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"This book locates teacher unions at the crux of the enduring tensions between teachers' own low status in the educational system and the necessary autonomy and working conditions to teach effectively and well. The chapters, focusing on teacher unions in Canada, the U.S., and England reveal the dynamic nature of teacher unions engaging in a variety of activities and pursuing multiple strategies"--

This paper presents case studies of teacher union-government relationships in three Canadian provinces – British Columbia, Ontario, and Alberta – where teacher organizations have undertaken divergent strategic positions relative to educational reform. It identifies critical factors that may lead teacher unions to challenge government reforms, how and when a teacher organization might instead accommodate governmental reform, and under what circumstances union renewal drives an organization to establish reform strategies of its own. The paper demonstrates the results of these varied strategies and suggests that teacher unions' stances, including when they are resistant, are rational and, arguably, necessary.

This Handbook is for policy researchers, analysts, academics and graduate students interested in educational policy, educational reform, educational governance and leadership, teacher quality, literacy, and workplace learning. This Handbook is the only one of its kind. It has over fifty chapters written by nearly ninety leading researchers from a number of countries and presents contemporary and emergent trends in educational policy research. It captures many of the current dominant educational policy foci, situating current understandings historically, in terms of both how they are conceptualized and in terms of past policy practice. The chapters are empirically grounded, providing illustrations of the conceptual implications contained within them as well as allowing for comparisons across them. The self-reflexivity within chapters with respect to jurisdictional particularities and contrasts allows readers to consider not only a range of approaches to policy analysis but also the ways in which policies and policy ideas play out in different times and places. Sections cover the contemporary strategic emphasis on large-scale reform, substantive emphases at several levels – on leadership and governance, improving teacher quality and conceptualizing learning in various domains around the notion of literacies and concluding, finally, with a contrasting topic, workplace learning, which has had less policy attention and thus allows readers to consider both the advantages and disadvantages of learning and teaching under the bright gaze of policy.