Teacher Power and the Struggle for Democracy: An Educational Movement in Malta.

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.