In Europe today, the pace of change is so fast, “that every teacher needs to keep her practice under constant, critical review and adjust it in the light of students’ outcomes…”. Teachers should offer individualized teaching “so that all learners achieve specified outcomes”. (European Commission 2012, p. 5). The European policy rhetoric, as well as other transnational policy discourses (OECD 2005, Barber & Mourshed 2007), emphasize the teachers as having the most important impact on the performance of their students within educational institutions. It is reasonable to say that there is a strong transnational policy pressure in European countries to focus on the role of the teacher and on student performance. What we know less about is how this pressure on the results and grades affect teachers' social environment in today's society marked by digital communications.

The purpose of this paper is thus to examine how perspectives of transactional realism and materialism can contribute to a more complete understanding of factors within and outside the institutional environment of school that form different but overlapping networks for teachers, potentially affecting their room for action.  The research question we will explore in this paper is: What factors contribute to shape the relations constituting the social environment for the teacher in the task of grading, with the potential to affect her space of agency?

The theoretical framework of this paper is based on John Dewey’s view of transactional realism and on the more recent understanding of materialism and actor-network theory, represented by Bruno Latour.  Dewey (1925/1981, 1938/1991) was engaged in the reconstruction of realism (Sleeper 1986/2001, p. 7), but as Westbrook (2005, p. 40) notes, it was a “piecemeal realism” Dewey argued for. This means that there are things that are existentially real, but they are not real in any essentialist way, instead they are “contingently real objects”, not “permanently real” (Sleeper 1986/2001 p. 147). Dewey’s logic of theory and piecemeal realism means that the “world” is influenced through our actions and vice versa. The reality “is in the transactions among all those events that participate in the context including the participation of inquirer” (Garrison 1994, p. 13).

The sociologist Latour (2011, p. 11) writes that Dewey “invented reflexive modernization before the expression was coined”. The actor-network theory (ANT) examines how heterogeneous networks connects and manages to hold together, more or less temporarily, and enact economic, political and social phenomena or effects. As formulated within ANT, reality is enacted in practice: “ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day to day, sociomaterial practices” (Mol, 2002, p. 6). Consequently, performances have to do with material processes taking place continuously, which draws attention to materiality and multiplicity, and posing questions about ‘conflicting realities’. This also means that different objects, including human subjects, will take different form in different places and practices. So instead of asking ‘How do teachers do when they make judgment on grades?’ a more pertinent question might be ‘Where are grades?’, implying that entities of grading take different form in different places and therefore it is relevant to trace the socio-material processes where, in this case, grading occurs as performances in webs of relations (Mulcahy 2012).  In this sense, grades and grading do not function as a representation of a fixed reality, or as different perspectives of a fixed reality, but as different realities enacted in different spaces, with different functions and consequences.

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