Brazilian and Portuguese Teachers' Unions Leaders' Perspectives About Labor Conditions and Public Schooling

• In Event: International Relations Committee Paper Session 2

Abstract

This paper analyzes Teachers’ Union (TU) leaders’ discourses about the perceived tension between teachers’ demands for adequate working conditions and the social demands to “flexibilize” those conditions to ensure the right to education in Brazil and Portugal (Stoleroff & Pereira, 2008; Gindin And Finger, 2015). The main goal of this project was to understand how TU leaders’ frame tensions emerging from discourses that oppose the defense of ideals about public education with unions strategies protecting the rights of the teaching workforce. For this project, we analyzed the framing documents and historical narratives about the creation of the TUs and interviewed the leaders of the largest TUs in Brazil and Portugal in the period between August 2019 and January 2020.

Authors

• ANDREA BARBOSA GOUVEIA, Federal University of Parana

• Gustavo E. Fischman, Arizona State University