Shifting education reform towards anti-racist and intersectional visions of justice: A study of pedagogies of organizing by a teacher of Color

Abstract

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 the micro-level dimensions through which social movements for educational justice emerge.Methods: Drawing on audio/video recordings, field notes, and artifacts as data, we examine the micro-interactional processes through which a teacher of Color, as union organizer, facilitates common cause and identity among teachers, students, and working people as social movement actors in the 2019 Los Angeles teacher strike.Findings: Our analysis details how broad-based social movements and teacher union’s organizing strategies influenced his practices. Guided by ethnic studies and third world feminism, this teacher simultaneously engaged multiple contexts—sometimes at tension with one another—to (re)create organizing strategies that sustained collective action and (re)centered anti-racist intersectional visions of educational justice.Contribution: We argue that this teacher’s culminating practices concurrently re-shaped and re-imagined present and future education reform efforts, and discuss how expansive possibilities of educational justice within a neoliberal context are embodied by teacher-activists of Color who critically and innovatively enact everyday organizing practices.