Practice Architectures
Practice Architectures
- Christine Edwards-GrovesChristine Edwards-GrovesGriffith University, Australia
- , and Peter GrootenboerPeter GrootenboerGriffith University, Australia, and Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia
Summary
The theory of practice architectures has been emerging in common parlance in qualitative research investigating the nature and conduct of education (and other) practices since it was first introduced in 2008. The theory was developed to capitalize on “the practice turn” in social life and organizational activity. Since its inception, the theory of practice architectures has become an influential and widely utilized theory, among the broad family of practice theories focused on the social, cultural, and material world. The theory has been taken up in many countries and in many fields—including education, health, agriculture, environmental science, and business—legitimizing it as a robust way to conceptualize the sociality, situatedness, and happeningness of practices associated with participating in the social world.
As a basic premise, the theory of practice architectures attests that in everyday life- and system-worlds, practices are existentially dynamic, socially constituted, intersubjective activities that are always influenced by practice architectures. Practice architectures are the enabling and constraining conditions that influence what happens among interlocutors as they encounter one another in practices. Understanding practices means attending to ways the intricately interconnected and simultaneously produced sayings, doings, and relatings “hang together” in a project through individual (or subjective) and intersubjective achievements. It is in intersubjective spaces where
• what people can say and think (sayings), in the semantic space shared among interlocutors, is made possible (or difficult or impossible) by the cultural–discursive arrangements found in or brought to a site—that is, by the content and form of shared (or not shared) language and specialist discourses used;
• what people can do (doings), in the physical space-time shared with other embodied beings, is made possible (or not) by the material–economic arrangements—that is, by actions, activities, and work done amid the objects that exist in the site; and
• how people can relate to others and the world (relatings), in the social space shared with other social–political beings, is made possible (or not) by the social–political arrangements—that is, by the relationships of power, agency, and solidarity.
Establishing a deep sense of site is critical for understanding the nature and particularity of practices and practice architectures that shape how education is experienced (produced and reproduced) in the site. The site ontological schematic counters oversimplified or ambiguous perspectives by orienting to the complex linguistic, cultural, interactive, material, temporal, social, and relational constitution of practices as they happen in the local site. By establishing more nuanced site-based understandings, detailed descriptions, and critical explanations about the conditions that prefigure (although do not predetermine) the conduct of practices, transformations to those practices are possible. Consequently, the theory of practice architectures has been described as a transformative resource—because to change education, one must change the practice architectures that enable and constrain its practices. Broadly speaking, therefore, the theory of practice architectures is an integrated theoretical (way of considering), analytical (way of examining), linguistic (way of describing), and transformative (way of changing) resource or frame for studying practices.
Keywords
Subjects
- Educational Politics and Policy
- Educational Systems
- Educational Theories and Philosophies
Introduction
Education in its core mission aspires to develop individuals and collectives by responding to diverse student, community, and regional needs and circumstances; consequently, it is imbued with ranging practices and conditions that influence its day-to-day courses of action. Education practices as they happen (Schatzki, 2006) cannot be understood without a theory of practice that explains how practices unfold discursively through interaction and activity in real time and among interlocutors (students, teachers, leaders, and others) and how they are not simply interlinked but ontologically interwoven (entangled [Hodder, 2012]; enmeshed [Schatzki, 2002, 2010]) with local sites, not simply “set” in them (Kemmis, 2009). At the same time, there is a need to understand that practices in education are never neutral but always transpire under influential enabling and constraining conditions shaped by cultural–discursive, material–economic, and social–political arrangements (particular to that practice). In simple terms, these arrangements are practice architectures that cannot be understood outside understanding the dynamic interdependencies between the site, the practice, and the practice architectures. This article addresses key questions related to the development and use of the theory of practice architectures and outlines its distinguishing features, introduced by Kemmis and Grootenboer (2008) and subsequently developed empirically by Kemmis and colleagues in a 4-year critical ethnography, presented comprehensively in Changing Practices, Changing Education (Kemmis et al., 2014). First, a brief genealogy of the history and development of the theory of practice architectures is presented.
