Learning to Lead: Teacher Unions as Education Leadership for Racial Equity

• In Event: Educational Leadership Through a Learning Sciences Lens: Toward Justice-Oriented School-Community Transformations

Abstract

Given the complexity and pervasiveness of racism in schools and society (Gooden & Dantley, 2012; Gutierrez & Jaramillo, 2006), we may need to investigate both new contexts and organizational actors that hold potential for creating more racially just schools and systems. As school districts across the country are taking up racial equity initiatives (Curry-Stevens et al, 2013), teachers unions, as powerful political organizations with professional expertise, could be critical sources of education leadership. However, the role of teacher unions in education policy and practice reforms is understudied and there is scant empirical inquiry addressing the work of teachers unions within leadership literature (Bascia, 1997, Johnson et al, 2009). While the education leadership field has traditionally focused on school and district formal leaders, recent critical scholarship has pushed on this construction of leadership to also recognize the leadership of youth, families, and communities, particularly in equity-focused reforms (Bertrand & Rodela, 2017; Khalifa, 2012; Ishimaru, 2013). This shift highlights an opportunity to continue to expand what education leadership is and consider how education organizations, such as unions, may enact leadership.

Further, academic research on teachers unions has largely focused on the impact of bargaining agreements on district reforms and student outcomes (Osborne-Lampkin, Cohen-Vogel, Feng, & Wilson, 2018) or historical accounts of unions as spaces of teacher organizing and labor activism (Goldstein, 2014; Murphy, 1990). We have yet to explore the ways educators are learning to leverage their expertise and position teachers to collectively advance racial justice.

Building on Ishimaru and Galloway’s (2014) conception of organizational leadership for equity, I explore how a teachers union attempts to enact racial equity initiatives within a school district. Data consists of interviews and observations from a group of educators serving as “equity coaches” within the union’s Center for Racial Equity. In a historic collective bargaining agreement, the union and district collaboratively created a labor-management partnership to address issues of racial equity in schools through school-based racial equity teams. As a result, the teachers union funded their own center, led by a full-time director of racial equity, and created educator positions of “coaches” as a union initiative to grow their own teacher leadership to support the work of equity teams.

I draw on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), a sociocultural learning theory, to examine how these educator leaders cultivate their collective leadership practice and learn to lead district-wide racial equity initiatives. CHAT attends to the collaborative learning and experiences of individuals engaged in complex social systems, such as education, and foregrounds the “how” in change-making efforts (Engeström, 2001). In particular, emerging findings highlight how the creation and use of tools mediate the collective learning process as educators use their agency to shape district equity conversations and priorities. In addition, key tensions in the division of labor, such as the roles, responsibilities, and positioning of “educators” versus “district leaders” may constrain their equity leadership practices. Taken together, this study uses a learning theory lens to understand the complexities, dynamics, and possibilities of unions as critical leadership for education justice.

Author

• Aditi Rajendran, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities