research data without explicit examination of what the referent might be and where
the problematics might lay, then research risks perpetuating undisclosed and
unexamined assumptions. Similarly, following capital‘I’innovations into teaching
and learning settings usually produces researchfindings that are referenced to those
innovations (as degrees of success or failure) rather than to the practices of teachers
and their students. This is not to say that policies and reform agendas developed by
governments, professional bodies, and universities can or should be ignored. In
current times, these policies tend to present technology, teaching and teachers in
technicist ways. Analyses of the material-discursive work of policy texts are useful
because these texts are a material part of teacher education practice. Combining
close-up analyses of activities (what is done and what is said in specific situations
and particular locations) with analyses of how these activities relate to material and
discursive strategies to manage and govern professional practice can help us to
tease out tensions between continuity and change, and to understand how inno-
vation occurs often despite such strategies.
But could policy also be otherwise? Saltmarsh ( 2015 , p. 32) argues that the
“proliferation of heterogeneous practices calls instead for a conception of cultural
policy that creates space for others to operate andflourish.”In relation to educa-
tional technology, such policy would effect a dispersal of the discursively con-
structed centre of innovation as outside of schools and classrooms, recognising that
innovation and change involves multiple sociomaterial negotiations that do notflow
in one direction from top to bottom. Such policy would also be respectful of
teachers’extant abilities and commitments and the productive cultures already
found in schools, and would support visions of innovation as messy and unpro-
grammable and as central to the everyday work of teachers and schools.
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