Reimagining Teacher Activism Through Post-Structuralism: Teacher Union and Grassroots Responses to COVID-19 School Reopening Plans

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Renewing Teacher Power: Organizing for Labor Rights and Social Justice in Education (Table 1)

Abstract

Employing Harding et al.’s (2018) post-structural framework of alliances, assemblages, and affect, this paper explores the public discourses of several Canadian teacher unions and grassroots teacher activist groups around the issue of school reopening plans in Canada amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper aims to highlight the ways in which these two forces of teacher activism can influence and impress upon each other to create a different possible future for collective resistance to neoliberalism in education – an assemblage of union and grassroots activism intra-acting, shaping, and impressing upon one another.

Authors

• Trudy Lynn Keil, University of Regina

• Pamela J. Osmond-Johnson, Memorial University of Newfoundland