Change and obduracy in university teaching practices: tracing agency in professional development

Abstract

Research into effectiveness of teaching practices and professional development invites questions of teaching and learning change: how it takes effect and is accounted for, and where its agency is claimed and contested across a range of institutional, disciplinary and pedagogical actors. This article investigates change in teaching practices and professional development through the notion of obduracy (Law, 2003): ordered arrangements that persist in the background and surface in a process of change. In focussing on practice as the object of inquiry, this study is part of a shift away from the study of professional learning drawing on individualist, cognitive traditions towards practice-oriented understandings of change and agency as an effect of social and material arrangements. The setting for this study of teaching practice is two disciplinary academic collectives, or workgroups, in one Australian university. Rather than approaching change as a human-centred and intentional process, the method of sociomaterial tracing was applied to teaching practice undergoing an institutional change process. The study highlights the process in which change is assembled, resisted or accomplished through heterogeneous networks of curriculum, discourses, technologies, and policies. Teaching and learning change, it is argued, involves recognising how obduracy is embedded in distinct networks across the university. The contribution of this study is to draw attention to the agentic role of materials and spaces in the negotiation and stabilisation of teaching practices and in approaches to professional development.

Using teaching and learning regimes in the international classroom to encourage student re-subjectification

“…A TLR is inherent in the everyday practices of teaching and learning that are corporally and symbolically expressed or performed in different moments of social interaction (Hannon et al, 2017). For Trowler (2009, the eight moments are: power relations, implicit theories of learning and teaching, conventions of appropriateness, recurrent practices, tacit assumptions, codes of signification, discursive repertoires, and subjectivities in interaction.…”

Reassembling academic work: a sociomaterial investigation of academic learning

“…For example, Trowler (2008) has made the case for studying 'workgroups' (usually below the level of department) where curriculum planning and other task-based teams set out with a unified focus to bring about some change. Hannon (2016) is also interested in learning, change and what he terms 'obduracy' (after Law, 2003) particularly in university teaching and learning contexts. Having noted that theories of change in universities assume that change (and learning) happens through an orderly, coordinated and integrated process, even if resistance and difficulties occur along the way, he argues that this is not the case: 'an array of disparate elements … interact in unpredictable and 'messy' ways ' (2016, p. 4).…”