Educate. Agitate. Organize: New and Not-So-New Teacher Movements

Main Article Content

Mark Stern
Amy E. Brown
Khuram Hussain

Abstract

The articles collected within these virtual pages knit together intimate portraits of educators and communities from Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Arizona, Indiana, and North Carolina and their struggles in fighting for the democratic and, at times, revolutionary and humanizing ideals that are still to be realized within the project of public education in the United States. Though at times disparate in how and where these struggles take place—in the street, in the classroom, in the school, in the union meeting, in the home, in the courtroom—what threads these qualitative sketches together is the collective double-movement of the teachers they document. One the one hand, teachers hold radical critiques of the way things are and the shape of the river, as it were, in the direction things are going (without any kind of romanticizing of a past that never was). On the other hand, these critiques are met with intentional, organized, and informed action. Because of and despite the kinds of neoliberal policies that have made it almost impossible to engage in liberatory pedagogy and create loving and caring communities in the classroom, teachers are figuring out ways to resist, to endure, and to transform public education.

Article Details

Section
Introduction
Author Biography

Mark Stern, Colgate University

Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Studies

Colgate University