Constructing Teacher Identities

This book is grounded in the idea that words matter. It holds that how we discuss teachers and teaching in the public space shapes the way we come to regard teachers as a society; the beliefs we hold about who they are, what they do, and why they do it. Over time it also comes to shape the conditions and contexts in which teachers do their work. This matters because schooling provides one of the very few common experiences that most of us share. Teaching, in particular, provides a convenient rallying point for discussions of public policy, and beyond citizens’ own school experiences, the print media makes the most significant contribution to broad social understandings of schooling and teachers’ work.

This book provides a comprehensive and systematic exploration of print media discourses around teachers and their work, using over 65,000 articles published in Australian print media from 1996 to 2020 as a case study. It also takes a comparative look, drawing on print media texts from other countries, namely the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada. It employs an innovative combination of large-scale corpus-assisted analysis and close qualitative analysis to identify and explore representations of teachers in the print media, how they are constructed and how these constructions have changed and shifted over the past twenty five years.