ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the ways in which the newspaper constructed a particular version of what good teachers should be within the policy context of the Australian Quality Teacher Programme. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is identified as a suitable means for analysing public discourses. The chapter examines how critical discourse analysis can provide a framework for understanding, and exploring, the interface between government, media and education policy. Thus, policy discourses on teacher quality, discourses that emphasised professional standards, and identified teachers as stakeholders in the introduction of these standards, were rejected in favour of a commonsense discourse on teacher quality. The analysis established that media discourses are essential to the construction of discursive threads within the complex web of contested meanings that characterise policy-making processes, working within the public sphere to construct an authoritative public voice that defines educational policies and identities in particular ways.
