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This paper explores how advocates in Ontario have resisted neoliberal restructuring in education since the 2018 general election, which marked an intensification of market-oriented reforms. Shaped by the insights of 23 participants, this paper shows how resistance has been accessed through multiple entry points and has been spatially heterogeneous, replete with internal contradiction. It also highlights the cost of resistance for participants whose relationship to systems engender oppression and harm. Broadly, this paper calls for vulnerable reflection on fantasies of a "good life" shaped by a normative neoliberal order that interferes with collective flourishing. Through emergent strategy, which aligns action with a vision for social justice, this paper values the non-linear and manifold ways individuals are embedded in systems; the fractal nature of change, which takes place at all scales; and a love ethic, which sustains relational the spiritual growth necessary for solidarity.

Despite declines in private-sector union membership in the United States, labor relations remains an essential topic within the field of human resource management. However, most undergraduate students have little experience with labor unions, making it difficult to enhance learning by applying labor relations concepts to their prior experiences. The current lesson addresses this gap by teaching students about labor relations through the exploration of an authentic collective bargaining agreement (CBA) and an analysis of an actual work stoppage (i.e., strike or lockout). Students will learn about how different elements of the CBA influenced negotiations and factors that contributed to a work stoppage, leading to a basic understanding of how the human resource management decisions they make as managers can directly impact organizational outcomes. The lesson also serves as a tool for synthesizing content from throughout the semester in an undergraduate human resource management course.

Trade unions have a long history of providing learning for their members. After years of decline this flourished after the 1997-2010 Labour government introduced the Union Learning Fund and legal rights for union learning representatives. This article reviews that extraordinary renaissance and discusses how a new Labour government could learn the lessons of the first ULF and introduce a new, and stronger, version helping millions of working people, including the most disadvantaged, encouraging employers to invest more in training, promoting economic growth, and rebuilding a key element of adult learning.

Objectives: Overweight and obesity among school-aged children pose a threat to both their academic performance and public health. The Healthy Primary School of the Future (HPSF) initiative was established to address this issue. Our objective was to explore the conditions that make HPSF sustainable based on the perspectives of relevant stakeholders. Design: The study utilised Group Concept Mapping, a structured methodology for conducting mixed-methods participative research, combining qualitative data collection with quantitative data analysis measures. Method: Participants included parents, teachers, school directors, politicians, labour unions, educational, nutrition and health scientists and policymakers. They were asked to respond to the prompt, 'A necessary condition to make the HPSF sustainable is . . .'. The statements generated were then assessed for their importance and feasibility. Using multidimensional scaling and hierarchical cluster analyses, we identified the shared vision among the stakeholders. Results: A total of 106 unique statements were generated and grouped statistically into 10 clusters. The most significant clusters were identified as Financing; Accessibility for everyone; and Content/Lifestyle/School Programme. The clusters that were deemed most feasible included Content/Lifestyle/School Programme; Accessibility for everyone; and Evaluation. Conclusion: Achieving sustainability for the HPSF requires a comprehensive approach that addresses the conditions outlined in all 10 clusters. Based on the ratings of feasibility and importance, our recommendation is to prioritise implementation of Content/Lifestyle/School Programme and Accessibility for everyone. Subsequently, efforts should be directed towards realising the less feasible but crucial conditions, such as Financing and Evaluation, followed by the remaining six clusters of conditions as identified.

Although charter schools are frequently afforded flexibility from many state laws that govern traditional public schools, a growing number of charter school teachers have now unionized and introduced collective bargaining to the charter sector. Using data from a detailed content analysis of teacher CBAs from California, we compare the restrictiveness of CBAs in 75 unionized charter bargaining units to the restrictiveness of CBAs in 31 nearest neighbor traditional public school district bargaining units. We find that independent charter CBAs are much more flexible than the CBAs of traditional public school districts, but charter school CBAs of bargaining units combined with traditional public school districts are comparably restrictive.

