Lessons learned from oral histories gathered from the April 2018 Oklahoma Teacher Walkout
Abstract
This qualitative oral study study's primary purpose is to elicit, preserve, and explore personal stories from individuals who participated in the April 2018 Oklahoma Teacher Walkout. The study also builds understanding of narrators' experiences of the events surrounding the Walkout. In addition, as supported by oral history methodology, the collection of individual stories collectively provides glimpses into the historical context and significance of the Walkout through the perspective of those who experienced it. For this study, 22 narrators participated from rural, suburban, and urban communities and school districts from across the state of Oklahoma. A semi-structured interview protocol and photo-elicitation methods were used. A variety of unique, analytical methods were used to make meaning both within and across narratives (Patton, 2015, p. 47). Inductive analysis was done through drawing and visual representations along with data displays, data poems, and found poems. Interconnected themes emerged from the accounts that centered on, first, participants' emotional experiences during the Walkout in being seen and heard, physically and symbolically, and the Walkout's amplification of teacher voice; second, the expanding sense of community narrators' experienced through participating; and third, the feelings of public affirmation, respect, and mattering (Flett, 2018) as educators. Together this study contributes to the limited scholarship on teacher activism by giving voice to those educators and stakeholders who assembled en masse on the state's Capitol for nine days in April. Their oral accounts reflect embodied components of their participation as well as fluid, shifting, conceptions of community that both reflected and were further forged through the interactions and events. It also contributes to the sparse qualitative scholarship regarding teacher walkouts historically and regionally.
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- OSU Dissertations [11222]