Original version
Curriculum Journal. 2020, 31 (4), 775-791, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/curj.60
Abstract
In a time of strong focus on school development, teachers’ work is increasingly linked to a variety of actors, organisations and stakeholders with different agendas and suggestions for school improvements. This paper explores the different actor constellations that teachers engage with in collaborative knowledge work and the opportunities and constraints such engagements entail. By drawing on ethnographic methods, teams of teachers from one lower secondary school in Norway assigned to developing a local curriculum were followed closely across sites over a year. The analysis, which employs resources from assemblage thinking (AT), shows how new actor constellations spatially relocate teachers’ work in ways that extend their professional roles and responsibilities. The findings also reveal that such work is epistemically demanding because it requires comprehensive collective negotiations and investigative activities from the teachers. The analysis foregrounds insights that contribute to our understanding of changing conditions for knowledge work in the teaching profession.