How teachers are represented in the Australian print media shapes public understanding of the profession, potentially affecting who considers teaching, who stays, and how teachers’ work is valued within our society. This presentation extends a 25-year (1996 to 2020) study of media representations of teachers to 2025, drawing on systematic analysis of over 70,000 articles published in the Australian national and capital city daily newspapers.
The COVID-19 pandemic briefly changed the picture. As parents engaged with home learning and teachers’ classrooms became visible in new ways, media coverage softened, and for a moment, something different seemed possible. While at the time there was some optimism about the shift away from discussions of teacher quality and accountability, the analysis highlights that this shift was relatively short lived. By 2022, media discourses had largely returned to their familiar shape.
But the analysis also shows that the pandemic generated new story lines, around teacher workload, wellbeing, and workforce attrition, along with a sustained new focus on questions of pedagogy and teachers’ curriculum work. Five years on, these have become some of the most prominent features of how teachers are discussed in the print media, and they appear to be proving durable.
This presentation explores what changed, what didn’t, and what it means for how the teaching profession is understood in Australia today.
Nicole Mockler is Professor of Education at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. She is President Elect of the Australian Association for Research in Education. Nicole’s research focuses on teachers’ work and professional learning; education policy and politics; and curriculum and pedagogy. Her recent books include Constructing Teacher Identities: How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and their Work (2022), and the co-edited BERA-Sage Handbook of Research-informed Education Practice and Policy (2025). Nicole was Editor-in-Chief of The Australian Educational Researcher from 2017 to 2022, and is currently on the Editorial/International Advisory Boards of five scholarly journals. In 2022 she was awarded the Australian Council for Educational Leadership Dr Paul Brock Memorial Medal for significant career-long impact on the field of education. She remains a registered secondary school teacher in NSW.
