50.4 Alternate Understandings of Teacher Technology
Practice
Education researchers working with practice theory draw on theoretical resources
that are diverse in their genesis but often cognate in their onto-epistemological
sensibilities (Lynch et al. 2017 ). Practice theory provides alternatives to technicist
understandings of practice. Through dialogues between onto-epistemological con-
siderations and close-up empirical engagements, research informed by practice
theory supports the production of new understandings of what professional practice
is, how it comes to be, and how it might change (Lynch et al. 2017 ). One mani-
festation of practice theory that has proved efficacious in relation to understanding
technology practices is the sociomaterialism described by Fenwick ( 2012 ), where:
- Practice is understood as material, embodied and relational;
- Practice formations are understood as contingent, requiring ongoing socioma-
terial negotiations; and, - Enquiries into practice resist the bracketing off of particular entities and locales
as taken for granted or as mere context to the matter in focus, and instead seek to
trace the sociomaterial movements that together work to constitute, for example,
a technological artefact as practised.
From this view of practice, all entities—human and nonhuman—are understood
as emerging in relation with diverse arrays of sociomatter—with people, with tools,
with texts, with happenings past and future. Within educational technology
research, sociomaterial approaches lead us to examine how new materials and tools
become configured through practice within institutionalised settings such as schools
and classrooms: that is, how they manifest in relation with other elements, how
these relations are enacted and maintained and how reconfiguration occurs. Such
approaches bring into view how the introduction of new technologies into class-
rooms necessarily articulates with other aspects of classroom practice (including
more traditional information and communication technologies) in complex ways,
thus highlighting the artificiality of a distinction between teachers’technology work
and their other work.
Close attention to the specificity of practice and the ongoing co-constitution of
entities supports new understandings of innovation as an everyday occurrence that
affirms the productive everyday work of teachers and students. These alternative
understandings are quite distinct from technicist conceptualisations of innovation as
introduced into afield of practice from elsewhere. Influential cultural theorist,
Michel de Certeau, provides a conceptualisation of everyday practice that is useful
here, where the everyday usage of cultural products is seen as a productive
re-deployment, characterised by microinnovations. Within de Certeau’s conceptu-
alisation, usage of machines, tools, techniques and ideas is never a straightforward
implementation—a transference of some imagined, ideal usage into a particular site
—but instead is always a creative act: what de Certeau ( 1984 trans) termedreuse
(see especially Chap. 3 —Making do’: Uses and tactics—and also thefinal chapter
746 J. Lynch