Distance education is being used increasingly for both pre and in-service teacher education in both developed and developing countries (Robinson & Latchem, 2003; Kwapong, 2007; Perraton, 2010). In Rwanda, the Kigali Institute of Education (KIE) introduced its first distance education programme in 2001 with the aim of upgrading the qualifications of under-qualified high school teachers, including those who teach English, using printed materials as the main teaching/learning resource. This study has aimed to investigate the role of the 2010 version of these materials in addressing the professional needs of high school English teachers. It was centrally informed by theories of the sociologist of education, Basil Bernstein (1996, 1999), about curriculum and of the sociocultural psychologist, Lev Vygotsky (1978), on mediation, by Shulman’s (1986, 1987) work on pedagogic content knowledge and by literature on English language teaching, on language teacher education and on distance education materials design. The investigation involved textual analysis of a selection of KIE’s distance education materials for English teaching and focused on the content selected for these materials and on the mediation of this content on the page. After this analysis, one section of these was re-designed by the researcher. Nine teacher-learners enrolled in the programme for English teaching were interviewed to determine their responses to both the KIE materials and to the redesigned section. The findings suggest that Kigali Institute of Education’s distance education materials for English do not adequately address the academic and professional needs of high school English teachers for four main reasons. Firstly, the content selected for the materials does not respond sufficiently to the interests and needs of foreign language teachers of English. Secondly, it is not externally aligned to the curriculum at the level that these teachers are supposed to teach. Thirdly, the mediation of this content does not adequately support the development of subject and pedagogic content knowledge and skills of teacher-learners and encourages surface rather than deep learning (Biggs, 1987). Lastly, with the exception of sections on some literary genres, the materials list useful ideas and language teaching approaches and methods but consistently fail to explain to the teacher-learners how to teach different aspects of language. These findings suggest that these materials do not adequately assist teacher-learners to develop pedagogic content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) for the teaching of English. The limitations identified may result from a lack of knowledge, skills and experience in distance education materials and graphic design among the KIE materials designing team and from inadequate resource provision (including time) by the institution and suggest that there is a need for changes to the KIE distance education materials designing process.

International and local guidelines for designing distance education materials advise designers to use feedback from students in the redesign of their materials. This study is a response to the researcher’s failed attempt to elicit critical feedback from some of her students. It therefore sets out to devise a framework for a critical pedagogic analysis of distance learning materials designed for South African teacher education programmes. It draws on theorisations of pedagogy, principally from the work of the sociologist of education Basil Bernstein and the applied linguist Suresh Canagarajah, theorisations of mediation, originating in the work of Lev Vygotsky, and theorisations of subjectivity. It also draws on international and local conceptualisations of a knowledge base for teacher education. In the analysis of the selection and organisation of knowledge on the page, the study draws on Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and the field of social semiotics to uncover the positions constructed for readers as students and as teachers in each multimodal design. A pedagogic analysis of distance education materials for pre-service or in-service teachers responds to a series of questions: What elements of a knowledge base for teacher education do designers foreground and background? What is the orientation of the materials to the relationship between knowledge and practice? How is knowledge mediated through in-text activities, pedagogic episodes and scaffolded readings? What roles do linguistic and visual design choices play in the mediation of knowledge? A critical pedagogic analysis interrogates the subject positions that the multimodal designs constitute for ideal readers as students and as teachers. In the study, all of these questions frame a detailed analysis of three sets of materials designed for South African teacher education programmes and, finally, a critical reflection on materials for which the researcher was the principal designer. The study concludes that a critical pedagogic analysis affords designers and evaluators the critical distance needed for evaluating the mediation of knowledge(s) and the constitution of readers’ subjectivities in teacher education materials. As an alternative (or in some circumstances, as an addition) to reader feedback it has the potential to inform redesigning for the original local context(s) of use or reversioning for use in broader regional or global contexts.