Member Perspectives: Understanding How Beliefs and Attitudes Relate to Elementary Teachers' Union Member Engagement in Ontario, Canada.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Globally, teacher education unions operate in the context of neoliberal educational reform, which aims to undercut publicly funded education systems in the name of standardization, privatization, and profit. Neoliberal education reforms work to reduce or eliminate the power of teachers and their unions, which act as an important counterbalance to these agendas. In the context of this work, in Ontario, Canada, neoliberalism has not been fully entrenched in the education system, and the viability of teachers’ unions may increase if they can engage and activate a broad base of their membership. This research explored how teacher members’ beliefs relate to their extent of engagement with the union, the ways and means teacher members engage with their union, and factors that may influence this engagement through a mixed methods research study. In one of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario’s locals, these research questions were explored using a survey and interviews. Findings that add depth to current understandings include the notion that engagement breeds beliefs, and the more highly engaged members are, the stronger their beliefs are about the unions, their priorities, and the value of engagement. This research also unveils more nuanced findings that enrich the understanding of union member engagement in this context. Findings suggest that a hierarchy of teacher-member priorities, emphasizing the braiding of industrial contracts and professional unionism is influential when understanding teachers’ beliefs and how they relate to engagement. Members typically engage in easily accessible opportunities, yet they highly value engagement and understand it as a means to strengthen the influence of the union, underscoring the critical need for amplified messaging around the importance of union member engagement. The importance of social engagement and local connectivity with union representation were emphasized as key admissions to engagement. The research identifies potential barriers to engagement, including increased professional demands and negative public perception of union member engagement. These findings provide openings for teachers' unions to consider new pathways to increase engagement, leverage local leadership to confront engagement barriers, and consider messaging related to union priorities to foster connections across demographic membership. Word count: 343Keywords: teachers’ unions, responsiveness, neoliberalism, engagement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".