ABSTRACT
Teaching roles are constructed by key policies, discourses, and values that are located within the countries, societies, and institutions in which teachers work. In this chapter, we see how teachers are aware of the way teaching is constructed in their own societies and, during the course of these interviews, how they as teachers deconstruct these roles. In so doing, the chapter explores what similarities and differences in values are evident within the three national settings with a particular focus on what the respondents value as central to their role of being a teacher. The chapter is arranged, in order, around the dominant themes about the role of the teacher that emerged from coding the data. These include teacher as ‘friend’ and ‘carer’ in Norway, as ‘subject specialist’ and ‘benign authoritarian’ in Germany, and ‘carer’ and ‘strong authoritarian’ in England.