Practice Architectures: A Genealogy
The theory of practice architectures is one from a broad family of practice theories that specifically aims to grasp the particularity of practices that exist or come to exist in local sites (see e.g., Latour, 2007; Nicolini, 2013).1 A common question asked about the theory of practice architectures is, How did it emerge to be an important contemporary theory of practice? The early conceptualization of the theory evolved organically from robust theoretical and philosophical discussions (beginning in 2006) among a group of Australian educational researchers at Charles Sturt University,2 who from their different intellectual traditions, theoretical orientations, and disciplines came together because of their shared interest in and commitment to education practices to ask questions about practice and its conceptual, theoretical, and practical dimensions. Furthermore, these scholars were intent on understanding and “speaking back” to the cross-currents in education policy and management being experienced by educators at that time. This interest-in-common initiated a series of ongoing meetings among the group to critique the history of, and developments in, practice theory and philosophy. Discussions about the convergences and divergences, affordances and shortcomings of the varying standpoints, the conceptual leanings of the different theoretical perspectives presented in a burgeoning body of social practice literature,3 generated a conceptually rich palette of ideas that ultimately contributed to the foundations of the theory of practice architectures.
To capitalize on the fruits of their discussions, and what practice theorists Schatzki et al. (2001) described as “the practice turn” in social life and organizational activity, the book Enabling Praxis: Challenges for Education, edited by Kemmis and Smith (2008), was published. Practice architectures were theorized in chapters by each of the contributors in relation to their different fields of study (teaching, professional learning, educational leadership, vocational education, university teaching, and environmental education), but it was the chapter by Kemmis and Grootenboer (2008) that first presented the detailed theoretical propositions of the theory.
At the outset, the practice theory and philosophy of Schatzki (e.g., Schatzki, 1996, 2002, 2010; Schatzki et al., 2001) were influential in the development of the theory of practice architectures, especially for
reconceptualizing, in fine-grained ways, the sociality of practices;
delineating the configuration of practices in terms of being composed of sayings and doings, to which relatings was added to explicate Schatzki’s more implicit orientation to the influence of human relationships in their activity;
prioritizing the site ontological emphasis of the theory; and
conceptualizing notions of site-based conditions as practice architectures framed in terms of cultural–discursive, material–economic, and social–political arrangements.
This latter point was an important part of the historical timeline in the development of the concept of practice architectures as being evident in three types of organizational and structural arrangements. As Kemmis et al. (2014, p. 30) explained, ideas about these three kinds of arrangements are also shaped by practice traditions informed by history, philosophy, and social theory. To illustrate:
Hadot (1995) refers to the ancient Greek distinction between three parts of philosophy—dialectic or logic, physics, and ethics—which were regarded as separate only for pedagogical purposes—that is, to help people learn what it means to “live a philosophical life” and thus (a) to speak and think well (logic), (b) to act well in the world (physics), and (c) to relate well to others (ethics);
Habermas (1972) identified the three social media of language, work, and power in his social theory; and
Bourdieu (1990, 1998) theorized human sociality and practice in terms of cultural and symbolic capitals and fields, economic capitals and fields, and social and political capitals and fields.
These historical influences trace through the core concepts of practice architectures.
By contrast to more abstract idealizations of education and its composite menu of “best” practices, the theory of practice architectures has always attended assiduously to site-based peculiarities and distinctiveness to contribute to understandings of education as social phenomena composed of a complex of interdependent ecologically connected practices. An important part of this narrative is that the focus on, and sensitivity to, the site gave rise to the importance of theorizing an intersubjective space as having three entwined spatial realms: semantic, physical space-time, and social.
