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Materialising Change in university teaching: Tracing agency in professional development

John HannonLa Trobe University

E: [email protected]://latrobe.academia.edu/JohnHannon


Coffee milk thermometer: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Steamed_milk.jpg. CC BY-SA 3.0


http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/books/report

Discourses/logics that circulate & acquire agency


Models of change: Change as (re)-structure: that diffuses through the ‘organisation’

1. Top-down or management driven2. Bottom-up, participatory, led by innovative

adopters (Rogers 2003)3. Distributive leadership - agendas managed by

participant stakeholders (Brown 2013)

How does learning and teaching change happen? De-reification

Change as coherent and integrated: the unified, structured organisation

Mismatch between rhetoric & reality


Challenge: Complexity and multiplicity of institutional agendas in analysis of change

Responses: •frame studies around the ‘wish for order and coherence’ •investigate the diverse interactions of practiced realities

“In policymaking, multiple heterogeneous actors and materials interact, assemble, disassemble, and reassemble in ways that confound conventional categories deployed in educational research… and resist analysis…. These presume a wish for order and coherence, and a press for similarity to overcome difference” Fenwick and Edwards, 2011: 79)

The urge for modernist purity in research

Researching learning & teaching change


strategiesproceduresKPIs policiescurriculum courses assessments credit lectureslearning spacesLMS

Materials configured in teaching and professional development

textbookse-textsdigital filesknowledge resourcesassignments gatheringsdiscussions, presentationsdiscipline identities &culturescareer development

Focus on materials

Materials implicated in L&T change: actors, agents and mediators


Tensions in professional development:

Professional development: a site for a study of change

Academic workgroupsCapture shared practices of formal vs informal professional development Enact meso-level agendas – circulating discourses or “logics” (Law 2009; Mol 2010)

Formal programs::Eg. Grad Cert in Higher Education

Measurable Effective?

Risk of deficit model – PD as remedial (Boud & Brew, 2012)

Informal professional development as “less organised activities based on naturally occurring apprenticeship and situated learning” (Leibowitz, Bozalek, Van Schalkwyk & Winberg, 2015)

opportunities for critical reflection on practice


Disciplinary workgroups and interview participants

Setting: Study of workgroups

Departmental teaching academics

Size Setting Workgroupparticipants

Gender/early-mid-late career

Health Sciences

11 Common core first year health unit. N=1700

7 1 late career 1 mid career5 early career

Biosciences 14 B.Sc re-design for Multicampus teaching

6 1 mid career5 early career

Workgroups: of 13 academics, all partially or full completion the GCert programData: Interviews, focus group: Seven teaching academics, one HOD


Research question: How does professional learning occur in a disciplinary collective?

A shift away from individualist, cognitive traditions to the social and material arrangements that generate practices

1. Tracing commenced by selecting a ‘salient’ object, (Read and Swarts, 2015: 24): that has meaning and importance to stakeholders: GCert

2. Coding of interview transcripts: issues of concern that were most visible or prominent in the workgroups

3. Tracing materials – curriculum, technologies, policy texts and institutional procedures – that were bound up - entangled in workgroup practices.

Method: sociomaterial tracing


The one thing that is formal is doing the Graduate Certificate and … then how far you go and what you choose to do with that once you finish is really your prerogative. You can leave it and say there’s my certificate up on the wall, … or I’ve found a lot more about what we do and why we do it and how we do it is those conversations with people. (Health WG-FG)

Salient object: the Grad Cert

I: So, one of the things these courses do is introduce concepts and language for talking about it. So can you name two or three sort of key ideas that were useful that you could bring?J: From the Graduate Certificate?I: HmmmJ: Um, I think know understanding that there has to be evidence based kind of practice as well, is a big one... I sometimes wonder if what the directive from the university is, is based on what is best for teaching and learning or if it’s just what’s best for the university (Health WG-P2)


Content Analysis Traced materials bound up in workgroup practices Coded instances were clustered issues based on recurrence and intensity Issues enacted via entanglements: sticking points, fixities, breakdowns, transitions.


