Teachers, Inequality and Collective Action
Research Group Leader: Hania Sobhy
The Research Group “Teachers, Inequality and Collective Action” (TICA) studies teachers as central agents in the contemporary restructuring of mass schooling. Understanding teachers’ values and agency has become increasingly urgent amid intense global transformation. While the learning crisis in the Global South is widely acknowledged, concerns about stagnation and decline in learning outcomes are also prominent across parts of the Global North. Mass public schooling worldwide faces mounting pressures from defunding, privatization, digitalization, and challenges to liberal-democratic values. Teachers navigate these transformations amid changing professional demands and shifting dynamics of collective representation and action. Yet teachers' values, characteristics, and orientations toward these transformations remain unevenly and insufficiently studied.
TICA investigates how teachers’ social, political, and professional profiles shape their orientations toward inequality, transformation and collective action. The project examines teachers’ orientations as shaped by material, institutional, relational, and affective dynamics. The first line of inquiry explores how teachers perceive inequalities along lines of class, gender, migration background, language, and their intersections; how they explain their causes; and which policy and teacher-led interventions they judge capable of addressing them. The second links teachers' profiles to their orientations towards collective representation and action, and their reported participation in established and alternative associational forms. The research also develops a fine-grained account of teachers' perceptions of and attitudes toward contemporary educational transformations, mapping how these vary across cohorts and social and professional profiles, and examining how they relate to political ideology and democratic values. Methodologically, the group integrates institutional mapping, survey research, and qualitative analysis.
TICA's empirical work is primarily anchored in the Middle East and North Africa — a region that offers distinctive and varied configurations of the pressures reshaping mass schooling globally. Our workshops and research exchanges are geared towards productive dialogue with scholars working on TICA’s research themes beyond the region.
TICA is part of the Max Planck Network EduTrack, a six‑year interdisciplinary multi-institute research collaboration on the future of education. The project is led by Population Europe, a Europe-wide science-for-policy network, and the research is conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science.
