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Constructing Teacher Identities
How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and Their Work
Nicole Mockler
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eBook - ePub
Constructing Teacher Identities
How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and Their Work
Nicole Mockler
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About This Book
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.
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1 Words matter
Iâve been a ânews houndâ for most of my life. I remember as a child spending school holidays at my grandparentsâ house, examining the front page of the newspapers that arrived daily â there were three daily newspapers in Sydney at the time â wondering how it was that the same event could raise such completely different outrage in the three different papers. Around the same time I was fascinated by Behind the News, the long-running Australian public television show that aims to give children insight into how news stories are created. For a while in my teens I toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist, but the lure of a seemingly âsafeâ profession like teaching was strong for a first-in-family university student, made safer by the time I finished my degree in the recession of the early 1990s. Iâve remained an avid newspaper reader, however, and the advent of the internet, where everything from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Daily Mail is available in real time, has only fed the addiction.
In my years as a school teacher, I became interested in how my profession was characterized in the media, and this was something I took up in my doctoral research (Mockler 2008), examining how a selection of prominent Australian education journalists represented teachers and their work. In the years since my doctorate I have pursued this interest, initially using news framing analysis to explore constructions of education and teachers in small collections of texts (e.g. Mockler 2013, 2014, 2016), and more recently employing corpus-assisted methods to examine patterns and chart shifting constructions over time on a larger scale (e.g. Mockler 2020a, 2020b; Mockler and Groundwater-Smith 2018). My interest in the discursive construction of teachers in the print media â and the way in which these representations form part of the cultural-discursive âarrangementsâ of teachersâ work (Kemmis et al. 2014) eventually brought me to the research that is reported upon in this book.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault wrote of the complex relationship between words and discourses, arguing that while discourses are comprised of âsignsâ, they are ultimately more than can be rendered or represented in words:
âWords and thingsâ is the entirely serious title of a problem; it is the ironic title of a work that modifies its own form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day, a quite different task. A task that consists of not â of no longer â treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. (1972: 49)
The starting point for this book is thus the idea that the way we speak in the public space about things that matter to our society, like education, has implications for those things, and consequently, for society as a whole. While they do not tell the whole story, for discourses are more than words, words are nevertheless important. Of all public policy areas, education is a particularly fertile space for public discussion as it provides a rare common experience that most of us share. The vast majority of people alive today within any Western society went to school themselves, and send or have at some point sent their children to school. Consequently, most of us have a first-hand understanding of school, for better or worse. The policy areas of health or immigration, for example, do not hold such extended connections experienced by virtually all citizens in the same way as education (although since early 2020 the area of health has taken on renewed interest due to the Covid-19 pandemic). Consequently, politicians in Western democracies often use education and education policy as touchstones for building connection with members of their electorates and communities, and both this and the high level of community knowledge of and interest in education translates into an abundance of media coverage, particularly in the print media.
Much of this media coverage focuses on teachers, the human faces of education and schooling, and understandably so. To start with, the âhuman interestâ factor is high: most of us can name, from our own experience, a good and/or not-so-good teacher who made an impact on us as a young person. Second, collectively and individually, teachers are charged with the responsibility of supporting the next generation academically and socially, and thus their practices â most often understood through the lens of common sense â are a matter of interest more broadly. Third, the growth of what sociologist of education Marianne Larsen has called âthe discourse of teacher centralityâ, âone of the most revered and abiding cultural myths associated with education: the assumption that the key to educational success lies with the teacherâ (2010: 208) is also responsible. Teachers are increasingly positioned as both saviours and demons within this discourse, answerable for aspects of education well beyond their sphere of influence, and for this reason also, media coverage of education-related issues often places teachers front and centre.
In early 2020, the issue of âteacher qualityâ, a media âgo toâ for some years now (Mockler 2020b), once again became a fixation of both capital city daily newspapers in my home state of New South Wales (NSW). This followed the release of a NSW parliamentary report substantially authored by Mark Latham, a then recently elected MP from far-right nationalist party Pauline Hansonâs One Nation. The report advocated the introduction of a school inspectorate to undertake âregular inspections of classroom practices, teacher quality and school managementâ (NSW Legislative Council Portfolio Committee No. 3 â Education 2020: viii), and has given rise to media commentary such as this, from a former Liberal (conservative) Party staffer turned journalist:
A new NSW Parliamentary report found last week our schools are failing. Itâs not that our schools are under-staffed or under-funded or under-equipped. Indeed, there have never been more teachers, more funding and better equipment yet despite the record billions being thrown at the problem, the reality is that Australia is going backwards on almost every measure against our international competitors.
