Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0006-4346-8916

Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

School of Education

Department

Education

Committee Chair

Melissa Sherfinski

Committee Co-Chair

Samuel Stack

Committee Member

Sharon Hayes

Committee Member

Hal Gorby

Abstract

This critical phenomenological dissertation explores the lived realities of becoming a West Virginia teacher-activist. Presenting the experiential accounts of three participants, its semi-structured questions Show the lifeworld forces, inherited (factical) self-identities, and occupational, "on-the-ground" classroom experiences that inspired its research collaborators to assert themselves as unionists and natural teacher-organizers. This dissertation utilizes a collection of Marxian, phenomenological, and post-structural interpretation devices to develop robust, sensemaking themes which reveal the meaning of participants’ lived reflections. It also provides thick descriptions of co-researchers' historic and current political, economic, and socio-cultural backdrops amid West Virginia’s right-wing political realignment of the 2010s, the eternal legacies of the state’s coal wars, and the ruinous consequences of deindustrialization, intergenerational impoverishment, and the opioid crisis. In addition to defining education workers’ unions as vanguard institutions committed to shielding teacher-members, democratizing schools, and combating social injustices, this investigation’s findings unearth the conscious-raising moments of Heideggerian angst that highlighted the principal benefits of union membership and thus helped remold participants into teacher-activists. Research volunteers’ lived memories attest that conventional union organizing methods (e.g., interpersonal conversations), the achievement of small victories (improving teachers’ material benefits and classroom teaching conditions), and the formation of "big bargaining" coalitions—establishing firm bonds between education workers’ unions and their communities—augmented the overall strength of their local affiliates of the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA), now Education West Virginia (EWV).

Incorporating Merleau-Pontian strands of embodied phenomenological thought, co-researchers claim that the enfleshed acts of engaging in the 1990, 2018, and 2019 West Virginia teachers’ revolts assisted striking teachers in cultivating a shared consciousness and maximizing the potential of collectivist protests to contest the legislature’s perceived acts of disrespect (directed toward teachers), substandard professional salaries and benefits, and the proliferation of neoliberalized education counter-reform (e.g., charters and vouchers). Nearing the conclusion of the last conversational interview, each participant articulates their own primer on how teachers’ unions can fight the "war of position" against accelerating marketized schooling counter-reform endeavors within West Virginia’s right-to-work, non-bargaining context. This dissertation’s practical implications stress the need for unionists to heighten teachers’ voices and institutional influences through: adopting traditional organizing strategies; maintaining consistent communication with members; concentrating on winning "point of production" classroom victories; co-opting internal school-governing mechanisms such as faculty senates and local school improvement councils (LSICs); and building big bargaining alliances uniting teachers and their communities. Methodological implications posit the notion of integrating photovoice techniques and participant-created poems into hermeneutic phenomenological studies to unmask absent, concealed aspects of co-researchers’ lived experiences. Theoretical implications suggest teacher-organizers construct their activist identities through a long series of personal choices and leadership decisions that mark them as fighters and devout unionists—proving that the phenomenon of becoming a teacher-activist exceeds involvement in the watershed, consciousness-shifting Events of strikes and radical direct actions.

Download

Share

COinS