Reassembling teachers’ professional practice: an ethnography of intertextual hierarchies in primary mathematics

Abstract

The formation of teachers' professional practice has been discussed in relation to a wide variety of influences, with government prescription of practice often criticised as oppressing professional agency. Set within an ethnographic study within one English primary school, this paper explores the role of intertextuality in the form of intertextual hierarchies during a policyled period of change to teachers' professional practice: the introduction of a new way of teaching mathematics. Drawing on actor-network theory and literacy studies, we trace the stages of the translation of the new method from policy into practice, through the intertextual hierarchies which carry this knowledge across policy/practice boundaries. We highlight the crucial role of texts as actors within a remodelling of professional practice. Describing how the socio-material use and creation of texts leads to localisation of policies, we lend hope to schools in terms of their own agency within government-driven agendas. Data reported on draws primarily on fieldwork notes and document analysis, enhanced by semi-structured interviews with 3 of the 12 research participants.

Immunitas and (un)desirable teacher knowledge in teacher education

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Teaching through the cloud: An ethnography of the role of cloud‐based collaborative technologies in the formation of teachers' classroom practices

“…Unsworth and Tummons (2021) have spoken to limitations in the language and tools of ANT in describing how texts are used and created. We pointed out that many moments in the teachers' professional lives were centered around the creation and use of texts.…”

Expanding student access to field experiences: Virtual ethnographic field schools

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