Protecting Our Greenhouses: Sustaining the Struggle for Social Justice in Education

A lot seems to be happening very quickly. As Lois wrote last week, manufacturing crisis after crisis is a political strategy to distract, demoralize, and debilitate resistance. Empire is collapsing, authoritarian tendencies are expanding, and wealth is concentrating. Amidst the overwhelm, it can feel challenging to sustain our energy, motivation, and sense of possibility for resistance. In scattered, sometimes fleeting spaces, we can find reinforcement for our desires and creative imaginations for justice. For educators, these spaces might be our classrooms, our union halls, community organizations, or social movement spaces.

These spaces are greenhouses1 where our ideas, feelings, and desires get warmer and stronger. We learn they are actually public feelings and thoughts and we find a sense of purpose and direction in understanding that we are one part of a larger ecosystem.2

When we leave the protection and socialization of the greenhouse, the temperature of these feelings and motivations can dissipate into the harsh winter wind. Throughout the last few months, I’ve experienced, in myself and others, the general, nearly simultaneous affects of apocalyptic end times alongside the drudgery of being in the middle of life. Amidst all the ways our lives under capitalism have intensified work (waged and unwaged), most of us (I use “us” loosely but I am generally thinking of education workers), find it challenging to experience consistent, meaningful social reinforcement of credible, empirical truths that make concrete connections between our everyday experiences and the worlds we wish could be.3 In a media terrain, social and otherwise, that is largely moderated by gargantuan corporate and billionaire interests, it feels rare to read analyses that appropriately communicate what is happening, really, and what we can do (and are doing) about it.

Social Movement Unions as Greenhouses

Within K12 and higher education, social movements/social movement unionism have been a crucial source of expanding the greenhouse and heating up resistance. And, because the Right understands this, teachers unions have become politically targeted in more intense, more blatant ways than ever before. One of the most prominent examples is the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE)-led Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Adam Sanchez, in a recent piece for Rethinking Schools, writes that through commitment to union democracy and social justice, the CTU has become a “force field to protect against Trump’s attacks on public education” (citing CTU vice president, Jackson Potter). In their 2025 contract fight, ...