The study focus mainly on the cognizance of collective bargaining and its benefits in relation to teacher's welfare and working condition in public secondary school in Delta State, Nigeria. Two research questions were asked and answered in regard to the extent of awareness of Delta State public secondary school teachers of the principle of collective bargaining and the benefits of collective bargaining in public secondary school in Delta State. One hundred and twelve teachers were randomly selected from fourteen secondary schools in Delta Central Senatorial District in Delta State, Nigeria. The questionnaire which was rated on a five point Likert Scale was administered as the main instrument and the reliability coefficient was 0.90. Descriptive statistical procedures were employed in the analysis of data. The study revealed that the awareness of collective bargaining in public secondary school in Delta State was moderate as the respondents were not all members of the teachers' union. The resolution of issues relating to better working conditions, welfare, promotion, recognition and reward of staff were done through collective bargaining. Furthermore, some of the benefits revealed from findings of the study were better working condition, staff welfare, recognition and promotion. The study recommends that teachers should have better and clear understanding of collective bargaining; finding out their grievances and discussing various issues leading to addressing general school disputes and not just focusing on wage increment only.

After George Floyd was murdered by police, teachers, alongside the leaders of their unions and professional associations, confronted urgent calls to address racism in their communities, schools, and classrooms, just as they were concluding an academic year rendered chaotic by COVID-19. This article leverages four waves of semistructured interviews with teachers' union and association leaders embedded in 14 states and 45 school districts to investigate how and why teachers' unions responded to those calls during 2020 and 2021. Local leaders were more likely to have taken concrete steps if they were serving urban or suburban and predominantly Democratic communities. Most commonly, unions offered symbolic gestures of support or sought to develop their capacity to recognize and understand bias.

This study examined high school mathematics teachers' job satisfaction and professional growth in Nepal. The data were collected from 49 high school mathematics teachers using a structured questionnaire with Likert-scale items and some open-ended questions. The quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed mixed findings. Mathematics teachers were relatively satisfied with their profession; however, various factors were important for job satisfaction and professional growth. The three most important were inservice training and educational resources, schools' infrastructure, and financial incentives. The data analysis further contends that the school education system must be free from politics, and the procedure of forming the school management committee (SMC) must be isolated from political intervention. Furthermore, school teachers are prohibited or discouraged from participating in politics as political cadres. The data revealed that the different teachers' unions need to work on behalf of teachers' welfare rather than carry forward their political parties' agendas and ideologies.

Using data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, this paper compares the earnings premium and employment share of jobs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) across 11 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The results reveal that the STEM wage premium is higher in the United States than in any of the other comparison countries, despite the fact that the U.S. has a larger share of workers in STEM jobs. We also find evidence that the premium varies significantly across STEM sub-fields and education levels, and that the premium tends to be higher in countries with lower unionization rates, less employment protection, or a larger share of employment in the public sector.

The purpose of the paper is to understand why academics' main association and trade union in England (University and College Union-UCU) is not stronger in its representation capacity, deepening knowledge regarding its role in the wider higher education sector. UCU operates in an adversarial context, claiming itself to be academics' main voice. However, UCU, as an association/union of academics, does not have a monopoly on representation, nor is the representation that it offers consistently strong. Applying a "Multiple Logics" perspective to this under-investigated topic within higher education, findings suggest that UCU is hampered by: 1) an increasingly heterogeneous academic workforce, resulting in contrasting interests; 2) an overriding cascade of managerialism in all ranks; 3) a widespread soloist mentality among academics; 4) an understanding of one's profession as in contrast with the idea of mobilization; 5) internal ideological conflicts among UCU activists.

