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.
