Re/Definitions of teachers and teaching work in UK and US policy discourses under Covid-19 and their implications for social justice

This article is concerned with the discourses of teachers and teaching work that have circulated in UK and US education policy circles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on UK and US policy texts published in Spring and Summer 2020, we discuss how the policy discourses underpinning these texts re/define and mis/recognise teaching work. On a theoretical level, the article bears on a poststructuralist tradition calling, inter alia, for a critical deconstruction of discourses and the relationships of power they sustain, while also borrowing from critical theorists’ understandings of social justice. We argue that while some aspects of teachers’ work have attracted more visibility and recognition, these processes have been partial and coexist with the strengthening of some of the hierarchies of teaching work in place prior to the pandemic.