Table Of ContentChanging Practices, Changing Education
Stephen Kemmis • Jane Wilkinson
Christine Edwards-Groves • Ian Hardy
Peter Grootenboer • Laurette Bristol
Changing Practices,
Changing Education
1 3
Stephen Kemmis Ian Hardy
Charles Sturt University University of Queensland
Wagga Wagga Brisbane
New South Wales Queensland
Australia Australia
Jane Wilkinson Peter Grootenboer
Charles Sturt University Griffith University
Wagga Wagga Queensland
New South Wales Australia
Australia
Laurette Bristol
Institution: Griffith University
Charles Sturt University
Brisbane
Wagga Wagga
Queensland
New South Wales
Australia
Australia
Christine Edwards-Groves
Charles Sturt University
Wagga Wagga
New South Wales
Australia
ISBN 978-981-4560-46-7 ISBN 978-981-4560-47-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-981-4560-47-4
Springer Singapore Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013951821
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Foreword
Few phenomena are as crucial to human life and as tricky to figure out as education.
In recent years the world has witnessed a plethora of efforts to deal with the com-
plexities of this enterprise by specifying common policies and standards as well as
precise performance metrics for all schools located in particular, large-scale (often
national) jurisdictions. The authors of this outstanding new book, Changing Prac-
tices, Changing Education, claim that this approach—which they call New Public
Management—strips education of its proper goal, that of preparing students to live
well in a world worth living in, and transforms education into standardized, factory-
like schooling. The antidote to this baneful effort is the realization that education
always transpires in particular sites and can achieve its promise if it and its trans-
formation are conceptualized as such. The authors acknowledge that the idea that
education always transpires in particular places and should be attended to as such is
not new. What this book brilliantly provides is a new way to understand this truth
and, thereby, a new conception of a path whereby education can fulfil its mission.
This new approach involves reconceptualizing education and the sites where it
occurs through a type of social ontology that has recently been making waves in the
social sciences: practice theory. Ontologies of this type advocate analyzing social
phenomena as composed of practices. Applying the authors’ version of this ontolo-
gy to education and its transformation involves treating education as a complex—or
ecology—of practices, the sites where it transpires as places where practices in-
tersect and develop, and its transformation as a matter of reconfiguring practices,
practice ecologies, and the conditions under which they transpire. The result of this
reconceptualization is a new, insightful grasp of what must occur for education to
realize its promise. Since the book marshals an original version of practice theory, it
also makes an important contribution, not just to educational theory, but to practice
theory itself.
The book well succeeds at its tasks. The elaborate theory exposition provides the
reader with a compelling account of the nature of practices, the semantic, material,
and social arrangements that support practices and prefigure their development,
and the idea that practices form networks that can be likened to living entities. The
authors very nicely conceptualize interdependencies among practices as a matter
of practices providing resources for one another. They also stress the importance
v
vi Foreword
of sites, the fact that practices always transpire in particular places: while practice
architectures—sets of supporting arrangements—are always the arrangements that
support particular practices at particular sites, it is in particular places that practices
exist in ecological configurations. The book thereby adroitly depicts how practices
concretely proceed and hang together.
The book’s version of practice ontology proves its empirical chaps in being put
to work analyzing what the authors call the education complex: learning, teaching,
professional learning, leading, and researching (self-study on the part of teachers
and administrators). These phenomena are analyzed as practices, a tack that so-
metimes yields original delineations, for example, professional learning treated as
practices of developing practices. The authors explore ecological relations among
practices of these five sorts, clairvoyantly revealing how practices of one sort pro-
vide resources for practices of other sorts—in particular classrooms, schools, and
districts. Most intriguing among the many insights that result from treating the edu-
cation complex thus is the authors’ recasting of the venerable question about the
effectiveness of teaching in inducing student learning as a matter of the interde-
pendence, that is, the resource interdependence between particular teaching and
learning practices. The book’s version of the idea that learning is initiation into
practices—in its hands, a Wittgensteinian becoming able go on in practices—is also
most illuminating.