Method: sociomaterial tracing


This year because we had the directive to - we got to switch to blended [learning], basically we dropped totally a lecture schedule, everything was moved online, and they only had the two hour workshop. So that was a total shift. (Health WG-P1)

Entanglement 1: Policy & teaching practices

It's a moving feast, everyone's trying to find a way of getting around the directives that are coming from above plus, still trying to get the content delivered effectively. (Health WG-P1)

I know in some areas a whole blanket response like everyone has to have all of their subjects online next year is something that might come down from the top, that’s not how our faculty works and I don’t think that’s a very productive way of doing it (Biosc WG-Head)

not a pedagogical logic

conflicting logics


Huge culture change. But in saying that there are still the old school people in the department who are like ‘I refuse, I’m not going blended’ (Health FG)

Entanglement 3: Disciplinary cultures

So I talked about eighty percent sort of being in that mindset, then we’ve got a handful of people in each sort of sub area within Life Sciences that are really interested in looking at different things and realizing … that it’s not necessarily working the way that we are currently doing it. (Biosc WG-Head)

The culture, the culture is a bigger thing, isn’t it? OK, so I would describe the culture as very mixed, there’s probably about eighty percent very traditional thinking, um, academics that wouldn’t call themselves teachers. (Biosc WG-Head)

already embedded practices


Workgroups were materially entangled with meso-level actors

Teaching practices became stuck in conflicting logics: what standards, what counts?

Agency was re-assembled across social and material actors

Professional learning in the meso-level

Metro 2033 Map (cropped). PurpoleWym, https://www.flickr.com/photos/wyrmworld/16413311376(CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)


Models of change 1: Change as (re)-structure: that diffuses through the ‘organisation’

1. Top-down or management driven2. Bottom-up, participatory, led by innovative

adopters (Rogers 2003)3. Distributive leadership - agendas managed by

participant stakeholders (Brown 2013) Change as coherent and integrated: the unified,

structured organisation

Organisations are not unified – always organising•Continual effort to maintain hierarchies

•Multiple logics: “modes of ordering that extend through people to …” Law (2009: 149)

•Change was delegated to durable material forms that gather agencies (Hannon 2016)

How does learning and teaching change happen? De-reification

Models of change 2: Change as processual: disparate networks constantly interact – ordering, organising


Suspending assumptions about change

Structural/synchronic Assemblage/processual

Change is human-centred, intentional

Change is entangled with materials: ‘things’ or gatherings of social and material relations

Change as synchronic, progressive, inevitable, natural, reified – the urge to purity

Change as processual, no fixed structures or hidden forces (Durkheim)

Change is studied via a snapshot of one unified structure that shifts to another

Change is studied via practices that are assembled and re-assembled, mediated by materials.

Agency is given, arriving prior to a state of affairs,

Agency is accomplished and assembled


Boud, D. & Brew, A. 2013. Reconceptualising academic work as professional practice: implications for academic development. International Journal for Academic Development, 18(3): 208-221.

Brown, S. 2013. Large-scale innovation and change in UK higher education. Research in Learning Technology, 21, 1-13.

Fenwick, T. & Edwards, R. 2011. Considering Materiality in Educational Policy: Messy Objects and Multiple Reals. Educational Theory, 61(6): 709-726.

Hannon, J. (2016) Change and obduracy in university teaching practices: Tracing agency in professional development. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 3(3). http://cristal.epubs.ac.za/

Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V., Van Schalkwyk, S., & Winberg, C. 2015. Institutional context matters: The professional development of academics as teachers in South African higher education. Higher Education, 69(2): 315-330.

Read, S. & Swarts, J. 2015. Visualizing and Tracing: Research Methodologies for the Study of Networked, Sociotechnical Activity, Otherwise Known as Knowledge Work. Technical Communication Quarterly, 24(1): 14-44.

Law, J. 2009. Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics. In Turner, B. (ed). The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 141– 158.

Mol. A. 2010. Actor-Network Theory: Sensitive Terms And Enduring Tensions (Koordination und Ordnungsbildung in der Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie). Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 50(1): 253-269.

References


QnA

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