Teachers and Teacher Unions in a Globalised World

In the whirlwind of educational policy changes, teacher union histories such as this one provide critical explanations for why teachers are caught in the web of the state apparatus, and how they worked to get out of them. Carr and Beckett have produced a very readable and important contribution to educational history with this work on the Irish National Teachers' Organization. Nina Bascia, Professor & Chair, Leadership, Higher & Adult Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Carr and Beckett have created a treasure trove of artefacts, analyses, and articulations of the trajectories of teachers and a teacher union over time that is a major 'glocal' contribution to scholarship on the profession and its union representation. The text is at once empowering and enlightening, as well as a call to arms to teachers and their representatives 'to strive, to seek to find and not to yield', but to pursue and promote an education system that fosters the public good, raises the morale of the profession by releasing its agency and its professional soul from the de-professionalising shackles of 'regimes of control' to the detriment of teaching and learning, by cultivating an enabling sense of professional responsibility. Read it, be empowered and join the effort. Ciaran Sugrue, Professor of Education, School of Education, University College Dublin This scholarly and innovative publication interweaves history, theory and politics to analyse the policies adopted by the INTO and places them in a global context. It takes contemporary issues of accountability, teacher status and professionalism and shows how the Irish experience has relevance for modern debates. Pamela Munn, Professor Emerita of Curriculum Research, University of Edinburgh. All teachers, regardless of their union involvement, will find much in this book to stimulate intellectual and political conversation. Carr and Beckett use the anniversary of the Irish National Teachers Organisation to skilfully tease open connections between history, theory and politics which influence teachers' work today. Of significance in this archival documentary are the accounts of teachers' disquiet, resistance, protests and challenges. These provoke all of us involved in the teaching profession to consider the authors' 'rebuttal' of extant school policies which regulate and sideline teachers' professional work. Amanda Nuttall, formerly research-active teacher at White Laith Primary School Leeds now Senior Lecturer and Programme Coordinator in Primary Education at Leeds Trinity University.