The Sydney Corpus Lab is excited to announce the publication of a new book by Sydney Corpus Lab affiliate A/Prof Nicole Mockler: Constructing Teacher Identities: How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and Their Work

Constructing Teacher Identities: How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and Their Work provides a comprehensive and systematic exploration of print media discourses around teachers and their work, drawing on a purpose-built corpus of over 65,000 articles published in Australian newspapers over a 25-year period from 1996 to 2020. The book also includes a comparative element drawing on a more targeted selection of print media articles published in Canada, New Zealand, the US and the UK from 2016 to 2020. 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 25 years. The findings are important in themselves but also because over time public discourses of education, come to shape the conditions and contexts in which teachers work. This has direct impact on teachers and teaching but also beyond the profession itself given the centrality of education and schooling, one of the very few common experiences that most of us share. At a time when teacher shortages are a concern internationally, and difficulties in recruiting and retaining teachers are widely acknowledged, this book argues that how we talk about teachers in the public space is of critical and growing importance.