The book concludes with an eloquent elucidation of site based educational de-
velopment, the idea that the realization of education as preparation for living well
in a worthwhile world must be taken up site by site in response to the particular
practices, architectures, and ecologies present in them. Having already traced the
complex architectures of and entanglements among practices in particular classes
and schools, the authors cogently argue that reforming education requires changing
practices class by class, school by school, and that doing this in each case requires
altering the arrangements that support practices in a class or school and transfor-
ming the practice ecologies located there. No doubt a tall order, but a necessary one.
The significance of this exceptional book lies not just in delivering a novel al-
ternative to opponents of the standards and curriculum establishment. It also lies
in demonstrating the value of attending to ontology in empirical research and po-
licymaking. The book provides insightful analyses of schools while also offering
new ways to fill out ideas about education and its path forward. It thereby provides
guidance for education and a lesson for other researchers throughout the social di-
sciplines.
University of Kentucky Theodore R. Schatzki
Acknowledgements
First, we want to record our enormous gratitude to the teachers, students, school and
district leaders, and district education consultant staff in the states of New South
Wales and Queensland (Australia) who have given us such generous access to their
work and lives in the course of the research reported here. Some, we met only two
or three times, for a total of just a few hours, but others we have worked with for
dozens of hours over more than 4 years. Although one of our research team had
previously worked with people in some of the schools and one of the districts, most
of us started our relationship in the roles of researchers and researched. Over the
years we worked together, however, we have become closer to one another. In ad-
dition to being visiting researchers, we gradually became critical friends, and then,
with people in some of the schools, we have become just plain friends as well as co-
researchers on new projects. Thank you for allowing us to interview you, to observe
you at work, to engage with you in conversations about your practice, to hear your
stories and the histories of your schools and districts, and to write about you in vari-
ous publications about practices and the relationships of practices with one another.
We have learned so much from you and because of you.
We also want to thank two critical friends who read earlier drafts of this book
and gave us constructive advice about our ideas and the ways we expressed them:
Karin Rönnerman and Roslin Brennan Kemmis. Thank you for your suggestions,
and please forgive us for the suggestions we failed to notice or failed to implement.
Others have also read other draft texts in various forms—conference papers, articles
and raw manuscripts: thank you, too, for the civility and generosity of your acade-
mic friendship. Among these (we cannot name them all), we especially thank Susan
Groundwater-Smith, Bill Green, Paul Hager, Ann Reich and Nicole Mockler. We
especially acknowledge Alison Lee, whose death in 2012 robbed us of a friend, and
years of scholarly advice and inspiration. Practice theory has lost a spring of fresh
and sometimes disruptive insights.
We thank Annemaree (Annie) Lloyd who worked with us on several drafts of
a manuscript which never appeared in its own right, but some of which appears
in Chapter Four of this book, about student learning. You continue to sharpen our
thinking with your (not so) innocent questions.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Kathleen Clayton, Barney Dalgarno, Susanne Francisco, Annette Green and
Nick Hopwood also read particular draft chapters, asked many probing questions,
and made many helpful comments which caused amendments in our texts—perhaps
not as many as you would have liked.
Our thanks also go to our colleagues in the Pedagogy, Education and Praxis
research collaboration—colleagues and co-researchers at Charles Sturt Universi-
ty, the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), the University of Tromsø (Norway),
Åbo Akademi University (Finland), Leiden University (The Netherlands), Shef-
field University (United Kingdom), and Griffith University and the University of
Queensland (Australia). It has been a privilege to have you test and develop our
ideas in your empirical projects, and to reflect with you about what we all have
learned. Our thanks, too, to our colleagues in the Research Institute for Professional
Practice, Learning and Education at Charles Sturt University for practical, finan-
cial and intellectual support over many years.
We are grateful for the support of the Australian Research Council, which pro-
vided funding in 2010-2012 for the Discovery Project Leading and Learning: De-
veloping ecologies of educational practices (DP1096275). We are also grateful to
Charles Sturt University for the support and co-funding that made the project, and
the writing of this book, possible.
In print and in person, Theodore Schatzki has been an immense source of insight
and inspiration for us—an example of how to be the finest of intellectual interlo-
cutors. We hope this book contributes to the continuation of our conversation. We
are especially grateful, too, Ted, that you munificently agreed to write a Preface for
the book.
