Understanding the Need for Action: Teacher Oral Histories From the April 2018 Oklahoma Walkout

• In Event: Justice, Activism, and Action

Abstract

This paper contributes to developments in life writing and methodology by exploring the narratives of 12 teachers who participated in the April 2018 Oklahoma Teacher Walkout (hereafter, Walkout). This action, which took place in April 2018, was part of a series of mass teacher actions in the United States that began in Chicago (2012) and continued in Spring 2018 in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina. We draw from an oral history study of walkout participants to highlight dimensions of 12 teachers’ experiences before, during, and after the event—in their own words—to demonstrate the power of oral history to animate educator's lives and individual accounts of historical events.

Authors

• Lucy E. Bailey, Oklahoma State University

• Rhonda Harlow, Oklahoma Education Association