The European Commission stimulates interdisciplinary subject clustering and team-teaching (EC, 2017). European countries are introducing curriculum changes in this direction. The case of the curriculum reform in Finland, which first made the news worldwide for a supposed abolishment of the school subjects altogether (Gardner, 2015), and afterwards as a case of overblown news (Strauss, 2015), is a fascinating example (FNBE, 2016; Braskén, Hemmi & Kurtén, 2019).

In this paper, a study of the teachers’ practice resulting from a curriculum change towards interdisciplinarity in Flemish Belgium is presented, where the conceptual framework of the actor-network theory (Latour, 1987, 2000, 2005) has provided inspiration for the analysis of the collected qualitative data.

While other studies have considered curriculum making and the discourse around curriculum reforms from an actor-network perspective (Refea, 1999; Elgali & Kalman, 2010; Carroll, 2018), in this work the concept of actor-network is used to analyse the (discourse in the) everyday practice of secondary school teachers in a case of implemented curriculum change.

Our work is placed in a critical agenda aiming at challenging curriculum changes that are possibly not enough thought-out. Underlying today’s educational reforms is an idea of what the learner must learn and be able to do for the needs of society. However, the pillar of school education (Masschelein & Simons, 2012) is today still the figure of the (subject matter) teacher sharing things of the world with young people (Ardui et al., 2012). Starting from the assumption of the importance of this figure, we ask how reforms affect the subject matter teacher, and how this impacts school education.

While large-scale studies have taken place by interviews with teachers, pointing out that societal requirements and continuous reforms put teachers under pressure (Galton & MacBeath, 2008), in this work we investigate one case of curriculum change in great detail by document study, observation in schools and actor analysis, achieving a description of the position of the teacher in the new educational practice and of the mechanism putting teachers under pressure.

In Belgian Flanders the trend of subject clustering and team-teaching underlies aspects of a large-scale modernisation of secondary education started in September 2019 (Eurydice, 2019). This reform eliminates the obligation to organize secondary education according to specific school subjects, opening the way to all forms of interdisciplinary clustering and team-teaching (Flemish Ministry of Education, 2018). The study presented in this paper focuses on a small-scale but radical curriculum change being a precursor of the large-scale reform taking place today. In 2006, the largest network of schools in Flanders introduced, in one curriculum for secondary technical education, an innovative school subject being a competency-based cluster of Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Food & Nutrition and Self-Expression taught by an interdisciplinary team of teachers (Catholic Education Flanders, 2015). This concrete case of contemporary educational construction remained unstudied for several years. In the meantime, the voice started to rise from practice that this innovative school subject was problematic to realise for schools and teachers. Responding to the outcry of teachers, we studied this case by document analysis (Tamassia & Frenssen, 2019) and participant observation. In the presentation we focus on our data analysis, conceptually inspired by the actor-network theory in a practice-oriented context, and on the description of the position of the teacher we obtained (Frenssen & Tamassia, 2019).

We considered the following research questions (RQ): 1a) What actors are present in the observed practice? 1b) In whose name do they speak? 1c) What are their actions? 1d) On whom are these actions exerted? 2) What is the position of the individual (subject matter) teacher as an actor in the observed practice?

Introduction Our (didactic) practice-oriented project setup did not originally include an actor-network analysis. Document study and observations had not been performed for this purpose. The bizarre structure of the new school subject, the ‘semantic disappearance’ of the teacher in official documents, together with the ‘refusal’ by teachers to interact with students in the classroom, led to an awareness that we had stumbled into some interesting, possibly overlooked phenomenon. We had kept broad, detailed field diaries. We divided the raw data in narrative fragments, which could not be made public in a local context, even when anonymized, without a risk to bring teachers in trouble. While trying to structure the data in a more abstract, non-narrative way, the idea came to perform an actor-network analysis. The choice for this ‘drier’ approach would allow to structure and make results public in a ‘very anonymous’ way, and to highlight the role of actors other than teachers in the ‘innovated’ practice. 1. Document analysis of public records (policy artefacts): Teacher handbook, professional development material (Catholic Education Flanders), learning goals, inspection reports/documents (Flemish Ministry of Education) and lesson timetables studied by symmetry arguments, semantic searches, logical implication. 2. Observation in 3 schools with different implementation of curriculum change: - In each 3-4 teachers implementing an integrated task in the classroom (1 day/week, 2-6 weeks according to school, including teacher team meetings). In the school with the longest task: 56 lesson hours observed (36 in classroom, 20 in meetings). - Learning material development and try-out by teacher teams. - Two project events with teachers and researchers. - School practice artefacts (learning material) and project practice artefacts (e-mail correspondence, meeting reports). - Focus: teachers’ practice in school. Other actors considered when interacting with teachers or mentioned by teachers. - Participation: in classroom, researchers interacted with students when allowed by teachers. In one school the researcher fulfilled other tasks in problematic situations. During project events and learning material development, researchers were participant observers. 3. Data analysis - Informed by document study. - Raw data organised in approximately 100 fragments. - 14 actors identified (RQ 1a). - 4 actors observed only in one school (in incidents) removed from general analysis. - Actor-action table built (RQ 1b, 1c, 1d). - Actors connected by actions visualised in network (RQ 2), with oriented connections (arrows). - ‘Limiting procedure’: sending one actor to zero (= removing actor and his actions, removing decoupled actors).

In Europe curriculum innovation and accountability are changing the teacher profession by changing the position of the teacher in its everyday practice. At the same time, Europe experiences a crisis of the teaching profession, considered to be lacking ‘attractiveness’ (EC 2013). We consider a case of curriculum innovation in Belgian Flanders and, by studying actors and actants in the practice of teachers, we show how the (subject matter) teacher is positioned in the ‘innovated’ practice. We argue that this practice is constructed as a withdrawal of the teacher from interaction with young people. We present a description of the position of the teacher in the form of two twin actor-networks, related to each other by the procedure of eliminating (‘killing’) the actor ‘individual teacher’ and reintroducing it. The actor-network in which the individual teacher has been eliminated describes a practice where the withdrawal of the teacher is completed, but is also meaningful when the individual teacher is very small. The actor-network where the individual teacher is present shows the resistance of this actor to his own withdrawal with respect to pressure exerted by other actors. Since these networks are built with oriented connections, they can display processes. In the network where the individual teacher is eliminated, a flow is visible. It is a productive process where ‘teacher team’, under pressure by four actors, performs labour in order to produce ‘learning material’, an actant interacting with students and becoming, in turn, object of control by pressure-exerting actors. A cycle arises, resulting in learning material implementing an external educational vision better and better in the classroom. This process is a model of school practice without individual teacher, where an actant interacts with students, and where the teacher profession consists in being part of a development team under pressure, alienated from young people.

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