approaches produce familiar criticisms and discursive positionings of teacher
educators as both unprepared and unwilling to change from old ways to new.
So how can teacher education programmes prepare teachers for an unpro-
grammable technological practice? Here I offer two tentative and interrelated points
for consideration, as well as a source of contradiction or doubleness that questions
the whole enterprise of preparing teachers to use technology. First, in an effort to
move ourselves (teacher educators) and our preservice-teacher students beyond the
technicist assumptions that tend to dominate popular understandings and expecta-
tions of teacher preparation, sociomaterial approaches can be supported by
opportunities for explicit engagement with ontological questions. It is very easy to
be seduced into conversations about the latest device or the latest app, but this sort
of conversation needs to be complemented by substantive conversations about the
nature of technology and the nature of technology practice. Myfirst point is to
suggest that teacher education programmes engage preservice teachers in robust,
philosophical debate of questions such as: what is technology? and what is inno-
vation? These types of questions lead us to consider both ontological assumptions
and institutional and historical settings in ways that offer a critique of dominant
positionings of technology, teachers and innovation.
It is one thing to consider in abstract terms the implications of ontologies of
emergence, but it is more powerful to consider this with reference to specific
examples of situated, emergent practice. My second point for consideration is that
teacher education programmes provide opportunities for preservice teachers to
practice technology—this is not a practising of particular operational skills (though
even that would evidence instances of microinnovation if we looked closely
enough), but a usage of materials and tools in ways that make visible thereuseof
technological artefacts. Engaging in both usageandexplicit examination of usage
as reuse may well support the development of operational skills and indeed
knowledge about technology integration as it is commonly understood, but more
importantly it supports the recognition and affirmation of innovation in the
everyday. Teacher educators and preservice teachers may well engage in practices
that are novel in obvious ways (e.g. using a new device within an established
curriculum area), but we should also be invited to notice the novel in the everyday.
This type of work provides both critical and productive spaces, where preservice
teachers in dialogue with teacher educators can develop their own critiques of
commonly held assumptions and their own ways of introducing difference into
institutionalised ways of doing teaching and learning. This type of work can also be
complemented by opportunities for inquiry into the everyday microinnovations of
others—for example, that of children’s everyday use of technologies in schools and
in homes.
These points taken together might support preservice teachers to develop their
own practice-oriented thinking and indeed their own teaching-with-technology
practice. However, there is a contradiction that emerges when these two points are
considered side by side and indeed with the whole concept of teacher technology
practice. The types of engagements that I suggest here—those concerning onto-
logical questions around technology—almost always lead us to an understanding
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