The construction of the metaphorical teacher in policy: Strong Beginnings for compliant victims

Abstract

An analysis of teacher metaphors has long been a feature of research into the development of early career teacher identity, however, the metaphors used to construct the ideal teacher in educational policy remains under-researched. These policy documents explicitly seek to frame what it means to be an effective teacher. As such, an analysis of the metaphors used in these documents to describe teachers ought to provide insights into how policy makers perceive teachers, particularly early career teachers, not least in how these metaphors differ from those held by early career teachers themselves. This research finds that a recent Australian government policy document Strong Beginnings, with the explicit aim to make initial teacher education courses more effective in producing teachers likely to stay in the profession, provides teacher metaphors that fall within three overarching categories: saviour, victim and compliant teachers. These categories of metaphor rarely overlap with those early career teachers use to describe either themselves or their profession. The teacher as compliant metaphor is mostly constructed indirectly by first making initial teacher education courses compliant in teaching core content. In this way policy proposes it is best placed to mandate changes to initial teacher education courses to ensure they produce effective teachers, and this effectiveness will be the deciding feature in keeping them in the profession long-term. This paper argues the mismatch of metaphors between those held by policy and early career teachers is likely to undermine this assumption.