Rebecca Tarlau

Rebecca Tarlau is Associate Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Her ethnographic research agenda has four broad areas of focus: (1) theories of the state and state-society relations; (2) social movements and popular education, labor education, and critical pedagogy; (3) Latin American education and development; and (4) teachers’ unions, teacher activism, and teachers’ work. Dr. Tarlau is the author of the award-winning Occupying School, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education (2019, Oxford University Press, published in Portuguese in 2023 by Expressão Popular), which analyzes how a large grassroots social movement has linked education reform to its vision for agrarian reform by developing pedagogical practices for schools that foster activism, direct democracy, and collective forms of work. Dr. Tarlau’s forthcoming book Teacher Organizing Across the Americas: Diverse Strategies for Transforming Unions, Schools and Societies (Oxford University Press) explores why teachers’ unions in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States have embraced radically different strategies, and the important role of internal oppositional movements in transforming the goals and strategies of labor unions. Currently Dr. Tarlau is involved in a multi-country comparative study analyzing the impact of sustainable agriculture education on agroecological knowledge and landscape change in Latin America.