"I Don't Need Your Permission, I'm Just Walking Out": Networked Teacher Activism and the #OklaEdWalkout

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

Abstract

The advent of for-profit social media platforms shifted the ecology of activism and politics in predictable and unexpected ways. While media has been traditionally controlled by gatekeepers, the rise of social media in the 21st century offered a microphone to the masses. Social media affords powerful new opportunities for mobilization, messaging, and organization. In this chapter, these authors examine the effects of social media on teacher labor movements. This phenomenon is complex as teachers’ labor and activism, the school settings from which they come, and the social media platforms they use are diverse and shifting.

Social media is not a neutral technology. Like other media forms, social media platforms offer tradeoffs (e.g., weak ties for strong ones), disproportionate impacts (e.g., amplification of white suburban schools), and interact alongside—not replace—other means of communication (Postman, 1998). For better and worse, teachers unfamiliar with traditional union structures can participate in labor movements via social media. Their online communication can instigate, sustain, and amplify activism beyond more formal synchronous meetings and planned strikes. However, decentralized movements can also result in more fragile bonds among activists, threatening collective power. This shift to more online networked activism poses challenges. Do traditional groups with power offline dominate—or respond to—narratives online? Are the interests of minoritized communities better served by online networks or traditional unions?

Here, these authors explore the complex role of networked activism in the 2018 Oklahoma teacher walkouts and argue that educators in a conservative state with relatively weak unions turned to social media to make change, but online spaces—like structures across the state—often centered the educational concerns of white suburbs. As teachers and labor move forward in this mediated and networked environment, the #OklaEdWalkout illustrates possibilities and challenges for our current understandings and future actions.

Authors

• Daniel G. Krutka, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author

• Marie K. Heath, Loyola University Maryland
  Non-Presenting Author