Politics or Pedagogy? Competing Professional Roles for Teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: Teachers: Professional Roles and Career Choices

Abstract

This paper argues that competing roles for the teaching profession in Mexico create intense conflicts for teachers in the state of Oaxaca. Teachers in that region have a long history of dissident mobilization going back to the 1970s, and the institutionalization of such revolutionary activism by the local teachers’ union has resulted in many teachers expressing a sense of tension between their roles as classroom pedagogues and the political-syndical role promoted and incentivized by the union’s leadership. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and observations, I illustrate these tensions by casting light on the varying levels of conviction or obligation teachers feel to perform distinct roles, and discuss how competing models of being a teacher generate personal, interpersonal, and societal conflicts.

Author

• Christian Alejandro Bracho, University of La Verne