Picturing educational and future success

This chapter explicates the ways that written and visual texts are circulating inside and outside the domains of education field to contour the formations of policy, practice and everyday life in shaping the popular construction of educational and future success. Taking a critical perspective to investigate the taken-for-granted construction of success, this chapter highlights and selects educational policies, curriculum and syllabus examples from education department websites from each of the three global cities where the study was conducted. Foregrounding the ways that policy intersects with perceived individual, family and community aspirations on behalf of children, we expand our discussion by bringing in discussion of popular images, advertisements and discourses concerned with education and success. We contend that business and in particular, edu-business, also harness these ideas to promote particular orientations to, and opportunities for, participation in learning experiences designed to maximise selected perceived sociocultural imaginations as the potential for children’s successful and promising futures. Additionally, our qualitative data from children’s learning dialogues in which they responded with both written comments and illustrations, to four prompts, provides particularly interesting insights into the ways that children themselves make use of the visual modality to construct and express their own versions of what is valued about their everyday learning, and of what goals and visions of future success animate their ideas about school as well as aspirations of their own futures. Together with these examples, we contend, function in the production of policy cultures in which orientations to educational and future success are taken up, re/produced and contested in the everyday lifeworlds of children. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.