Abstract

OECD dominance in the international educational policy discourse in the developed regions of the world, particularly in promoting teaching policy has been long acknowledged. While many works have explored the organization’s verbal discourse, no study has considered exploring the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) visual discourse despite the potential contribution of such an analysis to uncovering the organization’s underlying constructions. To close that gap, we employed a visual discourse analysis on the covers of OECD documents pertaining to teachers and teaching (i.e., TALIS and ISTP). Our goal was to use this analysis to better understand the OECD’s discourses. The analysis found that OECD’s covers drew mainly on two discourses, a conservative discourse on teachers and teaching, and a liberal diversity discourse. However, the latter was entangled with constructions of traditional gender relations and whiteness, both of which serve to maintain a conservative order. Visual representations constitute a significant part of OECD documents and shed new light on the constructions of teachers and teaching used by the organization.