Abstract

Conceptualizations of teacher learning at school have stressed the role of cognitive and individual processes, especially beliefs, knowledge, and reflection on practice, with material and social conditions being deemed less relevant. Schools are populated by various objects, artifacts, and technologies that organize social life, determining teachers' possibilities of learning and psychological change. Several theories have recently been advanced to shed light on the involvement of materiality in educational change and teacher learning processes, understanding objects in an ambivalent manner, either as means or as agents of teachers' activities. However, these theories have been unable to convincingly account for the role of objects in teachers' learning. Thus, the objective of this article is to raise a dialogical view of objects, drawing on certain concepts advanced by Mikhail M. Bakhtin, with the aim of offering a theoretical framework to understand their role in teachers' learning at school from a materialistic point of view. We assert that objects, as historical creative objectification of social experience, actively establish dialogical relations with people and other objects through people, prompting responses and contestations of a different kind. As teacher learning is a developmental and creative process that unfolds through discourse in time, school objects participate, generatively triggering or delaying this process. We discuss some implications of this proposal for teacher learning at school.