Educators' Working Conditions Are Students' Learning Conditions: Differences in the Literature With and for Contemporary Educator Movements

• In Event: Walkout! Teacher Militancy, Activism, and School Reform: Bridging the Research-Practice Divide

Abstract

While many debates around the significance and impacts of union movements on educational policy and student learning tend to frame educators’ working conditions in an inverse relationship to students’ learning conditions, scholars and thinkers with and for contemporary educator movements recognize the mutual constitution of the two. Scholarship with and for contemporary educator movements, however, is far from uniform in its understandings of the tactics and organizational aims educators should mobilize to improve working and learning conditions and the extent of their responsibility to and entwinement with wider social movements. Approaches to rank-and-file and radically democratic unionism that forefront the possibilities of teachers as community workers, as waged-workers, and as social movement agents illuminate the crucial roles educators can serve in visioning and realizing a more just and sustainable future. In a moment where educator movements are necessarily growing and responding to intensifying austerity and privatization practices, engaging difference across the multi- and interdisciplinary literatures can support educators and scholars to reflect on and deepen their analyses and organizing efforts.

Author

• Erin Lee Dyke, Oklahoma State University
  Presenting Author