Portrait of a Teach for All Teacher: Analyzing the Media Narratives of the Universal TFA Teacher in 12 Countries

• In Event: 72.064 - Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: 72.064-3 - Exorcising the Specters of Neoliberalism and Quantification: Intersections of Cultural Studies and Education

Abstract

This article employs tools of narrative analysis to examine how the media in 12 different countries construct the character of the Teach for All (TFA) teacher. Our intent with this research is not to make over- generalizations about the media’s representation of TFA teachers; however, examining mass media narratives in these 12 countries demonstrates that there are some remarkable commonalities in the narratives and the character portraits co-constructed and propagated by the media. At the core of these narratives is the notion of a “crisis in education”,which is an integral feature of global neoliberal education reform. This crisis justifies the creation and emergence of a liberating and restorative TFA character, who is commonly constructed in opposition to traditionally certified teachers and embodies the characteristics and attributes of the contemporary neoliberal subject. In this research, we question the implications of this character’s widespread representation in the mass media of these countries; namely, what does the character construction mean for how the broader public perceives and (re)imagines the role of the teacher and the purposes of education in society more broadly?

Authors

• Michelle Gautreaux, The University of British Columbia

• Sandra Ximena Delgado Betancourth, University of British Columbia