in de Certeau’s 1974 (trans) bookCulture in the Plural). This framing of usage
provides us with an understanding of everyday practice as necessarily and always
innovative—involving an ongoing, improvised and often playful negotiation and
remix of materials and ideas—and an understanding of innovation as a prolific and
ubiquitous phenomenon.
The language frequently used in government educational technology policies
and interventions—for example, metaphors such as‘road maps’and‘blue prints’—
isflawed from a sociomaterial view of educational technology. This language
implies that a pathway to a particular vision can be mapped out in advanced and
specified in detailed and predictable ways, that practiceflows in a linear manner
from policy, and that practice can be measured and tracked in non-problematic
ways. Sociomaterial views of innovation suggest that we need new ways of
thinking about educational change and technology that are quite distinct from the
technological determinism that infuses education policy and the discursive politics
that position teachers as underprepared or resistant receivers of innovation. Rowan
( 2012 ) offers an alternative view of change in her discussion of equity reform,
arguing that microinnovation and iterative change in schools is a more likely
scenario than large-scale reform by external intervention. Rowan puts teachers at
the centre of this type of change, which she argues occurs when teachers employ
axiological dispositions based on suspicion of essentialist claims and recognition of
the active production of meanings. Within this view, meanings are not produced by
individuals but are co-produced and“policed”(p. 57) in multiple ways. Because
they are produced, they are contingent (rather than essential), but because their
production is brought about via complex, interrelated entities and operations, these
meanings are difficult to change. Consistent with an understanding of innovation as
everyday, Rowan advocates change via a“ceaseless introduction of difference”
(p. 61), a characterisation not dissimilar to the everyday proliferation of difference
observed by de Certeau.
While most research literature focusing on new technologies in education can be
characterised as technicist in its assumptions and as perpetuating reductive and
misleading views of teacher technology practice, close-up enquiries into educa-
tional practices do attest to the existence and value of everyday innovation; though
often such enquiries do not take new technology as their starting points. For
example, Handsfield et al. ( 2010 ) undertook a microethnographic approach to
investigating preservice teachers’literacy education pedagogy, focusing on what
they term“the microscopic and everyday”(p. 405) and drawing on theoretical
resources provided by Bakhtin and de Certeau. Their combination of“syncretic
theoretical framing and micro-level analytical approach”(p. 408) supported an
analysis of the interactions between structuring forces and everyday micro-level
operations, such as teachers’creative adaptation of curriculum resources and policy
narratives. Similarly, Lynch and Herbert ( 2015 , p. 300) drew upon de Certeau’s
conceptualisation of everyday practice to recast what might have been seen as
teachers’failure and resistance to innovate in science education. Instead, they
refigure divergence from top-down initiatives as evidence of teachers’“tactical
redeployment of available discursive (and material) resources”. This supports a
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