Reassembling teachers’ professional practice: an ethnography of intertextual hierarchies in primary mathematics

ABSTRACT The formation of teachers’ professional practice has been discussed in relation to a wide variety of influences, with government prescription of practice often criticised as oppressing professional agency. Set within an ethnographic study within one English primary school, this paper explores the role of intertextuality in the form of intertextual hierarchies during a policy-led period of change to teachers’ professional practice: the introduction of a new way of teaching mathematics. Drawing on actor-network theory and literacy studies, we trace the stages of the translation of the new method from policy into practice, through the intertextual hierarchies which carry this knowledge across policy/practice boundaries. We highlight the crucial role of texts as actors within a remodelling of professional practice. Describing how the socio-material use and creation of texts leads to localisation of policies, we lend hope to schools in terms of their own agency within government-driven agendas.