Teachers’ Unions, Educator Organizing, and Global Struggles for Educational Justice

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In the summer of 2022, we put out a call for papers on “Teachers’ Unions, Educator Organizing, and Global Struggles for Educational Justice.” At that moment, educators were becoming an increasing topic of interest. From the #RedForEd U.S. strike wave to Brazilian teachers taking to the streets to condemn fascism and Japanese teachers organizing for better public health conditions during the Olympics, educators were participating in struggles to transform both schools and society. Teachers’ unions, however, were still infrequently the focus of educational scholarship. Our Call for Papers was an attempt to recenter the role of teachers’ unions and educators organizing in global struggles for educational and social justice. We asked for contributions on how teachers’ unions were fighting to reinvest in public education and defending teachers’ and communities’ right to engage in educational policy discussions. We were also interested in the relationship between teachers’ unions and broader social movements, including how social movements transform the strategies and goals of teachers’ unions. From the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, teachers engaged in and were subsequently transformed by protest. We also wanted to understand the internal dynamics within teachers’ unions, such as the internal factions and caucuses that emerge and how that internal activism shifts teachers’ unions priorities and demands. Of particular interest was the shift in many locations towards social justice unionism, which prioritizes racial justice, and the rearticulation of teachers’ unions as feminist movements responding to a crisis of social reproduction. In many locations, teachers’ strikes were also on the rise, as well as other forms of direct action. Finally, the global pandemic had directly transformed teachers’ working conditions, and while in many locations this public health and political crisis destabilized teacher organizing, in other locations government ineptitude in response to Covid-19 created opportunities for new educator organizing.

We were overwhelmed with the response to our Call for Papers with dozens of abstracts submitted in November 2022. In total, twenty-one articles made it through the peer review process and into the current special issue. These articles include studies of teachers’ unions and educator activism across diverse geographical contexts, including two articles on Sub-Saharan Africa, three on Northern Africa and the Middle East, two on Asia, four on Latin America, five on the United States and Canada, and one on Australia. It is an unwieldy task to compare across these regions and countries, all of which have radically different histories of state-labor relations, including laws related to public sector unionism, as well as different racial, ethnic, class, and gender relations within schools and society. The articles also focus on different units of analysis, including single cities, subnational regions and states, national and cross-national contexts, and transnational organizations. What does it mean to compare the struggles of teachers at a national level in Greece to a Person of Color-led union in Oakland, California to a transnational network of unionists and academics in Latin America? Are there enough similarities in educator struggles in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia, versus Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, to make the categories of “Global South” and “Global North” meaningful? Are there other ways to categorize educator struggles that increase our understanding of teachers’ union and teacher organizing?

In the following panel, the three co-editors of the special issue will present some of the substantive contributions of the special issue, which we organize around nine themes. Part One looks at the social, political, and economic context of teacher activism. First, we highlight the continued impact of neoliberalism, austerity, and the casualization of teacher labor on educators and educator organizing. Second, and relatedly, we look at how the state context shapes teacher unionism, including in authoritarian political regimes. Part Two is focused on the strategies and impact of teacher unionism. The third section examines how teachers’ unions have chosen to relate to the state and social movements. The fourth section examines the organizing strategies that unions have embraced, and their impact in particular times and places, including the increased use of social media and other organizing tactics during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The fifth section is about how and when teacher organizing has influenced education policy. In Part Three we look at the challenges for teachers’ unions and future directions for teacher organizing. The sixth section focuses on educators’ disappointment with their unions, which sometimes leads them to act outside of this union infrastructure, as well as the challenges for cultivating social justice unionism. The seventh section examines the demands for direct and participatory democracy in unions and society, including the rise of dissident unionists and caucuses demanding democratic participation. The eighth section argues for why teachers’ unions need to develop concrete pedagogical alternatives. Finally, our ninth section reflects on how the articles in this special issue help us think about how teachers’ unions and teacher activists can play a larger role in academic knowledge production, as well as rethink the role of researchers who study teachers’ unions but are also invested in making them stronger, more democratic, and more just.

The panel will have a discussant who has worked with teachers unions and teacher activists for the past three decades, as well as including the many contributors to the special issue who are attending CIES 2025 as discussants to join the conversation.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Chair

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• The strategies and impact of teacher organizing - Javier Campos Martínez, Universidad Austral de Chile

• Challenges for teachers’ unions and future directions - Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University

Discussants

• pauline lipman, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Antoni Verger, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Hania Sobhy, Max Planck Institute MPI-MMG

• Rocio Fernandez Ugalde, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

• Ahmad Medadi, IOE, UCL

• Rita Z. Nazeer-Ikeda, Waseda University

• Jaeung Kim, The Pennsylvania State University

• Lauren EW Stark, Université de Sherbrooke

• Lluís Parcerisa, University of Barcelona

• Anna Traianou, Goldsmiths, University of London

• Riley Collins, UCSC