ABSTRACT
In previous chapters, we drew upon ANT-informed studies to explore separate aspects embedded in networks of ongoing educational practice. In studying planned educational change, such as school improvement projects or curriculum reform initiatives, these aspects usually need to be considered together as they respond to major agendas and interventions that can produce all sorts of anticipated and unanticipated outcomes. ANT has been widely employed in examining planned change in the broad field of organizational studies. However, aside from a few accounts of educational innovation and policy drawing upon ANT, literature on educational change in the main offers little uptake of ANT concepts. This is unfortunate, given ANT’s capacity to trace complex micro-politics and materializing processes that are so central in educational change. Working from ANT and after-ANT concepts and an extended example of educational change, this chapter first addresses the question: what does a network analysis contribute to understanding educational change efforts? It also considers: what can be understood about educational reform by stepping outside a network analysis, which, while important for illuminating certain dynamics, can become a singular and totalizing representation that obscures others? In other words, how might after-ANT readings of educational change help us to appreciate the spaces or blanks beyond networks, the partial and ambivalent belongings, and the otherness that cannot/should not be colonized by a single (networked) account? The argument ensuing from these questions suggests not only that ANT-inspired readings open important questions for researching education, but also that an educational consideration opens useful spaces for the ongoing development of material semiotics and other after-ANT explorations.
