that they are recast in terms of relational expertise aimed at building common
knowledge, where schools also recognise what matters for university staff and the
practices they inhabit. That common knowledge can be a resource ensuring that
student teachers enjoy some coherence between the school and university elements
in their training programmes.
Recently Sannino and Engeström have given account of how what they term the
“relational infrastructures”of an intervention in an Italian primary school built a
common understanding of the potential in a set of conceptual and material resources
among teachers, student teachers and pupils (Sannino and Engeström in press).
They argue that the intervention benefitted from having shared problems to work
on, so that relational infrastructures were built slowly and arose from much sharing
and mutual assistance as they tackled problems, such as how to teach fractions to
young children. The processes in the intervention allowed for the building of
common knowledge as a resource or second stimulus, which brought coherence to
the demands placed on the student teachers, enabling student teachers and
school-based teachers to see what the pupils were capable of doing.
In summary, once we see ITE as the formation of occupational professionals, we
need to attend to how their professional agency is strengthened, while also con-
necting them to the publicly validated knowledge that marks the profession. In
order to do, so we need to consider how we design learning environments and
position mentors and university tutors within them, so that the environment itself is
knowledge-rich, presenting demands which take forward the learning of beginning
teachers.
I now turn to the relational work of established teachers by focusing on the
development of knowledge-rich practices. Teachers’collaborative practice devel-
opment is not a new idea, but we perhaps need to be clearer about how this is done.
Recently, Hermansen has examined knowledge work in teacher meetings aimed
at implementing AfL. She has defined knowledge work in cultural-historical terms
as“the actions that teachers carry out as they work with and upon the knowledge
that informs their professional practice.”(Hermansen 2014 , p. 470). The knowledge
work she traced over time involved teachers in recognising the histories in the
practices they inhabited, and moving forward to a jointly produced and co-owned
refreshed version of future practice.
The interactions she captured were typical of the relational work that so often is
hidden and backstage. Yet it seems essential if teachers, as occupational profes-
sionals, are to recognise the potential in new tools and fashion them tofit the
purposes of institutional practices, while also reshaping those practices. The new
tools, a new form of assessment, were not taken as readymade and to be easily
inserted established routines. Instead, their potentially disruptive qualities were
acknowledged in the moves the teachers made towards the renewal of school
practices. As they struggled to make sense of the potential in the new tools and to
connect them to what mattered for them, they articulated the knowledge that
motivated them as professionals. In the meetings that Hermansen recorded, the
teachersfirst constructed common knowledge, which included their interpretations
of what mattered in school practices, and then used that common knowledge to
562 A. Edwards