Constructing Teacher Identities: How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and Their Work

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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.

Reviews

This book is a must-read for everyone interested in how cultural, economic, social, policy, and political contexts shape teachers work. Highly original, meticulously researched, and compelling, Constructing Teacher Identities offers a brilliant analysis of representations of teachers in the media over time, using the Australian print media as a focus. * Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education, Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College, USA *
Nicole Mockler has undertaken a detailed and systematic analysis of the printed news media coverage of teachers over the period from 1996-2020. The study reveals numerous insights into the ways that a range of newspapers represent teachers, not only in Australia, which is her main focus, but also elsewhere in the world. This is a breathtaking achievement, which sheds startling new light on the ways in which teachers are depicted by different parts of the press establishment. * Ian Menter, Emeritus Professor of Teacher Education, University of Oxford, UK *
Nicole Mocklers incisive and rigorous analysis highlights the critical importance of disentangling our sense-making about the teaching profession from media and political discourse that would have us place policy failures at its feet a must-read by one of Australias most talented education scholars in a generation. * Sue Saltmarsh, Professor, Department of Early Childhood Education, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong *

Author Bio

Nicole Mockler is Associate Professor in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of The Australian Educational Researcher.