U.S. Teacher Activism & Advocacy on TikTok

• In Event: Activism and protest as a fundamental part of education and a teacher’s responsibility

Proposal

Teaching is a job that is always demanding and underappreciated, but the additional weight of the pandemic, the global pushes for reckoning with the problematic and violent post-colonial history, and simultaneous authoritarianism seems to loom even larger on the horizon. In this space teacher activism has taken on new meaning and urgency, especially in the United States (US), where there is not one single concern that all teachers coalesce around, but rather numerous problems that teachers seek to address through advocacy and activism both on their own behalf and on their students' behalf. Often this advocacy and activism show up on social media, and TikTok has become a space where like-minded people can join together with ease due to the proprietary algorithm which shows you videos based on your previous views and interactions. It is yet unclear whether the different nature of the social media platform impacts the type of activism and effectiveness of activism, and that is outside of the purview of this article, but it does call into question performative activism. Strange (2021) compellingly points out that the current association between “performative activism” and falsehood runs counter to the arguments put forth by J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and Diana Taylor which conceptualize performance as transformative. It is through performance that those thoughts become reality. Perhaps the current negative connotation of online activism is not the performative nature of it, but rather the virtual aspect of it. Either way, this research seeks to demonstrate how teachers use TikTok to engage in activism and advocacy for themselves and their students.
Historically, teachers have long been involved in advocacy and activism for many different causes in America. This idea that educators are moral crusaders comes out of the 19th-century educational reformers who argued that education was supposed to provide the moral basis for society and that teachers were therefore conceptualized as mission-driven crusaders (Brown & Stern, 2018).
In addition to leading crusades for a more just and moral society, teachers’ work is also historically undervalued and under-compensated due to its status as women’s work, and teachers being seen as not ‘breadwinners’ (Brown & Stern, 2018). In this way, teachers must endure working conditions where their labor is not adequately compensated or resourced. However, even within unionized professions, teaching is still held with less regard than other professional fields, like firefighters, who often are not engaged in deeply divided power struggles over funding and professional control (Brown & Stern, 2018). In fact, in Philadelphia, teachers talked about a sense of precarity and vulnerability surrounding working so hard to make positive changes only to be fired (Brown & Stern, 2018). Recent teacher strikes have occurred not only in northern industrial cities like Chicago but also in red and purple states over the past few years like West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma (Hale, 2019). Central concerns of these strikes have included comprehensive insurance, better pay, and school funding (Blanc, 2019). However, the impetus for activism are not isolated to these causes, alone.
As with other fights for equity in the US, race often plays a central role in conversations about teacher activism. Hale (2019) elucidates the history of activism of black teachers in the South, where teachers did not often turn to unions as many Southern states have anti-union, right-to-work laws, and have instead turned to teacher associations. Black teacher organizations in the South were also precursors to the Civil Rights movement as black teachers were activists since Reconstruction when black education and literacy were controversial goals (Hale, 2019). In the North, black teachers fought in the 1930s and 1940s for the inclusion of black history and intercultural curriculum in New York City schools (Johnson, 2002). Black teachers have long been the vanguard of the workers' rights movement since the Civil War and issues of race and equity have long been at the center of their advocacy (Hale, 2019). More recently, gender and sexual identity are a newer battleground for teacher activism, but not less fraught. LGBTQIA+ teacher advocates have been vocal about opposition to the current wave of anti-trans bills that have shown up at both the state and federal levels in the past ten years (Miller et al., 2018). Because of the history and contemporary timeliness of these phenomenon, this study pursues deeper understanding into the emergent arena of teacher activism manifestations on social media.
This qualitative research collected data through searches of TikTok using popular hashtags. We compiled a list of 300 TikTok videos from popular hashtags including #teacher, #teachersoftiktok, #blackteachersoftiktok, #latinxteacher, #indigenousteacher, #queerteacher, #conservativeteacher, #homeschoolteacher #redfored, #teacheractivist, #teacheractivism, #teacheradvocacy, #educator and #instructor. Content analysis was used to analyze the videos and each video was coded for both the explicit and implicit messages.
Preliminary results showed that teachers advocated for two main groups – for teachers themselves, and for their students. The changes they advocated for were changes both inside the classroom and outside the classroom in society at large. Certain trends emerged on TikTok in terms of the rhetoric and approaches employed by teachers. Most popular was the “confessional” style video, where a teacher directly addresses the camera, however, there were humorous skits, re-enactments of difficult conversations, and even documentation of strikes.
While critics may argue that the use of social media for activism, is performative at best, teacher advocates on Tiktok have highlighted a number of concerns about difficult working conditions, students who have significantly more academic and emotional needs than they are able to meet and increasing concerns about the politicization of the teaching profession. TikTok has also captured the wave of teachers leaving the profession as well. If we are able to better understand the daily working conditions of both teachers and the students in their classroom, society may be in a better place to help them, and if society is unwilling to help them, we can at least understand the conditions that forced them out of the profession.

Authors

• Claire K.G. Ramsey, BB2C: Building Bridges to Careers

• Kathlyn Elliott, Boston Children's Hospital