Across the country, paraprofessionals in cities are primarily Black and Latina women, and they are far more likely than teachers to live in the district and even the school zone where they work. However the percentages of Black teachers in major city school districts across the nation have declined, while the percentages of census-designated Hispanic teachers have broadly held constant. At the same time, many of these districts have served a majority of Black and Latinx students since the 1960s, when educators, policymakers, and teachers unions first began building and fighting for para-to-teacher pathways. Nick Juravich argues that this is a strategy with a long history and tremendous potential for developing a more diverse teacher corps and connecting teachers and their unions with the communities they serve. Paraprofessionals have long sought opportunities to become teachers. Teaching jobs have offered paths to economic stability to working people for over a century, but beyond the economics, paraprofessionals are already educators. They have intimate, firsthand knowledge of what makes a classroom successful and every reason to believe they could succeed as teachers.

When COVID-19 forced a set of extraordinary challenges upon the U.S. education system in March 2020, risk and uncertainty were constant. Many stakeholders sought to weigh in on the endless choices confronting school leaders, including the teachers who would implement those decisions. In speaking with teachers union and association leaders across the country, the authors found that, more often than not, they described collaborative relationships with district leaders. What was learned highlights critical practices sustaining these relationships, and the authors believe state leaders have the power to both model and encourage many such practices in school governance. The authors' analysis suggests that relations between district leaders and teacher membership organizations need not be contentious and adversarial. Rather, under the right circumstances, these relationships can incorporate conflict and negotiation alongside collaboration and mutual respect in a way that can strengthen decision making and policy implementation.

As life course research has long recognized, work and careers are what Pearlin (1988; p.259) describes as "durable arrangements" that serve to "organize experience over time." However, understanding (a) the specific impacts of the alienations and contradictions of work and society under capitalism as well as (b) the analytic details of how the processes of learning are involved in the relationship of work experience and life course remain less well understood. An approached referred to as Mind in Political Economy is explained. It is based on a synthesis of several socio-cultural learning theories which allows the effective use of the concept of dramatic perezhivanie. This approach is then applied to a study of workplace learning in the context of a chemical production plant in Canada with a focus on the life history of one subject. It concludes that, based upon evidence of the realization of dramatic perezhivanie in relation to the contradictory object-motives of occupational autonomy/control as well as labour autonomy/control more generally, work-life learning in activity affected the quality of work experiences, the nature of development across employment history, and had carry-over effects beyond work. Moreover, it is shown that work-life learning could play a role in retrieving, reconstructing and making use of early life experience iteratively in the course of biographical meaning-making through the creation and refinement of biographical artefacts across the life course by a process of double stimulation.

Employing an institutional logics framework and critical discourse analysis, this study examines the discourse of participants in a stakeholder-feedback meeting about a proposal by the Denver Public School board to extend collective bargaining rights to teachers in the district's innovation schools. The findings provide insight into the logics that control how teacher unions and collective bargaining agreements are understood by proponents of autonomous schools and portrayed to the general public through media. The analysis explores how connections to power and status allowed some stakeholder groups to influence the board to revise the policy to one more favorable toward market-oriented school reform. In this case, the dominant narrative that emerged from the stakeholder feedback cycle was one in which the collective bargaining rights of teachers were positioned as a threat to autonomous schools' ability to provide "what's best for kids" in their classrooms.

Purpose: The unanticipated changes in state legislation in Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, and Wisconsin in 2011-12 significantly restricted or entirely prohibited the collective bargaining rights of teachers. Considering these institutional changes as a natural experiment, we examine the causal impact of weakening teacher unionization on districts' spending on teacher compensation. Research Methods/Approach: We merge two nationally representative data sets from the United States: the Local Education Agency (School Districts) Finance Survey (F-33) and the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) in 2009-16. We identify the effect of the institutional changes regarding teachers' unions by employing a difference-in-difference estimation and synthetic control method, exploiting district-level national data on spending on teacher compensation. Findings: We find that the antiunion institutional changes substantially reduced districts' spending on both teacher salaries and benefits. The negative impact is larger for the districts located at the bottom of the distribution of spending than for districts at the top. Implications: Our study suggests that the antiunion legal changes will raise income inequality among teachers, and the increased inequality in compensation among teachers may translate into greater performance gaps between students, if teachers receiving lower compensation are more likely to quit teaching or to move to districts that pay more. Therefore, the negative effects of the antiunion legal changes be even greater in the long run if the current trends persist.