From its genesis, the theory of practice architectures has aligned with three central principles: (a) a theoretical principle that aims to articulate a theoretical language which can be used to describe and interpret the social world; (b) a critical principle that aims to identify ways in which current practices unreasonably, unjustly, and unproductively constrain individual and collective self-expression, self-development, and self-determination;4 and, (c) a practical and transformative principle that aims to facilitate the development—and so transformation in real and practical terms—of education in times of increasing instability and rapid change to social, environmental, economic, cultural, and political circumstances, as experienced in particular sites, throughout the world. These principles cohere around this fundamental view as put by Kemmis et al. (2014) to address questions about the extent to which a “theory” can also be a mechanism for transformation: We cannot transform practices without transforming existing arrangements in the intersubjective spaces that support practices. They explained this position as follows:
We cannot transform practices without composing new ways of understanding the world, making it comprehensible in new discourses; without constructing new ways of doing things, produced out of new material and economic arrangements; and without new ways of relating to one another, connecting people and things in new social and political arrangements—all “bundled together” in new projects of schooling for education. This is the task of transformation. (p. 6)
The transformative aspiration of the theory of practice architectures emerged as a notable, and continuing, contribution that seeks to fulfill the promise of education, described here by Kemmis and Edwards-Groves (2018) in terms of a double purpose:5
On the one hand, it aims to form and develop individuals with the knowledge, capabilities and character to live good lives—that is, lives committed to the good for humankind. On the other hand, education aims to form and develop good societies, in which the good for humankind is the principal value.(p. 2)
On this count, the theory of practice architectures emerged as an important organizing conceptual framework for researchers studying the enabling and constraining conditions that makes education that benefits individuals and societies possible.
Changing Practices, Changing Education
A critical phase in the historical timeline of the theory of practice architectures was the 3-year empirical study “Leading and Learning: Developing Ecologies of Educational Practice,” funded by the Australian Research Council (2010–2012), which built on preliminary work of the research team undertaken in 2009. Data were drawn from in-depth case studies of six primary schools in two distinctive regions in Australia: one in a regional/rural area in New South Wales and the other in a Queensland metropolitan district. The project explored the relationships between student learning practices, teaching practices, teachers’ professional learning practices, and the practices of leadership in classrooms, schools, and school districts. Drawing on the resources of contemporary practice theory, and especially practice architectures (noting it was relatively conceptual at the time), a substantive empirical interpretation of education practices and their interrelationships emerged. This meant deepening the theoretical and critical attention to the site, and particularly the happeningness of practices (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 29). This focus was informed by Schatzki’s (2010, p. 171) notion of as activity as a “temporalspatial event” and the distinctiveness of local, systemic, and historical conditions that prefigure but do not necessarily determine the conduct of practices observed. At that time, these ideas concerning sensitivity to the site emerged to be central to the theory.
The empirical significance of the leading and learning study for the development of the theory of practice architectures was “recognising the interdependence of [different] kinds of [education] practices [that] prompted the development of our theory of ecologies of practices [italics added]” (Kemmis et al., 2014, pp. 13–15). Specifically, ecological relationships were found in dynamic traceable connections between the five practices of (a) student learning, (b) teaching, (c) teacher learning, (d) leading, and (e) research and reflection. This cluster was named the education complex of practices and has remained a key idea in the lexicon of practice architectures. For example, results showed that securing substantial and enduring transformation in these educational practices in schools in the two education districts required transformations not just in one or even all of the practices in isolation but also in the ecologies of practices that held particular forms of these practices together in specific relationships of interdependence. Relatedly, it was found that transformations in students’ and teachers’ practices depended on school-level transformations (e.g., in particular forms of practices of professional learning, leadership, and research and reflection) and district-level transformations (e.g., in school district leadership and in professional development) (see e.g., Wilkinson et al., 2019). Observing and reporting the empirical nature of these relationships “in practices and practice architectures” were critical for instating the notable contribution that the theory could make to educational research.
The detailed descriptions of the empirical, analytical, and theoretical developments of the theory of practice architectures, like the conceptualization of ecologies of practices, were subsequently published in Changing Practices, Changing Education (Kemmis et al., 2014). Significantly, the use and validity of the theory of practice architectures were substantiated and strengthened by the intensely empirical basis of the work reported, and this remains a seminal work for researchers studying education.
A testament to the ongoing significance to educational research is the prevalence of the theory of practice architectures disseminated in research conducted by scholars involved in the international Pedagogy Education and Praxis (PEP) research network6 investigating a range of topics and issues in contemporary education. Increasingly, PEP researchers, among scholars from a range of diverse national contexts and intellectual traditions from every continent of the world, have published empirical research that utilizes the theory of practice architectures to interpret the unique circumstances they observe in their own countries. Among these works are a number of edited volumes presenting collaborative international research that explores, compares, and critiques education practices and practice architectures within and across different national contexts.7 Critically, the theory is continuing its evolution in a process of ongoing transformation as new conversations, new theoretical considerations, and new conditions for education practices are encountered and discussed.
