Radical Imagination, Prefigurative Politics and Emergent Strategies in Contemporary Educator Movements

• In Event: Activists, Advocates, and Agitators: Teacher Unions and Grassroots Organizations as Remedies and Repair

Abstract

By offering space for experimentation, social movements serve as laboratories for change, with organizers imagining and practicing new or other ways of being as they enact their visions from the ground up (Juris, 2008). Social movements effect change through “repertoires of contention” (Tilly, 2008) that include a variety of strategies or forms of action. These strategies are often shared between movements, but they also evolve and change, whether by integrating new technologies or drawing on frameworks from other cultures or struggles. While the most visible of these strategies are mass mobilizations and strikes, the behind-the-scenes actions driving movements are equally vital.
Through social justice caucuses, grassroots networks, and unions, educators throughout the United States have used a range of strategies to advance justice within and through their schools and unions. Many of these struggles have been connected to larger social movements, including the Opt Out Movement, the Red for Ed Movement, the Black Lives Matter at School Movement, the Movement for Ethnic Studies, and the Movement for Social Justice Unionism. Educators leading these movements have put into practice counter-hegemonic visions for their schools, unions, and broader society, including visions for democratizing their institutions and advancing intersectional justice (Dykes & Muckian Bates, 2023; Maton, 2022).
As they have organized within these movements, educators have challenged dominant frameworks within their unions, schools, and broader society, including business-style unionism, portfolio-based school reform, and neoliberalism. While they have sometimes reproduced existing structures and systems, such as the bureaucratic, top-down structures of most unions, they have also developed alternative structures and strategies for effecting change. This has included developing networked and horizontalist structures within new and existing caucuses, grassroots organizations, and unions (Stark, 2023; Tarlau, 2023). It has also included developing emergent strategies that prefigure the possible futures imagined by educator organizers.
In this paper, I explore how organizers in contemporary educator movements have developed and employed new and alternative strategies for advancing justice in schools and society. To do so, I draw on ethnographic research within these movements, including field work, interviews, document analysis, social media analysis, and news analysis. This study builds on frameworks from research on (educator) social movements and unions, illuminating radical imagination (Khasnabish & Haiven, 2014), prefigurative politics (Maeckelbergh, 2011; Swain, 2019), and emergent strategies (brown, 2017; Ritchie, 2022) in educator-led social movements.
In dialogue with these frameworks, I highlight the ways that educators in a national network have put into practice alternative visions for schools, unions, and societies, as well as how they have done so using new or alternative frameworks and strategies. I also draw attention to how existing forms of action are used within these movements, including those that reproduce systems of inequality. In its focus on educator movements, this paper contributes to this session’s discussion of teacher activism and organizing, and the broader special interest group’s discussion of teachers unions. It further contributes to the conference’s conversations around how educators can foster renewal and social and educational change.

Author

• Lauren Ware Stark, Université de Sherbrooke