This article reports on an inquiry that explored how a school management team (SMT) in a rural school in Limpopo Province, South Africa, understood their role in creating a school climate conducive for improving teaching and learning. I used a qualitative case study design to investigate how their understanding informed their practices. A single high school was purposely selected, with all seven members of its SMT participating through semi-structured interviews, a focus group discussion, and each SMT member being observed for periods of one week. Teachers were also involved as information-rich participants, with six teachers sampled for a focus group discussion. My findings revealed that the SMT failed to create a conducive learning climate, owing to various barriers including the SMTs' limited understanding of their roles, lack of agency, teacher hostility and external forces such as teacher unions.

2022 marks one hundred years since the foundation of the Irish State, and thus an appropriate time in which to reflect on how educational policy has shaped the nation over the course of a century. This article examines one hundred years of education policy through an equality lens, asking how the concept of educational equality has been understood, fostered and mediated. Framing policy implementation across three defined periods, 1922-1959, 1960-1980 and 1981-2022, it argues that with the exception of a brief window which occurred during the 1960s, education policy has not been underpinned by rigorous policy formation based on considerations of social justice.

With the introduction of the sectorial agreement signed between the Maltese Government and the Malta Union of Teachers in 2017, Maltese teachers have been incentivised to accelerate their salary scale progression following engagement in self-sought professional learning. The theory of affordances was applied in this mixed-methods research to explore the importance attributed by secondary school teachers towards self-sought learning. Following data collection of 166 questionnaires and 14 teacher interviews, quantitative and qualitative data were analysed using SPSS and MAXQDA respectively. Results suggest that while the majority of teachers are intrinsically motivated to pursue self-sought professional learning, they seek incentives and, in particular, monetary support. Other important barriers that hinder teachers in furthering their professional learning beyond school hours are family responsibilities and lack of time. This study provides insights into teachers' conceptualisations of professional learning and implications for teacher education.

This paper examines school management and policies in Germany and Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study, which is comparative and qualitative, explores the interrelationship between different levels of governance and the responses of teacher unions. The inquiry is informed by the perspectives of historical institutionalism and path dependency, and the document analysis is conducted by utilising the justification categories of value, collective, and formal and procedural driven arguments. We argue the contestation which occurred between different levels of school governance and the teacher unions amidst the pandemic created the potential for changes in policy settings and influence over the administration of schooling. However, there is no indication of fundamental shifts in the organisation, policy direction or control over schooling in Germany or Australia. Instead, there is a conformity to established institutional arrangements and path dependencies, which secure and protect the vested interests of the different policy actors.

Higher Education staff in the United Kingdom (UK) work long hours to complete their duties. In a 2021 survey, staff reported a weekly average of 51 hours: a fact well understood to undermine health and educational quality. Yet, UK law sets a maximum working week of 48 hours, and failure to uphold this maximum is a criminal offence for employers. Seeking to understand this contradiction, the article reveals that staff are denied otherwise universal legal Health and Safety protection by the development and reinforcement of legal interpretation that assumes they have sufficient 'autonomy' to avoid overwork. As this is a position mutually constructed and accepted by both employers and unions, all efforts to reduce hours, including Industrial Action, have worked from this premise. However, critical analysis of university Terms and Conditions, against relevant jurisprudential developments, adds significant original value by questioning the validity of the status quo legal interpretation. Specifically, a landmark legal ruling against the UK by the European Court of Justice, and the resulting 2006 amendment to the UK Working Time Regulations, strongly suggests most University Terms and Conditions are legally noncompliant. As such, HE stakeholders should pressure powerbrokers involved in this omnipresent dispute to revisit the law: specifically with a view to re-establishing any fundamental rights of which they are currently illegitimately deprived. Where this was successful, empirically informed "weekly" workload modelling -- rather than irrelevant, abstract annual calculations -- would become a legally enforceable necessity for the benefit of staff and students alike.

