Teachers in the Dominant News Discourses
摘要
This chapter examines print news coverage of the teachers’ movements from both the CTU strike of 2012 and the rolling uprising in 2018, focusing on discursive currents embedded in the dominant frames thereof. In so doing, it inspects how teachers and education are viewed in relation to problems existent in other sectors of society. In the end, the relatively sympathetic liberal frame became more prominent in the coverage of the 2018 strike wave, reflective of the success of teachers in using their “signifying power” to shift news media discourse on the role of education in society. Nonetheless, I argue that this shift did not effectively break with the neoliberal paradigm, because the coverage did not question why teachers were being blamed for problems outside of their control in the first place. Rarely was this context of the broader neoliberal offensive on organized labor ever provided as explanation for why these broader struggles in education were occurring in the first place.