Reassembling academic work: a sociomaterial investigation of academic learning

Abstract

Academic work is changing fast, as is the work of other professionals, because of challenges such as accountability and regulations frameworks and globalised academic markets. Such changes also have consequences for everyday academic practice and learning. This paper seeks to explore some of the ways in which academic work is changing by opening the 'black-box' of everyday academic work and examining the enactment of academics' everyday learning. The paper draws on a study of everyday academic practice in the social sciences with respect to the institution, the department and the discipline. Assuming a sociomaterial sensibility, the study also sought to understand how academics' learning is enacted in everyday work. Within three universities, fourteen academics were workshadowed; social, material, technological, pedagogic and symbolic actors were observed and, where possible, connections and interactions were traced. The paper illuminates through two stories from the study how specific practices and meanings of disciplinary academic work are negotiated, configured and reconfigured within and beyond the department or meso-level, attending to resistance and rejection as well as accommodation and negotiation. The paper responds to educational concerns of professional (here, academic) learning by foregrounding both the assembling and reassembling of academic work and the enactment of learning.

Borderlanders: academic staff being and becoming doctoral students

“…This challenges dual-status academics to take responsibility for managing their paired roles as well as doing this within intensified interpersonal relationships. One positive development that did emerge is that as participants gained more confidence as researchers, so their researcher self became more integrated with their professional self as they assembled and reassembled their identities (Zukas and Malcolm 2019).…”

Am I Promoting Feedback Cycle and Sociomaterial Learning?

“…Writing instructors may also find themselves in unfamiliar disciplinary territories (Willey & Tanimoto, 2013. This is further complicated by higher education evolving into a transactional site, where the quality of learning is determined by measured accountability and performance of academic staff and the satisfaction of students -standards may not necessarily be the most relevant or supportive of student's learning (Zukas & Malcolm, 2019).…”

“…Conversely, the practitioner-researcher could always use WCF given to students' essays to indicate that teaching was actually carried out. These reasons are indicative of the performativity that one needs to enact, in order to convince stakeholders, including students, that work is actually being done (Orland- Barak, 2005;Zukas & Malcolm, 2019). Although such performativity may ensure the stability of the practitioner-researcher's position and provide evidence for accountability (Wei & Cao, 2020), it may not necessarily lead to students' extensive learning or even the practitioner-researcher's professional development.…”

Unfocused Written Corrective Feedback for Academic Discourse: The Sociomaterial Potential for Writing Development and Socialization in Higher Education

“…Viewing unfocused WCF as having sociomaterial potential positions students as having the agency to interact with social and material entities encountered in the writing process (Nieminen et al, 2021). It also recognizes that students' feedback interactions are not simply confined to their teachers; rather, students are viewed as social actors with the capacity to disrupt or even reject educational notions preferred or promoted by their teachers or the institutions (Zukas & Malcolm, 2019).…”