Mobilized Maestros: Teachers Performing Resistance in Oaxaca, Mexico

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

My poster will outline the four main chapters of my dissertation, each of which contributes to the larger contention I make—that mobilized teachers in Oaxaca perform political resistance as part of their professional duties. I use my extensive ethnographic research, collected over extended field visits over the last five years, to show how the political struggles of teachers in Oaxaca relate to larger, international dialectics around teacher professionalism, teacher unions, education reform, and the use of violence to end organized social movements. I use the theoretical framework of “teaching as performance” (Prendergast 2008) to explore the roles teachers play in larger social dramas, how teachers negotiate competing scripts for the profession, how they are trained to perform certain repertoires and choreographies, and the ways in which they perform “against the nation” in their public spectacles around Oaxaca State.

Author

• Christian Alejandro Bracho, University of La Verne