Framing teacher quality in the Australian media: the circulation of key political messages?

ABSTRACT

Mass media provides a public space for its readers to enter the discussion on education, as they consume and interpret key messages, which are often shaped by key educational policies. With a suite of recent teacher education reform measures in Australia aimed at solving the “problem” with teacher quality, a conceptual map for conducting a media framing analysis is prop osed and utilised to examine how teacher quality is portrayed in the media. This study found that the media portrays education, and teacher quality more specifically, in Australia through a lens of crisis and decline, with national policies being positioned as the solution. National policies which focus on more rigorous entry and exit requirements for teacher candidates, or a discourse of inputs, are offered as the solution to the education crisis in Australia. With the inherent power that media holds in proffering particular policies and/or viewpoints, this paper argues for the need to employ five analytic devices – event, format, voice, problem and solution – to understand how teacher quality is portrayed in the media.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• media
• policy
• framing analysis
• teacher quality
• teacher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).