In this article framing the special issue on the global school strikes for climate, we ask: what if education is not the solution, but part of the system young people want to change? In conversation with school strikers and reflecting on the contributions to this issue, we argue that the strikes pose a reckoning for education. Five key themes…

Between 2011 and 2015, at the dawn of the global financial crisis, Spain went through severe austerity measures that led to social unrest and to the emergence of new expressions of collective action. In the educational field, teachers' unions and grassroots movements organised against the neoliberal and neoconservative policies promoted by the…

As winter swept across the United States at the outset of 2018, ushering in the bitterest and bleakest days of the year, American teachers and their unions had little to celebrate. The first eight years of the decade had exacted a heavy toll, and still more trouble was lurking on the horizon. In the wake of the Great Recession, funding for public…

Background: Social movement scholarship tends to focus on macro-level processes of movement emergence, overlooking the day-to-day groundwork of marginalized social movement actors who contribute to and sustain large-scale action. Contributing to this gap in literature, we develop the construct of "pedagogies of organizing" to illuminate…

This article examines the teach-outs organised by staff and students at Lancaster University during the 2021-22 UCU strike. Guided by a critical discourse analysis of blog posts co-produced by staff and students during the strike and teach-outs, this article will examine how the teach-outs developed an education programme critiquing the neoliberal…

This article explores the realm of educational politics and the organization of opposition to neoliberal school reform in the United States of America. A distinguishing feature of the current reform movement--which blends free-market rhetoric with austere governance and undemocratic corporate control--is the callous normalization of educational…

In this paper, the 2019 Polish Teachers Strike (PTS), joined by 75 percent of all public schools and kindergartens for over three weeks, gives rise to an investigation in teacher professionalism that is grounded in local activism. Reading the Polish Teacher Strike (PTS) as a moment of social upheaval (Buchowski, 2017), I claim that the strike…

This paper investigates the case of Singapore where there are teachers' unions but industrial actions are rare. It questions why and how has educator organising, steered by Singapore Teachers' Union, transformed? Our findings show that historical, political, and socio-economic dynamics have influenced the transformation of STU. For more than…

In this paper, I present "Tier Two Worker Remote Office," a performance artwork that I produced on March 15-16, 2018 at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. For this performance, I set up an outdoor office between the building where I work and the picket line where I had been striking for three weeks. I worked outside in…

The United States has, for the last generation, been going through a significant and highly contested period of change in its schools. A bipartisan consensus around a reform agenda of accountability and choice was rolled out nationwide, with promises of closing achievement gaps and raising standards, all without the infusion of new resources. This…

This article traces the state takeover and neoliberal reconstruction of a mid-size urban school district in the California Bay Area. Aligning with research on social networks in school reform, it identifies three organizational nodes of power operating within the takeover and post-takeover landscape: venture-philanthropic capital, the Teach for…

On October 16, 2017, over 12,000 faculty, librarians, and counsellors in 24 independent postsecondary colleges in Ontario, Canada went on strike for the fourth time since they organized in 1971 as members of the Civil Service Association of Ontario and won their first collective agreement the next year. Begun as an apolitical, self-consciously…

In recent years, and particularly with the emergence of cultural history,historians of education have begun to adopt a wide variety of theoretical approaches to their scholarship. Notwithstanding this, cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) remains underutilised in the field of history of education, despite being employed widely in other…

After many years of labor peace, public school teachers have engaged in strikes and work stoppages in record numbers during the past two years. Chief among the demands of striking teachers was higher pay. Discontent was also expressed with working conditions, which teachers and their unions connected to flat or declining state spending on…

This article analyses the narratives and counter-narratives which characterised the struggle between the Chicago Public School Board (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers' Union (CTU) preceding the 2019 Chicago teachers' strike. This was an extraordinary event which has received little scholarly attention. The paper explores the types and uses of the…