Tara Fenwick

Within the increased flexible, contracted work in cities, employment is negotiated through network arrangements characterised by multiplicity, mobility and fluidity. For black and minority ethnic group members, this network labour becomes fraught as they negotiate both their own communities, which can be complex systems of conflicting networks, as well as non-BME networks which can be exclusionary. This discussion explores the networking experiences of BME individuals who are self-employed in portfolio work arrangements in Canada. The analysis draws from a theoretical frame of ‘racialisation’ (Mirchandani and Chan, 2007) to examine the social processes of continually constructing and positioning the Other as well as the self through representations in these networks. These positions and concomitant identities enroll BME workers in particular modes of social production, which order their roles and movement in the changing dynamics of material production in networked employment.

In considering two extended examples of educational reform efforts, this discussion traces relations that become visible through analytic approaches associated with actor-network theory (ANT). The strategy here is to present multiple readings of the two examples. The first reading adopts an ANT approach to follow ways that all actors – human and non-human entities, including the entity that is taken to be ‘educational reform’ – are performed into being through the play of linkages among heterogeneous elements. Then, further readings focus not only on the material practices that become enacted and distributed, but also on the otherings that occur: the various fluid spaces and ambivalent belongings that create actor-network(s) but also escape them. For educational research, particularly in educational reform and policy, it is argued that ANT analyses are particularly useful to examine the complex enactments in these dynamics. That is, ANT can illuminate movements of ordering and disordering that occur through minute socio-material connections in educational interventions. ANT readings also can discern, within these attempts to order people and practices, the spaces of flux and instability that enable and protect alternate possibilities.

Co-production, typically defined as services and products that are planned and delivered in full conjunction with clients, has become a popular policy discourse and prescription for professional practice across a wide range of public services. Literature tends to herald the democratic and even transformative potential of co-production, yet there is little empirical evidence of its processes and negotiations at the ‘chalkface’ of everyday practice. This article adopts a sociomaterial theoretical frame of professional knowing-in-practice to analyse these negotiations, drawing from a case study of community policing. The argument is situated in terms of implications of these co-production practices for professional learning.

Key words
Sociomaterial theory, co-production, policing practice, professional learning, professional knowing-in-practice

Drawing on studies of teachers, accountants and pharmacists conducted in Canada, this article examines models for assessing professional learning that currently enjoy widespread use in continuing education. These models include professional growth plans, self-administered tests, and learning logs, and they are often used for regulatory as well as developmental purposes by professional associations. The essay argues what others have critiqued about such self-assessment models: that their assumptions about learning are problematic and limiting in a number of respects, privileging human consciousness and intention, and literally ‘making’ a particular professional subject that is atomised and conservative. The discussion suggests alternative perspectives that are receiving increasing attention in theorising work-related learning and that may offer fruitful questions for re-considering the nature of professional learning and its assessment. Three perspectives in particular are outlined, all of which shift the focus from the learning subject to practice as material, emergent and systemic: complexity theory, actor-network theory and cultural-historical activity theory. The discussion concludes with possible approaches to assessment of professional practice suggested by these perspectives.