<![CDATA[Filipino public school teachers increasingly use social media as an alternative discursive space to express work-related frustrations, construct professional identities, and critique institutional conditions that are often insufficiently addressed through formal feedback. This study examines how Filipino public school teachers use social media rants to perform communicative acts, negotiate identities, and articulate power-related concerns within the public education system. Using a qualitative discourse-analytic design, the study analyzed 1,000 publicly available social media posts associated with teacher-related hashtags such as #buhayguro, #buhaysapagtuturo, and #pilipinongguro. The corpus was examined using an integrated framework combining Fairclough Critical Discourse Analysis and Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory. The findings revealed that expressive speech acts were the most prominent, indicating that social media functions as an outlet for fatigue, frustration, burnout, and emotional labor. Assertive speech acts document classroom realities, including overcrowded classes, insufficient instructional materials, administrative overload, and bureaucratic demands. Directive speech acts were commonly expressed indirectly, reflecting hierarchical relationships and limited teacher participation in institutional decision-making. Commissive speech acts demonstrated teachers’ continuing professional commitment despite adverse working conditions. From a critical discourse perspective, the posts reveal how teachers transformed personal grievances into collective narratives of solidarity, resistance, and institutional critique. This study contributes to research on digital discourse, teacher identity, and educational power relations by showing that teachers’ online rants are not merely emotional expressions but socially meaningful acts of professional voice and critique.]]>
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