‘We don’t value teaching as much as we should’: tracing ‘teacher’ professional identity in critical times

Abstract

As an epoch-making event, Covid re-set understandings of teacher professionalism, raising the question what it might now mean to be a ‘professional teacher’. This paper draws on data from interviews conducted in 2021 with eight academics employed in Australian teacher education programs as part of a wider study, Critical Times: Producing the Global Graduate in a Pandemic. It uses ‘big D’ Discourse analysis to explore complex constructions of the ‘global teacher graduate’ in academics’ accounts of producing such graduates during a pandemic. It focuses on an expansive Discourse of professional teacher that participants invoked to construct their graduates as autonomous professionals with a shared service ethos and distinctive disciplinary knowledges. Based on retrospective, occupationally defined accounts of ‘teacher’ and professionalism, this Discourse appears to have a generational aspect. Despite academics’ hopes, it may represent experiences of saying, doing and being a ‘professional teacher’ no longer available in the present epoch.