Teacher Power and the Struggle for Democracy: an educational movement in Malta

ABSTRACT

This paper gives an account of the formation of a social movement of teachers in Malta, of which the author was a founder‐member. The Movement (Muviment Edukazzjoni Umana) was set up by a group of student‐teachers wishing to link humanistic perspectives with a critical theory of schooling, and mainly as a political response to a centralised state educational system which was considered to be not only unresponsive to the needs of its students and teachers, but also undemocratic at a number of levels. The Movement's main goal is to develop participatory democracies in school communities, and to work as a pressure group in order to influence educational policy‐making at the national level. Towards this end it has embarked on a multi‐faceted project which includes the formation of action groups that tackle a diversity of issues. The paper contextualises the setting up and development of the Movement within a theoretical tradition that privileges social movements, arguing that such a perspective can help in shifting sociology of education's preoccupation with the critique of social and cultural reproduction to a more astute and politically effective agenda.

For the very act of sociological analysis is to rediscover the movements of social relations (that is, both social conflicts and cultural orientations) behind power, order, and the mechanisms, whereas the goal of democratic action must be equally to rediscover the action of the dominated and oppressed behind the veils of class domination, historical heritage, or state power... The first duty of the sociologist is to analyze social action, just as it is produced, consumed, spoken and fought over. (Touraine, 1981a, pp. 84‐5)