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

Review 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, USANicole 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, UKNicole Mockler’s 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 Australia’s most talented education scholars in a generation. --Sue Saltmarsh, Professor, Department of Early Childhood Education, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Product Description 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. About the Author 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.