Thinking teacher professional learning performatively: a socio-material account

Abstract

New socio-economic conditions have resulted in significant reconfiguration of professional learning in terms of the increasing integration of work into curriculum, pedagogy and inter-professional relationships. This article examines the significance of ‘more than human’ dimensions for this learning, using resources provided by actor–network theory (ANT). Drawing on data collected as part of a national study of practices of teacher professional learning and professional teaching standards, it is argued that teacher professional learning can, with profit, be conceptualised as a performative knowledge practice constituted and enacted by people and tools in complex collectives. In this conceptualisation, attention is given not only to what professional learning is but also to what it does – the effects it creates. Challenging the established individualised, psychological perspective, where learning is primarily seen in terms of the intrinsic capabilities or potentialities of people, ANT renders recognition of the constitutive roles of sociality and materiality in learning; the agency of both. Thinking performatively – seeing the human and the non-human at once – invites the dissolution of dichotomies such as professional knowing (education) and doing (work) and suspension of the means–ends production model of professional preparation. It also provides for the possibility of making visible, and attending to, forms of power that may otherwise go unrecognised.

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