The 'demand for justice' is a long-standing principle of Oaxaca's Sección 22 union chapter, which has led a teachers' movement since the 1970s that has evolved to meet changing social, political, and economic circumstances. Various researchers around the globe have increasingly linked notions of justice with education, exploring terms like social…

Unions have played a decisive role in promoting democracy and social justice in Tunisia. In 2023, two teacher unions led a yearlong 'silent strike' of withholding student marks from administration. Based on interviews with 60 teachers, this article analyses teacher views on the unions and on ongoing protests. While unions are still considered the…

Social movement organisations and unions can be spaces of transformative learning in which organisers research, debate, create, and put into action frameworks for social change. In this article, I engage with themes from Aziz Choudry's writings to explore learning and knowledge-making within and through the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File…

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…

Become a hyperlocal activist for change and help ensure a bright future for every student. Written for educators at all levels, this resource dives into the American education system, exposing the history of discrimination and offering strategies for establishing financially and academically equitable learning environments. You'll be empowered…

This paper argues that The National Coordination of Forcibly Contracted Teachers (NCFCT) [Arabic characters omitted] is a social justice movement that goes beyond the demands for better employment benefits and educational justice through schools that communities deserve to resisting philosophies that make use of their 'relegated' status as an…

This study combines critical service learning (Mitchell, 2008) and antioppressive pedagogies (Kumashiro, 2002) to highlight the importance of using community sites aimed toward transformational social change. How sites are structured and how students are positioned influence what students learn from the experience. Using ethnographic methods, I…

In the last four years, teacher-activists in the United States have engaged in an unprecedented wave of protests and strikes. The developing body of literature seeking to understand this flurry of activity has taken various analytical approaches; for example, distilling movements into their key tactics in the hopes of lending important tools to…

On October 16, 1963, author James Baldwin delivered his well-known "A Talk to Teachers" in which he argued that the United States was "desperately menaced . . . from within" (p. 325) by centuries of racialized cruelty. In his speech, Baldwin (1985) implored educators to "go for broke" (p. 325) in their attempts to…

This essay addresses theories, research, and practices of promoting arts and social justice across the curriculum toward collaboration between schools and their surrounding communities. As secondary students grapple with challenging issues, they can extend their learning experience in meaningful ways with creative expressions in the visual,…

In recent years, the field of education has been fraught with a variety of different challenges. A multi-year pandemic, book banning, and legislative efforts seeking to ban Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ positive curriculum have had negative effects on K-12 education, leaving many educators feeling the progress made in several states and…

This paper draws on the concepts of settled expectations and the educational racial contract to provide an analysis of the current social movements calling for the improvement of teacher salaries and work conditions in K-12 schools. This paper argues that some teacher unions' lack of centering race in their advocacy to ameliorate educational…

As public-sector unions such as teachers' unions used the boon of post-war liberalism to form their political power, they imported many of liberalism's key contradictions: its formation of racial contracts, its misappraisal of affective labour, and its opportunistic collective action logics. This article suggests cracks within liberalism weakened…

Teachers' unions and community organizing emerged out of shared collective struggles for social justice in the United States in the twentieth century. Beyond broad general aspirations for a better society, however, their interests and tactics have not always been compatible. This interpretive essay revisits three recent case studies of interaction…

Across the United States, a counter-network of teacher activists is engaged in the development of grassroots organizing structures to advocate for social justice, resist the privatization of public education, and increase union democracy. The United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators (UCORE) is a national network of more than 20 union reform…