Rhiannon M. Maton

Rhiannon M. Maton, Ph.D is a qualitative researcher who works at the intersection of labor studies, educational foundations, and organizational leadership. Dr. Maton's primary area of research focuses on teachers' work and unions in K-12 and higher education. Her work examines the conditions and renumeration of educators’ labor, and how teachers seek to influence policy through engaging a range of bottom-up organizational forms, including unions. 

Dr. Maton currently serves as Associate Professor in the Foundations and Social Advocacy department in the SUNY Cortland School of Education, and as Visiting Scholar (2024-2025) in the Hunter College (CUNY) National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. Prior to this, she was faculty in University of Pennsylvania’s Critical Writing Program and taught in traditional and alternative public and private high schools in Canada and the United States for over a decade. She has served in union leadership roles in K-12 and higher education in Canada and the U.S., and has provided professional advocacy and direct support services to children and teenagers experiencing economic hardship, homelessness, and physical dis/Ability.

Dr. Maton's expertise ranges from issues of teacher learning and leadership, grassroots organizing and mobilization, alternative school issues and models, activist teachers, teacher unions, and race, class, gender and sexuality issues in education. Her work has appeared in various journals and book volumes, including Teachers College Record, Gender Work and Organization, the Journal of Educational Change, Curriculum Inquiry, and the History of Education Quarterly. She also coedits the upcoming Routledge Handbook on Teachers' Work: International Perspectives on Research and Practice (in press, 2025).

Her broad research agenda focuses on how educators and schools can better support students facing systemic social and economic marginalization. The first and primary strand of this research examines educators' bottom-up engagement and learning in grassroots activism and union organizing in response to labor-related, student, family and community need, and broader systemic barriers. The second strand explores how public alternative school models might be mobilized to provide a more responsive and critical education. And, the third strand focuses on how teacher education can support educators in developing increasingly inquisitive and critical mindsets toward their work with students, families and communities. 

She was the 2023 recipient of the Di Nardo and Waring Outstanding Achievement in Research Award, and serves on the advisory boards for Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor, the Urban Education Justice Project (Towson University), and Sophia's Garden Institute (SUNY Cortland). She is the Past Co-Chair of the Teacher's Work/Teachers' Unions Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. And she has served in a range of editorial leadership roles, currently including serving as Co-Editor of the Routledge Critical Perspectives on Teaching and Teachers' Work book series.