Chapter 5: Teacher Collectives and the State: Conflict, Cooperation, and Cooptation

In the early chapters of this book, we have considered the notion of teaching as a mass profession. As members of a mass profession, teachers have participated in various social movements and lent their support to a wide range of causes and campaigns. In the USA, teachers played an important role in the Civil Rights movement (Alridge, 2020), and have supported democracy movements in Korea (Kang, 2007), Japan (Thurston, 1973), and Taiwan (Hsiao & Ho, 2010), sometimes creating special associations to increase activism. Meanwhile, mobilization of teachers in support of democracy was widespread in Nordic nations like Denmark (Mikkelsen, 2018) and Norway (Bie-Drivdal & Ulriksen Storrønning, 2024). Causarano (2012, p. 159) argued that the development and interaction of unions within European states shaped national school systems. As Moe and Wiborg (2017, p. 4) noted, “in the United States, the teacher unions have played a central role in that nation’s politics of education for decades.”