Leading, Organizing, and Engaging Members through a Comprehensive Teachers Union

• Published in: Schools (Chicago, Ill.) Vol. 20; no. 2; pp. 369 - 394
• Main Author: Anderson, Jo, Jr
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Chicago Press 01.09.2023
• Subjects: Boards of Education; Cooperation; Democracy; Educational Administration; Teacher Empowerment; Teachers; Unions
• ISSN: 1550-1175
• DOI: 10.1086/727142

This article describes what it means to be a comprehensive teachers union, one that integrates industrial unionism, professional unionism, and social justice unionism, providing a historical context for this evolution. The author relates his own journey in becoming a union organizer and then in building public spaces for teachers to find their collective voice and power, first in more adversarial settings and then through labor-management collaboration in the professional setting of teaching and learning. He describes how the union becomes the vehicle for transforming teaching into a genuine profession and how this collective efficacy can be realized against a deeply entrenched top-down command-and-control system. The union cannot make this journey alone; it has to do it in partnership with school management and school boards through labor-management collaboration and a systems transformation vision and strategy. Ultimately, this is a strategy not only to democratize teaching but also to democratize learning for students.