Working with and against the bureaucratic state: histories of grassroots organising for public education reform, 1970s–1980s

ABSTRACT The article introduces an international Special Issue that addresses the significant question of how and why people organise to engage with policy making in the public sphere of education, from a historical perspective. Focusing on the phenomenon of ‘grassroots' community organising during the key formation period of the 1970s and 1980s, the issue collects articles from Australia, Canada, Chile, South Korea, Spain (Catalonia) and the United States for the purpose of examining what ‘grassroots' organising might look like or encompass under different kinds of states and state bureaucratic arrangements. This introductory article outlines the editors’ own research into the Australian context before highlighting how the various articles individually and collectively contribute to questions of 1) expanding understanding of what it means to organise at the grassroots level; 2) the complex relationships between state and school; 3) connections and disconnections between the local, national and international educational domains; and 4) how, methodologically, to capture people, experiences and organisations that may be fully or partly absent from official top down historical records.