Shadow education (or private supplementary tutoring) has grown exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research. Based on a qualitative content analysis of international research on private tutoring published in the last four decades (1980-2018), this study explores how teachers and their teaching practices are represented in this literature and what such constructions mean for teacher professionalism. The findings reveal a variety of competing views about school teachers and the teaching profession, reflecting a partial and particular conception of the teaching profession. Influenced by the neoliberal logic, many of these projections portray teachers who participate in tutoring activities as corrupt or narrowly frame their work in terms of profit, competition, or entrepreneurship. Given that most of the reviewed research does not draw on teachers' own perspectives, we call for more nuanced and multidimensional approaches to understanding teachers' complicated roles and negotiations in this time of neoliberal globalisation.