Internationally, guidelines for distance education advise the use of feedback from students in designing and redesigning materials. As my own attempt to elicit such feedback was an instructive failure, I decided to draw on theorisations of pedagogy, mediation and subjectivity and on international and local (South African) conceptualisations of a knowledge base for teacher education, together with Halliday's work in systemic functional linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen's work in social semiotics, to devise a framework for what I have termed a critical pedagogic analysis of distance learning materials. I argue that such an analysis can assist materials designers and evaluators to uncover the subject positions constituted for readers of distance learning materials and that this is a worthwhile project because particular subject positions may affect readers' “investment” in their studies and in improving their classroom practice. After giving a brief account of the “feedback failure” and what I learned from it, I outline each “element” of the analytic framework and illustrate its use with examples from an analysis of three sets of South African teacher education materials.