resources that might be assembled to constitute a best practice, and that might be
supported in equally linear ways via the production of classroom-ready teaching
graduates by teacher education facilities, or the provision of skills to practising
teacher via in-service training. Technicist views of education, teaching, teachers and
teacher education—and the managerial policies and practices they support—have
attracted much academic critique, not to mention professional suspicion and con-
tempt. Amongst complaints of their implicit scientism and Classical logics, they are
seen as driven by new managerialist (Davies 2003 ) motives rather than foundational
and contemporary knowledges associated with the discipline of education, and, as
failing to adequately account for the complexities of professional practice.
In contrast, sociomaterial views of education (where my own biases reside)
derive from a recognition that“teaching’s daily reality is an improvised assem-
blage”(Connell 2009 , p. 219). Teaching is understood as a highly complex, non-
linear undertaking, where there are no straightforward formulas, solutions or sets of
actions that will translate into particular effects oroutcomes. This view understands
teaching practice to emerge as an assemblage of sociomaterial actors in ways that
are difficult to capture and contain within the logics of competency-based frame-
works. Instead, sociomaterial views support understandings of quality professional
practice as alert to emergent opportunities, where resources are deployed in
inventive, improvised ways that cannot be pre-programmed.
The bulk of published research into educational technology is based on
assumptions aligned with a technicist view of education, with a focus on determining
relationships between inputs and outputs, and on how mediating factors—such as
teacher competency and teacher behaviours—might be directed to support desired
outcomes. Selwyn ( 2010 )—also citing on Biesta—provides a critique of the
emphasis oneffective learningfound in educational technology research, as well as
the related emphasis on the‘state of the art’in educational technology resources and
practices. In the former, we see an abstract focus on how people learn with tech-
nology and a neglect of the social, political, economic, cultural and
historical-material specificities of technology usage. In the latter we see the devel-
opment of visions of perfect systems that fail to account for the actualities of schools
and classrooms. Such approaches are dogged by the realities of education where a
‘best practice’will not necessarily translate into predicted learning outcomes or even
be seen as desirable within a particular educational setting. The discursive politics of
such inquiries is rarely helpful. Technicist approaches to educational technology
research position practising teachers and students and their everyday classrooms as
inadequate. They favour the reproduction of knowledge and skills (and indeed
existing power relations) despite an often-stated focus on innovation, and they fail to
connect to what might be innovative in the everyday. These approaches emerge
from undisclosed normative politics and agendas of reproduction that foreground
deficiencies and failure, and that blind us to emergent practices and the small‘i’
innovation that is the mainstay of contemporary classrooms.
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