The sections that follow present detailed descriptions of the characterizing features that form the conceptual machinations of practice architectures; where necessary, notes provide additional information, and examples provide practical illustrations or explanations.
The Practice–Practice Architectures Dialectic
To understand practice architectures, one must understand practices as social phenomena. To begin, practice is always located in sociality, as Goodwin and Heritage (1990) explain: “Social interaction is the primordial means through which the business of the social world is transacted, the identities of the participants are affirmed or denied, and its cultures are transmitted, renewed, and modified” (p. 283). For education, this means that the nature of interpersonal interactions associated with learning, teaching, leading, researching, and reflecting form the “primordial means” by which students, teachers, and leaders conduct the “business” of education. For example, in schools, lessons involving student–teacher exchanges around a curriculum topic or meetings between members of a teaching or leadership team are discursive interactive events—primordially unfolding in sites of practice composed of social, practical, relational, and cultural work-in-progress (Edwards-Groves et al., 2022). Next, practices as social formations are explained in terms of three intricately connected realms.
Practices
Inspired by MacIntyre (1981) and Schatzki (2002), Kemmis et al. (2014) highlight the inherent sociality and composition of practices in their definition:
A practice is a coherent form of socially established cooperative activity involving characteristic forms of understanding (sayings), modes of action (doings) and ways in which people relate to one another and the world (relatings), that “hang together” in a distinctive project. (p. 31)
To explain, practices exist in sites in terms of three interrelated realms (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 36). Through its sayings, a practice unfolds discursively through the site of practice using the characteristic language and discourses (spoken and thought); these sayings are (or become) comprehensible to those present at a site of a certain kind. For example, in the case of reading lesson practices, the teacher and, increasingly, the students employ a particular theoretical discourse about English language and literacy to describe and interpret reading and to justify certain sorts of reading strategies and processes employed in the act of reading (e.g., phonemic awareness, cross-checking of cueing systems, or self-correcting errors), and they read particular texts that are part of the designated program materials. The discourse used is not merely something abstract or universal—as it happened in this particular place and time, it is site-specific. The language in which the practice of reading is conducted leaves behind specific memories, interpretations, and understandings about what happens in reading lessons. The site (the lesson itself in a particular classroom among a particular group of students) becomes a place for the use of this language (particular to “reading”) to be interpreted and communicated by those participating in the practice at the time.
Through its doings, a practice engages people and objects in activities, activity systems, and work that are part of the material “happening” of the physical site. For example, in the case of classroom reading, the teacher and students meet in a physical classroom space, often in a setting furnished with material objects such as desks and chairs, a mat for students to assemble on the floor, and a whiteboard, where particular resources (e.g., magnetic letters and individual student whiteboards, student workbooks, or leveled reading books) are present and used and which enable the activity of reading to be done. Doing the practice of reading leaves behind different physical traces and consequences (in the form of completed student work samples, particular reading resources used, and changed capabilities in the students and teachers at the site).
Through its relatings, a practice connects people and objects in varying roles and relationships that locate them as part of the site. For example, in the case of the reading lesson, the teacher exhibits a particular kind of authoritative knowledgeable relationship (like a master and apprentice) with the group of students as they encounter one another in the whole-class reading instruction, or in particular kinds of peer relationships as students practice reading their books to one another, or where individual students can exercise personal agency as they select their own books to take home to parents or caregivers for additional practice. The practice of learning to read leaves behind traces in the relationships between participants, such as their incumbency of particular roles (student, teacher, and parents/caregivers) and specific ways of relating to others (in solidarity with or resistance to them), the connection to books and other materials or resources required in a reading lesson, and an increasing sense of agency as students experience developing power over reading.
Therefore, a practice (like the learning to read example) does not merely “land in,” “pass over,” or “pass through” the place where the practices of teaching and learning to read happen. It is enmeshed within the place, and it is itself a site (Schatzki, 2002) in the distinctive sayings, doings, and the relatings that, in intricately interconnected ways, form part of the way the practice “gets done there and then” (e.g., of participating in a reading lesson). In this way, a practice, to use Schatzki’s (1996, 2002) term, is a nexus of sayings, doings, and relatings. Yet it is also true that practices—at the same time—engage with and become enmeshed with existing site-based conditions that form an inextricably linked mutually informing part of the “living” distinctiveness of a site. This means, in simple terms, that although the practices associated with reading lessons (for example) happen every day in thousands of classrooms throughout the world, no two reading lessons are the same because the practice architectures in the different places are contingent on the different cultural–discursive, material–economic, and social–political arrangements present (at the particular time and in the particular place). This forms what the practice–practice architectures dialectic.
