Teachers' Work as Women's Work: Reflections on Gender, Activism, and Solidarity in New Teacher Movements

The past decade has witnessed a sharp rise in domestic organized labor movements within the field of education. At the PK-12 level, new teacher movements, as they are called, have emerged in part as a response to the punitive policies that began formally with No Child Left Behind accountability structures and the push for privatization. Working both within and outside of traditional union structures, educational workers and activists have organized against austerity policies that limit the possibilities of education to instrumentalist behaviorism. Building on our ethnographic work with activist educators in Philadelphia, this study examines the role of gender within new teacher movements. Using interviews and field notes collected over the past three years, we examine the disconnects we witnessed between the seemingly rhetorical hesitations in explicitly evoking gender as constitutive force within critique and movement-building and the way the communities operated using feminist principles. Grounding this work within intersectional studies, we aim to illuminate how gender implicitly manifests within this community through critiques of patriarchy and why making feminist claims about labor and education might be useful for creating connections across precariously positioned communities.