge and the behavior of students, teachers, administrators, parents, classrooms, schools, and districts are not only (in)validated but also disciplined. Simply, the convergence of a number of phenomena related to image and high-stakes testing, including various means by which scholars might seek critical and practical insight, the mechanisms by which image and high-stakes testing both reflect and are reflected by societal circumstances, the enforcing consequences of such actualities, and the techniques by which both might be resisted define the scope of this chapter’s efforts.
