Innovating Just to Keep Up: Education Unions, Repertoires of Contention, and Technology-Based Privatization

• In Event: Who Profits From Public Education? The Role of Teachers' Unions in Resisting Privatization

Abstract

Since March 2020, teachers, education workers, students, and their families have all become much more familiar with online learning than they could reasonably have expected, or indeed, wanted. As teachers and education workers struggled to deliver high quality education remotely, they increasingly turned to a range of education technology applications to augment learning in extremely challenging circumstances. Importantly, increased reliance on online learning and “ed tech” represents an acceleration of existing trends rather than novel responses to COVID-19.

This paper explores the fraught terrain on which teachers and education workers find themselves in the context of twin dynamics of privatization currently at work in Ontario, Canada. First, the provincial government appears to be establishing a mechanism for privatization of education by creating the pre-conditions for privatized online learning. Second, the ed tech industry is pursuing a strategy of privatization in education through a range of marketing strategies aimed at integrating private, profit-making technologies into the pedagogical practices of teachers and education workers.

Within this context, teachers and education workers make good-faith choices about a range of pedagogical strategies, including use of online learning and ed tech (Christodoulou, 2020). However, they do not make these choices in neutral, transparent spaces. As Fontdevila, Verger, and Avelar (2019) have shown, privatizers deploy multi-pronged strategies to influence educational policy. In Ontario, these privatization strategies provide fertile soil is in the form of a government that is methodically laying the groundwork for privatization of and privatization in education. In combination, these factors make it increasingly difficult for teachers and education workers to both resist privatization and make pedagogically sound educational choices.

Education unions play an essential role in protecting members’ working conditions, supporting members’ ability to exercise professional judgement in relation to education technology, and defending the public education system from corporate intrusion. This paper will rely on a ‘repertoires of contention’ approach (Tilly, 1995) to trace the development of one education union’s efforts to fulfill this role of protection, support, and advocacy. Relying on analysis of government policy documents, collective bargaining proposals, the author’s observations, and key stakeholder interviews, this paper traces the development of the strategies and tactics deployed by the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF/FEESO) to resist privatization in education. As Piven and Cloward (2000) argue, innovations to strategies for ‘resistance from below’ consistently lag behind capital’s ability to develop new strategies. Labour unions generally, and OSSTF/FEESO specifically, face the same problem. The paper therefore identifies the gaps or lags between the strategies privatizers use to make inroads into public education and those available to OSSTF/FEESO for resisting those intrusions.

Author

• Chris Samuel, Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation