EduDisruptors: Teachers on Instagram and the Great Resignation

Eduinfluencers are educational entrepreneurs who sell or are compensated for promoting or endorsing educational services and products. Despite their ubiquity, research on eduinfluencers is a growing area of scholarship in need of further study. Importantly, there is a large teacher contingent on Instagram commonly using the hashtag #teachergram, many who can be described as eduinfluencers, leaving the teaching profession in record numbers and posting about their exodus via the #quitteaching hashtag. Using netnography and intersectional analysis, we examined the Instagram accounts of two eduinfluencers who resigned at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and their implications for education today. We asked: How did these educators use their Instagram accounts? What type of narratives did they (re)construct about teaching and the teaching profession? We found that both content creators were consistently engaged in social media activism that dismantled and reconstructed obsolete and harmful narratives about teachers/teaching while pursuing monetization of their accounts and/or adjacent professional opportunities.