Challenges for teachers’ unions and future directions

• In Event: Teachers’ Unions, Educator Organizing, and Global Struggles for Educational Justice

Proposal

The final panelist will discuss the challenges that teachers’ unions currently face globally and future directions for these unions. This third panelist will start off describing another major theme that cut across the articles in the special issue: the frequent disappointment that teachers have with their unions, and how difficult it is to build an approach to unionism that embodies broader social justice values. In multiple articles in this special issue, due to these frustrations with teachers’ unions, educators and communities choose to create non-union organizations to achieve their goals. Multiple articles in this special issue also discuss educators’ disappointment with the impact of union actions such as strikes. Other articles document educators’ attempts to shift their unions to embrace social justice goals struggles, but also the challenges in making this shift a reality. Together, these articles illustrate two major points: 1) The necessity for teachers’ unions to reinvent themselves as organizations that take bold actions and orient themselves towards the needs of their community, while also deeply embedding themselves in the day to day lives of the educators that make up their union—otherwise these unions will become irrelevant; and 2) the reality that leaders cannot simply decree their union a “social justice organization,” but rather, they need to do the hard work of meeting those members where they are at and doing the difficult and daily internal educational work to help those members see the links between their immediate concerns and broader social justice goals—the Freirean educational work that is the only way our unions can continue be representative and radical.

The second part of the presentation will discuss some strategies for revitalizing teachers’ unions. One of those strategies is to invest in a more democratic form of unionism, which allows for members to be directly more engaged in the many decisions that affect their lives. Another area where it is evident that teachers’ unions need to innovate is related to the development of educational alternatives. Although many of the teachers’ unions discussed in this Special Issue were directly involved in the politics of educational policy making—organizing collective actions in response to a variety of education reform proposals—there were only a few cases where teacher unionists developed their own educational alternatives. This focus on pedagogy is crucial both for teachers to have control over the future of their work and for teachers’ unions to move beyond critique and more directly engage in the praxis of creating more equitable and just education systems in the communities where they work. Finally, the presentation will conclude by discussing the relationship between academia and unions, and different experiments in creating more sustainable partnership, including in Latin America through an important transnational network of academics and teacher unionists. The argument is that moving forward it is critical to find ways to engage unionists more directly in knowledge production and make academic knowledge production more relevant for unionists.

Author

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University