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

This book provides a comprehensive and systematic exploration of print media discourses around teachers and their work, using over 86,000 articles published in Australian print media from 1998 to 2017 as a case study. Mockler also draws on print media texts of other countries including the United States, United Kingdom 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 two decades. The findings are important in themselves but also because over time print media discourses come to shape the conditions and contexts in which teachers do their work. This has direct impact on teachers and teaching but also well beyond the profession itself given the centrality of education and schooling, one of the very few common experiences that most of us share.