MORE can be understood to follow in the tradition of the organizational framework of Paulo Freire. A Freire-type model of organization is one that applies elements of liberation education to its approach. Liberation education is an educational framework that “begins with people’s own experiences” and “gives people the tools to analyze their situation and take action to transform themselves and their conditions” (Bernard, 2002 via Martinson & Su, 2012, p.65). In this respect, Freire-type models of organization are fundamentally structured from the bottom-up, rather than in a top-down fashion (MORE, perhaps in contrast to the UFT, fits this bottom-up structure). They emphasize relationships between their members, centering the importance of storytelling and sharing within their organizations. A Freire-type model will typically operate by first coming together to engage in dialogue to deepen understanding of the daily struggles of its members and the historical roots of those struggles, before collectively planning and executing strategies to create change, and finally reflecting on the results of those strategies. The organization can thus be summarized by the structure “listening-dialogue-action-reflection” (Martinson & Su, 2012, p. 66).

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MORE’s organization fits various aspects of this framework quite well; they center the experiences of their members, and seek to equip them (in addition to affected groups that are not officially part of their organization) with the tools to analyze and change their circumstances. They have made available on their website toolkits and resources for their members (and other viewers) to both survey their schools and take action to make their voices heard. Now that it is more difficult for in-person dialogues to be conducted due to Covid-19, MORE’s website and social media platforms have promoted the voices of individual teachers’ experiences, and drawn from those experiences to direct their actions as an organization, still following the progression of a liberation educational framework.

Their organizational methods center around phone trees, contact lists between members, and one-on-one conversations that establish values and consider members’ feelings and personal views. MORE elevates the experiences of the people who are involved in specific issues, valuing those people as individuals who are best suited to advocate for themselves on the problems that concern them, and develops action within those people and groups through question asking and problem-posing, rather than a top-down banking approach that would dictate the aims of those individuals without consideration of their needs. This aligns MORE with elements of Ella Baker’s organizational strategy, participatory democracy, which leans on local members to voice and address the needs of their communities. Participatory democracy is often defined by three main tenets: grassroots involvement of people in decisions that impact their lives, minimization of hierarchy with an emphasis on experience and professionalism as the basis for leadership, and direct action as an answer to alienation, fear, and intellectual detachment (Mueller, 2004). Fitting within Baker’s framework, MORE has organized on a district level for the first time this year, allowing the members of the organization to more directly address the issues in their immediate communities and represent those communities’ interests. The previously mentioned bottom-up organization aligns with participatory democracy’s stance against rigid (top-down) hierarchy, and MORE’s anti-corporation advocacy aligns with Baker’s values as well; Baker cautioned against the corruption of grassroots organizations by philanthropists and capital from corporate interests. MORE seeks to empower its members to directly participate in social change, with a focus not only on narrow actionable issues, but also broader societal ones such as systemic racism (an example of this being their advocacy for the Black Lives Matter movement), a scope enabled and empowered by the Freire and Baker-type models.

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