This presentation explores dialogical, phenomenological, and post-human approaches to the study of teaching practices, asking 1) how the three approaches offer theoretical work that could inform the understanding of subject-specific teaching practices, 2) what the implications of the three approaches are for subject-specific research methodology (data generation and analysis), and 3) what the complementary potentials and limitations of the three approaches are for research and practice. So, a dialogical approach to teaching practices is indebted to the work of Bakhtin; it would emphasize a communicative, or semiotic, understanding of teaching that establishes the ‘utterance’s content-form-function triad’ as the minimum unit of analysis for understanding how subjects operate as dynamic ‘genres’ (Bakhtin, 1986; Ongstad, 2004). An indicative research example from subject-specific writing research is offered for illustration (Jakobsen & Krogh, 2019). While a phenomenological approach to practice acknowledges the communicative nature of teaching, it would also highlight experienced non-semiotic and non-cognitive aspects of teaching practices, which students and teachers are initiated to ‘do’ and ‘relate to’ in subject-specific practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014; Schatzki, 2017). Data from an intervention study focusing on the teaching of literature from a phenomenological perspective are used as an indicative research example (Elf, 2021). Finally, a posthuman approach to practices would also expect teaching practices to occur in communicative ways, however claiming that intentionality is limited, and that it is relatively unpredictable how practices will (un)fold (Deleuze, 2004). As recent video-based classroom research from L1/Language arts classrooms illustrate (eg. Jusslin, 2020), new methods for grasping the agentive role of non-human actors, such as technology and artefacts, may illuminate hitherto unknown affective aspects of subject-specific teaching practices. For discussion, I argue that all three approaches basically acknowledge that an interaction order of teaching and more specifically subject-specific teaching exists. However, the analysis of the three approaches’ illuminate that they rely on different onto-epistemologies that allow for different ways of exploring ‘the order’. This includes differences in assumptions on the way disciplinary communication works, how subject-specific practices are constructed, and the way the human subject or, more broadly, actors are looked upon as part and parcel of the practice of subject-specific teaching practices. As such, they may reveal quite different, yet equally valid, qualities of a subject that could guide teachers and teaching.

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