Practice Architectures: Cultural–Discursive, Material–Economic, and Social–Political Arrangements
As Kemmis (2021) explained,
Practice architectures are combinations of cultural–discursive, material–economic and social–political arrangements that form conditions of possibility that enable and constrain how practices unfold . . . practice architectures prefigure (or shape or influence) but do not predetermine (Schatzki, 2002) . . . thus practices and practice architectures can be in dialectical relationships of mutual constitution. (p. 83)
Understanding practices and the practice architectures in this way directs the researcher to recognize that practices are always in motion through composite sayings, doings, and relatings, and they are connected at all points to distinctive and particular conditions or practice architectures that shape or influence what happens. For the researcher, this means discovering the ways participants in practices (e.g., teachers and students in a reading lesson) negotiate and display comprehensibility about what is happening at a given moment in time. According to Kemmis et al. (2014), this shared sense-making depends on participants
orienting [them]selves and one another to a shared culture through shared language and symbols, orienting [them]selves and one another to the same salient features of the material space–time [they] inhabit, and orienting [them]selves and one another socially and politically amid arrangements that contain and control conflict, secure social solidarities, and give [them their] agency, selfhood and identities as members of families, communities and organisations. It is an achievement secured by human social practices—the practices by which [they] secure and stabilise the world of today as continuous with the world of yesterday, and as the precursor of the world of tomorrow. (p. 2)
Cultural–discursive, material–economic, and social–political arrangements do not occur separately from one another, and they are always in motion enmeshed with practices and in places. These three kinds of arrangements form site-based conditions that always already exist in some form in any situation of human sociality; and they exist in three spatial dimensions, which are, in turn, associated with three distinctive types of media in which human beings find and express their sociality and through which they participate, substantively, in society. Practice architectures are
Cultural–discursive arrangements that exist in the dimension of semantic space and that enable and constrain (influence or shape) how people can communicate and express themselves and understand one another in the social medium of language (including symbols, visual, gestural, linguistic, and auditory modes)—for example, a shared language such as English or Swedish, or shared specialist discourses such as knowledge of a discipline like mathematics or a profession like education. However, cultural–discursive arrangements do not neatly align with sayings alone, because in the realities of participating in practices the language and discourses used in and about that practice enable and constrain the characteristic sayings, doings, and relatings. For example, the disciplinary or procedural language a teacher might use shapes what can be done then and there, and it simultaneously influences the kind of relationships that they have with their students, or the words students use in their discussions shapes ways that students can relate to one another or to the topic at hand.
Material–economic arrangements that exist in the dimension of physical space–time and that enable and constrain how people can do things in the medium of work and activity—for example, the resources and physical layout of a classroom, a staffroom, a home, a workplace, a town, a building, or a local region make the doing of different activities possible (or difficult or impossible). Material–economic arrangements do not simply align with doings, because in the activities undertaken in the practice enable and constrain the sayings, doings, and relatings. For example, the physical setup of a classroom influences what the students can do at the time, the resources themselves influence what can be said about them in their use, and how the desks as material objects are positioned enables and constrains how students can relate to the teacher and other students in that space.
Social–political arrangements that exist in the dimension of social space and that enable and constrain how people can connect and contest with one another in the social medium of power, agency, and solidarity—for example, the roles and relationships between people in a class, a family, a sports team, a club, or a work organization or a political entity such as a municipality or nation, or between people and other living and nonliving things in an ecosystem, or a factory, or a digitally mediated social network. These arrangements are resources that make possible (or difficult or impossible) different kinds of relationships between people and nonhuman objects, and they influence the sayings, doings, and ways of relating in practices. For example, the organizational functions, rules, and roles in a school, such as a principal’s leadership role, influence the sayings (language and discourses) used by the principal in their interactions with different stakeholders, such as students, parents, teachers, or others in their leadership team; the nature of these relational arrangements in the school simultaneously influences the activities of all people with whom the principal interacts.
