Sustaining pedagogic innovation in vocational education settings: an actor-network theory account

Market based approaches to education reform have gained 'grip' in the vocational education and training (VET) sector in Australia. In VET policy discourse, innovation is taken to be the main means of achieving this reform. Accordingly, innovation holds pride of place in the neoliberal reform program currently reshaping the VET system, and what VET educators do. However, neoliberal ideologies do not always 'fit' with local pedagogic practices and may serve to constrain rather than foster innovation. Given the pre-eminence of innovation in VET policy and management discourse, this 'lack of fit' is a policy problem.

Drawing on key concepts from the practice-based approach of actor-network theory, this study sets out to critically examine how pedagogic innovation is understood and practiced in VET. An investigation of four cases of pedagogic innovation attends chiefly to what makes pedagogic practices innovative, and how they might be fostered and sustained in VET settings. These are critical questions for a sector in the midst of tumultuous reform and under scrutiny for its capacity to innovate and produce innovative workers.

In contrast with innovation as diffusion (Rogers, 2005), innovation as translation (Latour, 1987, Callon, 1986) is tendered as a productive way to think and practice innovation. In the empirical analyses, pedagogic innovation presents as improvised, tenuous and emergent enactments in which spatiality, affectivity and distant policies play a constitutive part.

Innovative pedagogies are not packages of learning transactions, or the diffusion of knowledge and skills, as current policy framings have it. Rather, they are co-constitutive knowledge creating practices which are entangled in pedagogic networks consisting of surprisingly complex and powerful actors. What matters most to their 'innovativeness' is 'who and what' are enrolled in the networks.

Care emerges as the dominant practice the four educators use to make sense of the complex forces impacting on their pedagogic work and to ensure the best outcomes they can for learners.

This study concludes that neoliberal framings of pedagogic innovation, with their predilection for competitive markets, quality regimes and control 'from above' (Bathmaker and Avis, 2013), run counter to the relational, material and caring practices that predominate in everyday pedagogic work. Opportunities for pedagogic innovation emerge in the tensions and when innovative learning and practices of inquiry are embedded in the professional being of educators. They are also possible when the responsibility for innovation is shared beyond the immediate domain of pedagogic work.

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