This paper explores how UK early career academics (ECAs) develop their teaching practice from both social and material perspectives, drawing on the experiences of ECAs and practices of academic developers.

The “early career academic” terminology varies significantly across European higher education (HE) contexts in terms of “early career” period, contract type, and primary responsibilities (research, teaching, or a combination of both). This study focuses on ECAs with teaching duties - commonly called lecturers, assistant professors, or teaching fellows, who typically carry the heavy load of undergraduate and postgraduate delivery. However, their teaching practice often concurs with multiple and increasing pressures of the contemporary neoliberal academy (Crutchley et al., 2021; Tight, 2019), where ECAs are expected to “shine on all fronts of the profession” (Heijstra et al., 2017, p. 770) and produce high-quality research outputs and commit to public engagement and community service. Moreover, many novice ECAs start teaching with limited or no formative academic teaching preparation on how to design courses, assess student learning, or facilitate large classrooms (Harland, 2020), while some are required to teach outside of their research expertise (Mathieson et al., 2024).

Excessive workloads and precarious contracts further complicate these challenges. For instance, UK lecturers and teaching fellows work beyond their contractual hours, average 50 full-time equivalent (FTE) hours per week (UCU, 2022), and “constantly find themselves working against time” (Rowell & Morris, 2023, p. 39). This naturally leaves little room for teaching upskilling or investment in meaningful pedagogical development (Leathwood & Read, 2022).

To support ECAs and ensure a baseline level of university teaching quality, various universities offer academic development programmes such as Postgraduate Certificate of Academic Practice (PgCAP) or professional recognition schemes based on national sector-wide initiatives like UK PSF - Professional Standard Framework (Advance HE, 2023). As most of the ECA learning-to-teach happens on the job (Harland, 2020), available PgCAP provision in the UK often fails to comprehensively address the lived realities of ECAs (Mathieson et al., 2024). Recent studies tend to evaluate PgCAPs and explore ECA first teaching experiences (Crutchley et al., 2021) separately, yet little is known about how ECA teaching development is enacted holistically, i.e. considering 1) both training and teaching practice, and 2) perspectives of ECAs and academic developers together. This study goes beyond that gap by aiming to map the sociomaterial practices that enact the diverse, messy, and complex ways of becoming an ECA teacher (Crutchley et al., 2021).

This study employs Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a lens to trace those sociomaterial practices that enact ECA teaching development through the associations of human (social) and non-human (material) actors. By taking “practice” as a unit of analysis (Moura & Bispo, 2020), sociomateriality illuminates the everyday materiality often overlooked in anthropocentric educational research, offering a deeper insight into the entanglements of educational practices (MacLeod & Ajjawi, 2020). ANT views human and non-human actors as equivalent (or symmetrical) in their capacity to exert agency (Latour, 2005). Hence, educational practices are seen as fluid and contingent more-than-human actor-networks that come into being through translation (Callon, 1986) and produce relational network effects such as knowledge, identity, power, development, or experience (Law & Hassard, 2007). As a result, ANT provides a robust framework and a methodological toolbox to trace how dynamic webs of heterogeneous actors translate (or not) into ECA teaching development.

This paper seeks to address the following research questions:

• RQ1. How is ECA teaching development experienced and practised?
• RQ2. What sociomaterial (f)actors contribute to the teaching development of ECAs, how are those interrelated, and what effects do those produce?

This ANT-based study adopted ethnographic methodology (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) that helps to “follow the actors themselves” (Latour, 2005, p. 12) to trace how the existing sociomaterial practices of academic development and academic work - materialising both in physical and virtual spaces - translated (or not) into ECA teaching development. Additionally, to chart the development across time, the research design took a longitudinal approach spanning one academic year and employed various ethnographic qualitative research methods, such as 1) diaries, 2) mapping interviews, 3) observations, and 4) photovoice. The study targeted ECAs enrolled in academic development programmes and academic developers delivering those. The participants (human actors) were recruited from two distinct UK universities to facilitate a comparative analysis of how broader contextual and institutional (f)actors affect the practices and experiences of development. Due to the longitudinal nature of the research, the diverse range of methods employed, and the expected participant workload, the sample for this qualitative study was relatively small - four ECAs (N=4) from different disciplines and four academic developers (N=4). Throughout the study, the ECAs were asked to log diary entries based on significant (positive and negative) events, interactions, and activities in their learning-to-teach journey. They could share their observations, feelings, and meanings through text, imagery, or short audio and video recordings. Over three semi-structured interviews, each ECA created and amended an individual mind map of all the people and things with which they interacted weekly to identify the contributing social and material (f)actors (Fenwick & Nimmo, 2015). Simultaneously, academic developers participated in a photovoice activity - a photo-elicitation technique that allowed them to capture the materiality of their professional practice. During mapping interviews, they followed up on their photovoice reflections and extended the sociomaterial map of their professional practices. Also, academic developers were invited to create a mind map based on their beliefs regarding the sociomaterial (f)actors that contribute to ECA teaching development. Finally, observations of face-to-face and online participant interactions complemented the interviews and diaries and helped triangulate the generated data. As this is a work-in-progress, all data is expected to be analysed using Visual Network Analysis (VNA) and represented as aggregated maps of actor-networks that compose the practice under investigation (Decuypere, 2020). The diversity of research methods is expected to elicit thick descriptions and link rich data across geographical spaces, times, and different actors, offering a more nuanced and holistic perspective on “experiencing” and “practising” ECA teaching development.

This exploratory study aims to provide new insights into how UK ECAs learn to teach and how assemblages of interconnected social and material (f)actors contribute to their teaching journeys. By adopting the ANT ontological stance, the research traces how the interrelations of human and non-human actors - such as academic module content, institutional policies, student feedback, course planning digital platform, mode of PgCAP delivery, or teaching observation peers - shape ECAs’ academic development and work. The findings are expected to highlight the serendipity of ECAs’ learning, the significance of academic developers’ role-modelling, discipline-specific research-led teaching, and (in)formal peer interactions in ECA teaching development. In this scenario, it is viewed as a non-linear, messy, networked, and materially embedded process, where the disciplinary epistemologies, teaching philosophies, academic practice, and academic developers’ support are inseparable. Consequently, this study advocates for more structured, adequate, and holistic support for ECAs that can potentially inform academic development practices and guide institutional or department-level policymaking across European HE institutions, especially as they navigate the European Universities Initiative and the ongoing trends of neoliberalisation, massification, and internationalisation of higher education. Beyond its practical implications, this paper contributes to the under-explored post-humanist perspective on academic development, offering an extension and critical appraisal of concepts and the suitability of ANT in educational research. Additionally, it offers methodological innovation by synthesising VNA and ANT into a visual illustration of findings through VNA, allowing for a more holistic approach to reveal structural patterns and elicit the missing areas in ECAs’ learning-to-teach trajectories. Ultimately, this work aspires to advance both theoretical understanding and practical strategies for supporting ECAs, ensuring their teaching development is better integrated, supported, and valued within the broader academic landscape.

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