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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Globally, educators are at the forefront of community efforts to reinvest in communities and fight for the schools that their communities deserve. 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 are directly involved in struggles to transform both schools and society. Teachers’ unions, however, are infrequently the focus of educational scholarship. This two-part panel recenters the role of teachers’ unions and educator organizing in global struggles for educational and social justice.

For the past two decades, global education reforms have attempted to reduce teachers’ professional autonomy and educators’ and communities’ participation in school governance and educational policy making. The panels focus on how teachers’ unions fight to reinvest in public education and defend teachers’ and communities’ right to engage in the policy discussions that shape their educational experiences. The panels will also focus on the relationship between teachers’ unions and broader social movements, including how those social movements transform the strategies and goals of teachers’ unions. For example, how the Arab Spring, community organizing for access to water in South Africa, and the rise of Black Lives Matter and global struggles against anti-Black police violence, engage teachers and influence the character of educator organizing. In addition, the panels will analyze the internal dynamics of teachers’ unions, such as the oppositional movements and internal factions and caucuses that emerge within unions’ rank-and-file and how that internal teacher activism shifts teachers’ unions priorities and demands. Of particular interest is the shift in many locations towards social justice unionism, which includes teachers prioritizing racial justice and the rearticulation of teachers’ unions as feminist movements responding to a crisis of social reproduction. In many locations, teachers’ strikes are also on the rise, as well as other forms of direct action. The global pandemic 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.

These panels will examine teachers’ unions in diverse countries, from Latin America and the United States to Africa, Asia, and Europe, in order to increase our understanding of educators’ organizing efforts in and across geographical contexts.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Socialism and Education: Global Alternatives to Patriarchy, Racial Capitalism, Militarism, and Climate Change

Chair

• Rebecca Tarlau, The Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Revival of Resistance? Perspectives on Teacher Activism from Australia - Mihajla Gavin, University of Technology Sydney

• Framing the protest against austerity and neoconservative education reforms in Spain: the case of Teachers Assembly - Lluís Parcerisa, University of Barcelona; Antoni Verger planells, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• The ESTRADO Network in the Latin American Region, Unionist, teachers and academics entangling the perishes of neoliberal reforms - Dalila Andrade Oliveira, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

• Teacher Organizing across the Americas: Diverse Strategies for Transforming Unions, Schools, and Society - Rebecca Tarlau, The Pennsylvania State University

Discussant

• Gary Anderson, NYU