Bundled together, the three kinds of arrangements enable and constrain possibilities for shared sense-making (Weick, 1995) that is necessary for participating in social life. As Schatzki (2012) states, “The relationship between practices and material entities is so intimate, . . . the notion of a bundle of practices and material arrangements is fundamental to analysing human life” (p. 16). Significantly, practice arrangement bundles are understood intersubjectively as they unfold in practices, which by the same token are sites of shared, collective, intersubjective achievement.
Intersubjective Space and Participating in Practices
Participants in practices encounter one another in intersubjective spaces. According to the theory of practice architectures, practices always occur—not evenly or seamlessly, or without contradiction or contestation—in three interconnected and overlapping dimensions of intersubjective space. As Kemmis et al. (2014) note, intersubjective spaces “lie between” people in their day-to-day social encounters when they meet one another as
interlocutors in semantic space, in the medium of language;
embodied persons in physical space–time, in the medium of activity and work; or
social beings in social space, realized in the medium of solidarity, agency, and power.
Accordingly, practices are always multidimensional, interspatial, and inherently multimodal. Intersubjective spaces are always already arranged in particular ways so that people receive one another in these spaces in ways already shaped for them by the arrangements that are found to be already there, and sometimes by new sayings, doings, and ways of relating that are brought into a site. These ideas follow, for example, concepts of (a) language games (Wittgenstein, 1958, 1975) as shared activity involving participating with others with whom one shares broad “forms of life” in using language in ways (or arriving at ways) that orient speakers and hearers in common toward one another and the world; (b) temporalspatial events (Schatzki, 2010) as shared activity symbiotically related to their temporal nature and “brought off” in the practical work unfolding in physical spaces and time as people coordinate their activity; and (c) social happeningness (Edwards-Groves & Grootenboer, 2017, p. 32; Heap, 1985; Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 29) as shared activity and interactivity encountered in moment-by-moment discursive action involving people in various kinds of power, solidarity, and agentic relationships.
The Practicescape: A Site Ontological Imperative
The site is a key focus for researchers using the theory of practice architectures as they seek to advance discoveries about how diverse practices become interwoven in local sites—that is, in local practice landscapes (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 4). Practice landscapes—or practicescapes as described here—are sites at which many diverse practices coexist, although not necessarily in interdependent relationships (Lloyd, 2010; Schatzki, 2010). To take a site ontological approach emphasizes that practices do not occur in a vacuum as discrete entities but that practices are always found to coexist, exist, and unfold in the temporally located “happenings” of the site (Schatzki, 2010). In Schatzki’s (2002) terms, the practice is itself a social site organizing and influencing what happens, in which shared semantic, physical, and social spaces exist and overlap. This concept concerns how practices (and their requisite sayings, doings, and relatings) are arrayed and enmeshed with people and other objects in space and place and time described by Schatzki (2010) as activity-timespaces. These refer to happenings occurring in relatively short-term nexuses of time and space in which particular unfolding activities are enmeshed with people and other objects (e.g., in time spans lasting between a few seconds in an activity such as a class discussion to longer periods such as in a whole reading lesson). It also considers more molar levels in time where the focus shifts from activity timespaces to practice traditions (Kemmis et al., 2014)8 to show how practices of various kinds (e.g., specific traditions in subject matter teaching such as social constructivist mathematics teaching) are reproduced and transformed over longer periods of time (e.g., weeks and years).
In other words, to understand how practices and practice architectures influence one another in sites, there is a need to see both the intricate minutiae of the moment-by-moment happenings in activity timespaces and the broader cultural, demographic, historical, economic, and political conditions influencing the practicescape. Edwards-Groves and Rönnerman (2021, pp. 14–15) suggest that this task requires applying a site-ontological, a historical, and an ecological lens to more comprehensively show how practices, which exist or come to exist in sites, hang together (Schatzki, 2002) and are entangled in ecological relationships with one another in time and over time.