Barbara Conlan deserves our special thanks. You have so ably assisted us throug-
hout the research reported here, administering the project, providing research assis-
tance, managing the data archive, and keeping us going in travel and all sorts of ot-
her ways. We are grateful for your friendship, your laughter, your wry forbearance,
and your exceptional ability to work with us as part of our team.
Finally, we want to thank our families for the support you have given us through
the years of this research and the work that has sometimes—too often—taken us
from you in time and space. We are grateful for the opportunities you have given
us to live the kinds of lives—as academics, as authors and as people—that have
allowed us to encounter, engage with and express ideas and ourselves. Thank you
for these generous gifts. You are among the practice architectures that make our
practices possible.
Contents
1 Education: The Need for Revitalisation ................................................... 1
Introduction .................................................................................................. 1
A New View of Practices ............................................................................. 3
Practices as Formed in Intersubjective Spaces: Semantic,
Material and Social ...................................................................................... 5
Changing Practices Requires Transforming Intersubjective Spaces ....... 7
A Guiding Question...................................................................................... 9
The Organisation of the Book ...................................................................... 11
The Study ..................................................................................................... 13
Philosophical Empirical Inquiry .............................................................. 13
The Case Studies ..................................................................................... 16
Analysis ................................................................................................... 21
Conclusion.................................................................................................... 22
References .................................................................................................... 23
2 Praxis, Practice and Practice Architectures ............................................ 25
Introduction .................................................................................................. 25
Praxis and Education: Educational Praxis .................................................... 25
Practice ......................................................................................................... 28
Language Games, Activities and Practices .............................................. 28
The Theory of Practice Architectures........................................................... 31
Site Ontologies ........................................................................................ 33
Conclusion.................................................................................................... 37
References .................................................................................................... 40
3 Ecologies of Practices ................................................................................. 43
Introduction .................................................................................................. 43
Critiquing the Notion of ‘Ecologies of Practice’ .......................................... 44
Ecologies of Practices as ‘Living’ Systems.................................................. 47
Ecologies of Practices in the Education Complex ....................................... 50
Concluding Comments ................................................................................. 52
References .................................................................................................... 53
ix
x Contents
4 Student Learning: Learning Practices ..................................................... 55
Introduction .................................................................................................. 55
Learning as Initiation Into Practices ............................................................ 56
Learning How to Go on in Practices: A Wittgensteinian
View of Learning ..................................................................................... 57
Learning as Being ‘Stirred in’ to Practices .............................................. 58
Practice Architectures and the Practice of Learning .................................... 61
Sarah’s Lesson: What Did the Students Learn About
and Through Writing Expository Texts? .................................................. 61
Annie’s Moving Diagram: Tracing a Learning Journey over Time ........ 68
Analysis: Annie’s Moving Diagram ........................................................ 75
Practices of Learning in Ecologies of Practices ........................................... 82
Student Learning and Teaching ............................................................... 82
Student Learning and Professional Learning .......................................... 84
Learning and Leading .............................................................................. 85
Student Learning and Researching .......................................................... 86
Practices of Learning and Site Based Education Development ................... 87
Conclusion.................................................................................................... 89
References .................................................................................................... 90
5 Teaching: Initiation Into Practices ........................................................... 93
Introduction .................................................................................................. 93
Practice Architectures of Teaching at Hillview ............................................ 100
Practice Architectures of an Inquiry Approach to Teaching .................... 102
Practice Architectures of Teaching at Hillview: An Inquiry
Approach in Kindergarten ....................................................................... 104
Practice Architectures of Teaching at Southwood: The Community
Garden .......................................................................................................... 112
Teaching Practices in Ecologies of Practices ............................................... 118
Practices of Teaching and Site Based Education Development ................... 123
Conclusion.................................................................................................... 124
References .................................................................................................... 125
6 Professional Learning as Practice Development ..................................... 127
Introduction .................................................................................................. 127
Projects in Professional Learning for Practice Development ...................... 128
The Practice Architectures of Professional Learning as Practice
Development ................................................................................................ 130
Cultivating a Culture of Care and Collaboration ..................................... 130
Exercising Agentic Collegial Responsibility ........................................... 136
Deprivatising Practice ............................................................................. 140
Professional Learning in Ecologies of Practices .......................................... 143
Connections Between Professional Learning and Teaching,
Leading and Researching Practices ......................................................... 146