This article analyses the introduction of a mandatory learning management system (LMS) in Danish primary and lower secondary education. By thinking with Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus, the study analyses key policy texts to identify the embedded logics that structure the field of education, reflecting relationships of domination and struggle and explores how these logics and conflicts influence process of policy change. A historical analysis of the conflict between legislators and the Teachers' Union (TU) in Denmark is conducted based on 21 policy texts published between 2005 and 2020. The findings indicate that human capital is the predominant logic structuring the field of education. Legislators use the logics of other fields such as economics to support this predominance. Moreover, the findings suggest that changes in educational policy are the result of a protracted struggle between legislators and the TU, with legislators making ongoing adjustments to policies based on pressure from the TU. These modifications can be seen as a political concession.

This paper explores the experience of three mentors working with a group of 12 practitioner action researchers; practitioners who were recipients of an Action Research Grant (ARG) in a programme initiated and managed by the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS). The EIS is a trade union, which represents over 80% of Scotland's teaching professionals. The paper draws on these experiences, the views of participants and the research literature, to illustrate how action research, particularly that which is mentored by experienced colleagues, can empower teachers and enhance their practice to make positive difference to their learners and beyond and so becomes participatory action research (PAR).

This article offers a comprehensive thematic literature review on labour education, exploring the major contributions as well as some of the limits of this scholarship and future directions for researchers. Based on an analysis of 180 English-language publications from the 1960s until today, we find several general trends that we analyse as four broad themes in this literature: the politics of labour education; labour education in, through, and with formal educational institutions; the pedagogy of labour education; and labour education, globalisation, and transnational solidarity. Identifying some of the gaps in the existing scholarship, we propose several future directions for research on labour education: connecting social movement scholarship and the labour education literature; labour education programmes that centre intersectionality, namely themes such as gender justice, anti-racism, and disability; labour education through solidarity with other social movements, such as the environmental movement; and labour education programmes led by different types of labour organisations beyond trade unions. Overall, this article contributes to our understanding of how labour education can strengthen the labour movement, reduce inequality, and promote decent work for all.

This study aimed to assess the degree of openness to change among the faculties of educational sciences in Jordanian universities and its correlation with academic freedom, as perceived by faculty members. Additionally, it sought to identify whether there were statistically significant differences in the levels of openness to change and academic freedom based on variables such as gender, academic rank, university, and country of graduation. The study employed a descriptive correlational approach, involving 407 faculty members from the faculties of educational sciences in Jordanian universities during the first semester of the academic year 2021/2022. The study found a moderate level of openness to change and academic freedom, with a strong correlation between the two. No significant gender-based differences were identified, but Arab university graduates displayed higher levels. Hashemite University professors and associate professors emphasized these aspects more than counterparts at other Jordanian universities and different academic ranks. The results highlight the need for increased societal awareness, particularly within the educational community, about the importance of various freedoms. Additionally, the study recommends heightened awareness of the role of unions and institutions for Jordanian university faculty members, aiming to improve their scientific and social conditions.

This paper discusses the emergence of an opt-out movement in Israel led by parent associations at local and national levels. The protest targeted the use of a national standardized test, the Meitzav. Analyzing media coverage of this movement and informed by the theoretical arguments of the Advocacy Coalition Framework, the study suggests that by forming a coalition with the Teachers' Union, parents proclaimed their right to a role in education policymaking in a highly centralized system. The coalition was successful in that it influenced the Ministry of Education to postpone the tests and form a special committee to reevaluate the national assessment policy. The Israeli case enhances our understanding of opt-out movements in different educational and institutional contexts.