Teacher Education as Academic Work: The Affordances of a Materialist Analysis

Source: Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Volume 44, Issue 4, 2016, Pages 364-378

In this article, the authors argue for paying close attention to the materiality of practice in understanding the work of teacher educators; specifically, the meanings of artefacts used by teacher educators in the course of their daily work.

They locate this analysis within a dialectical materialist understanding of the development of human activity, providing examples of artefacts-in-use in initial teacher education and the meanings accorded to these artefacts by the teacher educators they observed and interviewed.
Their aim is to make a case for what is afforded epistemologically when researchers pay attention to artefacts from a dialectical materialist viewpoint. In the final part of the paper, they argue that paying attention to how teacher educators engage with artefacts can help them understand the unity of psychological and social processes within dominant approaches to teacher education, as well as providing clues about how adaptation of artefacts can drive cultural change.