A site ontological lens acknowledges distinctive local conditions and circumstances that influence the conduct of practices, enabling a view of the nuanced arrangements found at a site to be revealed. This idea follows the work of Dewey (1933) and Freire (1985), for example, who suggest site-ontological approaches provide authenticity to the view of practice being examined because they are interested in the particularity of practices. Considering practice from the site outward allows practices to be theorized as being relevant to particular sites where educators, in their practicing, make visible the ethical, moral, and affective dimension of their minute-by-minute, day-to-day work (Grootenboer, 2018). History prefigures, and so informs, practices as they adapt to changing times, participants, and local exigencies. Therefore, historicizing practices matters (Hardy & Edwards-Groves, 2016) because they exist and evolve through time as practice traditions (Kemmis et al., 2012). A historical lens prioritizes the trace of past practices, personal histories, and intellectual traditions that continue to exert influence on the enactment of practices (in the present). “Retrieving a sense of [an] intellectual history is not an antiquarian pursuit” (Doecke et al., 2003, p. 100), directing the researcher to find empirical evidence of the circumstances of practices shaped by past discourses, relationships, and activities (Kemmis & Edwards-Groves, 2018). An ecological lens allows researchers to understand how practices in the education complex of practices are inextricably related to one another whereby the emergence of the interconnections, interdependencies, and the enabling and constraining conditions that shape and are shaped by practices and practice architectures are illuminated.
The theory of practice architectures necessarily attends empirically to matters arising from these three multifocal lenses—the site ontological, historical, and ecological dimensions of a practicescape. For instance, in a classroom in which teaching and learning are happening, there is a need to take account of a more complete picture of how student learning is enabled and constrained by the teaching that happens there; in turn, for example, the teaching is influenced by the government and local policy directives, the theories of education informing a teacher’s decision-making, stage of career, and/or the professional development a teacher might be involved in, which often depends on what the principal invests in or values, and so on. These influences reveal a distinctive and dynamic ecological flow of practices between and across sites and times (Kemmis et al., 2014; Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008).
Studying and Analyzing Practices
Education is accomplished in practices experienced as sayings, doings, and relatings always-in-motion in their happening (Schatzki, 2010). It is an empirical question whether and how different practices and their practice architectures in a practice site are or are not in fact interwoven, and for whom. Therefore, studying practices involves deconstructing, reconstructing, and historicizing practices as they are configured, experienced, and interpreted by those involved—the practitioners of practices (Edwards-Groves & Rönnerman, 2021; Hardy & Edwards-Groves, 2016; Kemmis et al., 2014). Thus, data capture must cut underneath the surface of more obvious descriptions of practices to sharpen the focus on eliciting the distinguishing peculiarities and distinctiveness about what is actually happening and what the enabling and constraining features are that are influencing participation.
The researcher must remain sensitized to a practice stance by attending to, drawing apart, and examining the practices and the interrelated practice architectures present, but also following the thread to trace the history (genesis and evolution) of those practices and practice architectures (Edwards-Groves, 2017; Edwards-Groves & Hardy, 2013; Edwards-Groves & Rönnerman, 2021). The theory uses methods that draw attention to the specific sayings, doings, and relatings “in motion” in specific projects of a practice (e.g., a mathematics lesson or a leadership team meeting) and where data can be sourced and examined in terms of the practice architectures that shape those practices. Data gathering and analysis reside primarily in examining (a) observations of actual practice as it unfolds in real time, (b) the artifacts and archives that inform and arise from the practice, and (c) participant accounts of practice. These three distinct foci are accompanied by a range of methods and techniques for gathering empirical data in and about the particular field of study; examples of each are outlined as follows:
Actuality of practice: This means collecting data records of practices as they are happening “in real time.” Examples include field notes of participant and nonparticipant observations (lessons, professional development meetings, and teacher coaching sessions); audio and video recordings of observations; researcher-, professional-, and participant-generated transcripts of audio and video recordings of observations; researcher and participant photographs of activity; and shadowing.
Rationale: Because in reality practices are not static and unfold in real-time activity in physical space, capturing the in situ dynamism of the happeningness of practices is crucial (Schatzki, 2010). Thus, the appropriate empirical center of inquiry for studies focused on understanding practices is therefore
the study of naturally-occurring activities “as they happen,” not, by themselves, substitutes such as what researchers code in their observations, or what practitioners bring to bear in describing or evaluating lessons, or how a particular theory of teaching or learning pre-empts the nature and quality of pedagogical practices.