And it [sic] hardly surprising when you consider who is teaching our children.
âŠ
Yet across most of Australia, poor principals and mediocre teachers canât be removed; we subsidize comparative failure, not success; and we persist with teaching methods that we know donât work; or at least donât work for all students, like whole-word language training rather than phonics, and child centred learning rather than teaching thatâs driven by a teacher with a sound grasp of the fundamentals.
Is it any wonder that Labor thinks it can make un-costed climate policies when our kids are being told that nothing is more important than cutting emissions to save the planet. Academically deficient teachers lead to inadequately educated young adults and ultimately even poorer decision making in government. (Credlin 2020)
The way we discuss teachers and teaching in the public space shapes, over time, the way we come to regard teachers, the beliefs and assumptions we hold about who they are, what they do and why they do it. Beyond our own school experience, the print media makes a most significant contribution to our broad social understanding of schooling and teachersâ work (Mills and Keddie 2010). And consequently, the way teachers and schools are represented in the print media matters greatly to the way societies understand and value (or otherwise) teachers. This has flow-on effects to the way teachers understand their role and their importance to society, the way potential teachers feel about becoming a teacher, and the way current teachers feel about remaining in the classroom.
The aim of this book is to explore these representations over time in a very wide-ranging way, using the Australian print media as a case-in-point. It reports on research based on the Australian Teacher Corpus (ATC), a collection of over sixty-five thousand print media articles, purpose built for this research, which employs techniques of corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The book aims to develop a comprehensive picture of representations of teachers in the Australian print media over the past quarter-century and to contrast these with media representations of teachers in other Anglophone countries, namely the UK, United States, Canada and New Zealand.
This introductory chapter locates the research conceptually and methodologically. First, it provides an overview of the field of research on media discourses of education, both in Australia and elsewhere. Here it focuses on the particular themes taken up in this research, the scope of the research, both temporal and geographical, and the conceptual and methodological approaches taken. It seeks to build a case through this discussion for research that takes a âwide-angledâ longitudinal or diachronic view with a particular focus on print media.
Second, it introduces three sets of conceptual and methodological tools used as touchstones and resources in the book. The theory of practice architectures (Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008), which provides a conceptual frame for thinking about the relationship between the print media and teachersâ work and for understanding the relationship between discourse and practice, is the first of these. In introducing the theory of practice architectures here, I consider briefly how media coverage contributes (both directly and indirectly) to the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that frame and govern teachersâ work, using this to inform a case for research of this scope and scale.
This discussion is followed by a meso-level discussion of two other tools used within the book. One is that of media framing, and here I draw on the seminal work of scholars such as Goffman (1974) and Gamson and Modigliani (1987, 1989) along with more recent work such as that of Altheide (2013) and Scheufele and Scheufele (2013) to explore the role of language in the framing and conveying of meaning within the media. Next, the concept of ânews valuesâ, and the creation of ânewsworthinessâ by media organizations, is introduced, and here I draw especially on the work of Bednarek and Caple (e.g. 2012b, 2014, 2017). While the book aims to provide neither a framing analysis nor a discursive news values analysis (Bednarek and Caple 2017), I use both of these conceptual tools at different points in the discussion in Chapters 2 to 6.
Finally, turning to method, and mindful that the approach taken here may be very new to some readers, the concept of corpus-assisted discourse analysis is introduced, via a concise overview of corpus linguistic methods, and a brief explanation of each of the four key techniques used in the analysis presented. The chapter then concludes with an outline of the remainder of the book.
Understanding media discourses of education as a research problem
It seems somewhat obvious to say that the landscape of the media is currently in flux. In an age where social media has seen some of the power of âtraditional mediaâ displaced (De Waal and Schoenbach 2010) and where the print media, and in particular newspapers, have seen their readership decline (Thurman and Fletcher 2019), one could be forgiven for asking why a book such as this would focus on representations in newspapers.
Part of the answer to this question lies in the role that newspapers play in the shaping of both public policy (Lidberg 2019) and popular opinion (Fahey, Weissert and Uttermark 2018). For example, broadsheet newspapers such as The Australian are understood to continue to play an important role in influencing politicians and policymakers, despite their relatively small and dec...