Red Shirts, Blue Suits: The Strike May Be Over But the Relationship Continues
by oxford432
Red Shirts, Blue Suits: The Strike May Be Over But the Relationship Continues
This is the expanded version of my commentary that first appeared in Education Weekon 10/3/12.
As a professor in the educational leadership program at DePaul University College of Education, my students are mostly full time teachers seeking their master degrees and licensure to be school administrators. The required course I am teaching this quarter is Home, School, Community Relations: Transforming Conflicting Stakeholders into Strategic Partners.
The first night of class was Monday 9/10/12 and while there is no uniform in graduate school, many of my students were wearing, if not seeing red, having spent the better part of their day on picket lines chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Rahm Emanuel has to go” or ”R-E-S-P-E-C-T find out what it means to me.”
When the strike started that morning, I was nervous and curious about what the dynamic in class would be that evening given that we would be discussing Fisher, Ury, and Patton’s seminal tome on negotiation, Getting to Yes: