Rhiannon Maton

Philadelphia's teacher-led activist group, the Caucus of Working Educators, has displayed shifts in how it frames the central problems facing public education since its emergence in 2014. Initially, the organization tended to advance the notion that neoliberalist discourses and values were primarily responsible for " education reform " effects, including underfunded schools and districts, shrinking public school districts, and the privatization of formerly public aspects and services of schooling. Over its first four years of life, however, the organization has increasingly integrated critiques of structural racism in how it frames such issues in public education. This article asks: How do teacher Caucus members employ neoliberalist and structural racism problem frames within their activist teacher organization? I show how members have increasingly centered racial justice concerns, and argue that organizational strategy concerns and the desire to push the organization to align more tightly with specific ethical concerns have driven this transformation process.

The published article is also available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IX2scMxZYKjCCi499QG8/full

Activist teachers are increasingly organizing within and beyond their unions to respond to political trends toward austerity and the privatization of public education (Hursh, 2004; Quinn & Carl, 2015; Ravitch, 2010, 2013). Teacher-led grassroots groups often strive to partner in meaningful ways with parents and communities (Weiner, 2012), but simultaneously overlook how deeply embedded community histories shape the community and policy context (Crenshaw, 2011; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Gadsden, 1994), and teachers’ organizing and professional practices (Maton, 2016). The enhanced recent visibility of race-inflected social activism (#BlackLivesMatter, 2016) raises significant questions about how politically active teachers understand and engage with issues of racial justice.

This dissertation asks: When politically active teachers come together in an inquiry group to discuss structural racism, how do they engage in individual and collective learning processes? And, how do they perceive the shape, form and effect of their learning? Methodologically, the study draws from participatory (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; McIntyre, 2008) and race feminist (Delgado-Bernal, 1998; Smith, 1987) qualitative research traditions. The study examines the work of an inquiry group composed of nine racially and gender diverse participant who are active members of a change-seeking union caucus. Data sources include inquiry group meetings, interviews, field notes and written texts.

The dissertation builds a new theory for understanding the nature, form and function of teachers’ collaborative learning about racial justice. This study defines collaborative learning as the collective and social search for knowledge and transformation, and shows that it is composed of four interconnected and mutually reliant components: learning, pedagogy, relationships, and diffusion. Furthermore, the study finds that inquiry-based collaboration among politically active teachers, on projects where the goal is to build a common mission, vision and project, and where there is diversity in race, gender and a range of experiences with prejudice and discrimination, holds great potential for triggering teacher learning and addressing social justice issues within and beyond activist organizations and schools.

In the wake of Chicago’s well-known teacher strikes in 2012, social justice union caucuses are popping up across the U.S. as educators seek to better organize through the auspices of their unions in response to what they see as the dismantling of public education. In this article, I explore how members of one educator-led social justice caucus, Philadelphia’s Caucus of Working Educators (WE or the Caucus), engage in ongoing individual and collective learning processes as they take up principles of social justice unionism, inquire into race and racism, and make sense of these ideas in relation to their organizing practice. I show that Caucus members’ engagement in individual and collective learning processes fundamentally shapes the nature, mission and practices of their broader grassroots educator-led organization.

Alternative schools allow school systems to meet the social, emotional, and physical challenges of children and youth that are not addressed by mainstream schools. Many alternative schools experiment with different modes of organization that encourage curricular innovation. Often, teachers and students take an active role in designing original courses and programs. This chapter focuses on curriculum development in secondary alternative schools in the Toronto District School Board. It uses the concept of organizational “loose coupling” to describe how alternative school teachers and students actively select and craft courses and programs within the context of the school board and Ontario’s provincial policy constraints. The data that inform this chapter come from interviews conducted as part of an exploratory study that focused on the work of five teachers.

Toronto boasts a large and diverse system of public alternative schools: schools where democratic practices, student access and a commitment to public education are fundamental. There are academic schools; schools with thematically focused curricula; schools driven by social movement principles such as antiracism and global education; schools for students who do not thrive in mainstream schools; and schools with alternative scheduling and delivery practices for students who must work. The schools are small, supporting personalized relationships among teachers and students, with teacher-driven curricular programs that are responsive to student interests. Curricular innovation is made possible because alternative schools are only loosely coupled with the rest of the public education system, but they still must comply with school system regulations. This paper describes how teachers’ work and the structural elements of alternative schools support school-based innovation.

In this book chapter, Maton and Nichols examine the historical interplay of democratic and market based impulses in Philadelphia alternative public schools. Comparing snapshots of the district in 1975 and 2015, they trace how “humanization” and “the market” have exerted competing pressures on schools and teachers at two moments in time. In doing so, they illustrate how discussions about the promises of alternative schools are not easily separated from broader institutional histories of policies, practices, and ideologies of education. They conclude by pointing to the engaged work of negotiating these tensions as a site of possibility for enacting “humanizing” pedagogies within systemic constraints.