Demanding Justicia: the justice orientations of Oaxaca’s Sección 22 teachers

ABSTRACT

The ‘demand for justice’ is a long-standing principle of Oaxaca’s Sección 22 union chapter, which has led a teachers’ movement since the 1970s that has evolved to meet changing social, political, and economic circumstances. Various researchers around the globe have increasingly linked notions of justice with education, exploring terms like social justice education, justice-oriented teaching, justice-oriented education, and teaching for social justice in a range of contexts, mapping the ways educators integrate these concepts into classrooms and schools. Missing from this research, however, is an examination of the ways teachers might practice ‘justice-oriented teaching’ outside the classroom as well, as they participate in movements and struggles. Drawing on ethnographic data collected over a five-year period, and on interviews with 40 teachers, teacher educators, union officials, and student teachers, I will map out four ‘justice orientations’ via which Oaxacan teachers demand justice. Sección 22 educators perform justice-oriented teaching along economic, political, cultural, and humanistic orientations, manifesting a widely held belief in Oaxaca that ‘the teacher fighting, is also teaching’. This study can inform research about teachers globally enacting justice-oriented pedagogies and practices, not only in the classroom, but also in the public domain as activists, movement actors, and union members.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher movements
• justice-oriented teaching
• teacher unionism
• Oaxaca
• social justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, I will primarily use ‘justice-oriented teaching’ to emphasize the notion of teachers possessing certain orientations toward justice, but may on occasion use the related terms interchangeably.

2 Massive protests with thousands of participants in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza on 2 October 1968 were met with violent force when military police attempted to break up the demonstration, leading to arrests, injuries, and deaths (Fournier and Herrera 2010).

3 In Mexico, normalismo refers to the movements and ideologies of student teachers within teacher training colleges (escuelas normales). Today, especially at rural normal schools, students still participate in local, regional, and national struggles, and their normalista movements comprise a ‘co-curricular’ element of their professionalization (Gonzalez Villarreal and Amann 2009).