University teaching practices in local academic workgroups : measuring individuals or tracing change?

![CDATA[In recent years, there has been purposeful shift in the research agenda on academics’ professional learning as university teachers. That shift has been away from explanations based on individual, cognitive and behavioural traditions, to those that are rooted in socio-cultural (Trowler, 2008), socio-material and practice-based (Fenwick, 2010; Reich & Hager, 2014), and social realist understandings of change (Archer, 2007). This is a cluster theories that sees the experiences of academic life and identity – in this case, university teaching – as implicated in the effects of particular structures, discourses, ideas, materials, technologies and politics. In part, the goal is to trace how these elements are assembled, and further, how they produce certain kinds of practices and subjectivities over others, at any one time, that are available and prone to measurement. This makes the measurement of university teaching far more nuanced, inviting questions about what a university should follow (and measure) when looking for the reasons for, and explanations about, changed teaching and curriculum practices.]]