Everyday Organizing for Social Change: Teachers of Color as Critical Social Movement Actors

• In Event: Learning in and for Collective Action: An Intervention Into the Learning Sciences

Abstract

Objective
#Red4Ed teacher activism and teacher social movements are driving educational reform for racial justice in unprecedented ways. While analyses are emerging of #Red4Ed social media, in this study, we center the situational dynamics of teachers’ everyday organizing, interactions, and experiences. We discuss the trajectory of everyday activities of a teacher union organizer over the course of the 2017-2018 school year, and how they contributed to the largest teacher-led strike that Southern California has seen in over thirty years.

Theoretical Framework & Methodology
In our conceptualization of social movements, we consider the joint presence of larger social structures that reinforce constraints and enablement, and social processes that are conventional and innovative (Erickson, 2004). Through this lens, we investigate how the mass teacher-led strike emerged through micro-interactional processes, situated within broader historical, structural, and sociopolitical contexts.

Using video recordings, interviews, artifacts, and ethnographic field notes as data sources, our analysis focuses on how the micro-interactional processes of Makario, a Filipino high school teacher and teacher union organizer, co-created democratic engagement for educational justice alongside 50,000 students, educators, families, community members, and unions. Through a shared lens of language, the body, and the material environment, we employ cross-cutting analyses from linguistic anthropology (Goodwin & Goodwin, 2004), raciolinguistics (Alim, Rickford, & Ball, 2016), ideology (Author) and place-based raciolinguistics (Author) to examine how situated teacher activism constructed, maintained, and transformed race relations in micro-geographical contexts.

Findings
Through our multidisciplinary analysis, we found that Makario used adaptive language and embodied practices to strategically foreground particular aspects of his social identities (e.g. parent, teacher, Person of Color) to build cross-racial coalitions with students, families, teachers, union organizer leads, and community members. Relying on the coalitions he built, he was able to strategically 1) co-construct escalating collective action leading up to the district-wide teacher strike, 2) position Women and Youth of Color as public leaders advocating for structural change in schools, and 3) utilize hip hop music and race-conscious posters as critical resources for sustaining demands that center the interests and needs of Communities of Color.

Significance
We argue that the seemingly mundane or fleeting nature of Makario’s everyday practices contributed significantly to the quality and trajectory of mobilizing teachers in a largely anti-union context. Contributing to studies of and practices for teacher learning for social justice, ones that often rely primarily on posthoc data (e.g. interviews), our study offers a more comprehensive framework of social change that considers the embodied, ideological, and place-based dimensions of teacher activism, as well as an analytic and pedagogical tool for examining and amplifying the invisibilized labor and racial justice leadership of Teachers of Color as critical social movement actors.

Authors

• Josephine Pham, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Berkeley