(Edwards-Groves et al., 2022, p. 97)
Transcripts of recorded observations, for example, are an important technology for studying practices because they reveal “the collaborative ways in which members manage their conduct and their circumstances to achieve the orderly features of their activities” (Boden & Zimmerman, 1991, p. 7).
Artifacts and archives of practice: This means examining three primary types of texts, documents, or objects that inform or arise from the actual practice under study (O’Leary, 2013). Examples include the following:
Public records: official school and system policy documents, curriculum and syllabi, frameworks and guidelines, meeting minutes, student transcripts, mission statements, annual reports, strategic plans, transcripts, policy manuals, historical texts and records, handbooks, media reports, social media, and professional websites
Personal documents or texts: student and teacher work samples; teacher annotated work samples; assessment records; photographs of student-generated work products (sculptures, paintings, drawings, written texts, digital texts, models, story maps, dioramas, etc.); teacher notes; emails; scrapbooks; workbooks; Facebook posts or other social media; duty logs; incident reports; reflections, journals, and diaries; messages; programs; and daily notations
Physical layouts, objects, resources, and other evidence found within the study site: spatial maps; flyers; posters; professional publications; wall plans; agendas; and handbooks, handouts, and training materials
Rationale: Collecting artifacts in the form of archival materials, public records, personal documents or texts, or other relevant physical objects and resources found within the study setting that inform, influence, and arise from a practice and the analysis of these is an important feature of social practice research. As a qualitative method in its own right, an analysis of artifacts and archives can contribute to understanding and explaining practices because these are indeed practice architectures that prefigure (although do not necessarily determine) what happens and how practitioners understand the nature of their work.
Accounts of practice: This means examining phenomenological first-person accounts of an individual’s actions, perspectives, and experiences. Examples include audio- and video-recorded and transcribed interviews and focus groups; informal conversations (recorded in field notes or audio and video recordings); photo-stimulated recall interviews; photo-voice; surveys and questionnaires; and participant creative representations of their actions, opinions, perspectives, experiences, and beliefs recorded in concept maps, diagrams, photographs, poetry, or artworks.
Rationale: Eliciting participant accounts of practices is a commonly used method of inquiry in qualitative research that can be documented through the retellings and representations of practices and experiences. They are important in how participants construe the significance and nature of the practices of which they are part, and they provide a forum for communicating personal histories, predispositions, reactions, prejudices, bias, and emotions that indeed form practice architectures for “practicing.” Participant accounts about what happens further assist the researcher to come to more fulsome understandings about a participant’s sense of the enabling and constraining factors that influence their practices (sayings, doings, and relatings), discourses, activity, and relationships with others in terms of agency, solidarity, and power in the circumstances in which they find themselves.
In the study of practices, analysis of the actuality, artifacts, archives, and accounts of practices provides grounds for establishing a robust body of evidence that admits convergence, contestation, and corroboration. Although each of the methodological constellations has merit, intent, and emphasis in its own right, the use of at least two different data sources provides a scheme for triangulation necessary for instilling confidence and credibility in interpreting findings and drawing conclusions (Mertens & Hesse-Biber, 2012; Wiersma, 1995). Thus, to promote internal reliability, studies of practices importantly present disconfirming and anomalous evidence along with commonalities and convergences to avoid issues associated with seamless glossed “one-story one-voice” accounts of practices (Freebody, 2003). For example, in critical ethnographic research (see Kemmis et al., 2014), this forms the basis for in-depth descriptive studies of practices in which data are strengthened and triangulated across sources, giving stronger insights into the site-based conditions that enable and constrain practices across multiple occasions of practicing.
Some Words of Caution
A study of practice must account for the site ontological nature of happeningness, where the focus is on the work that sayings, doings, and relatings is taken to do in “real time” or, as Schatzki (2010) states, “in activity space–time.” Thus, as Edwards-Groves et al. (2022) state,
On any given occasion in a practice, what is said and how participants relate to one another in the doing of an activity is available then and there to the participants (and thereby to the researcher), while the intentions, thoughts and histories of speakers (and hearers) are not. (p. 97)
This means that using proxy methods alone (e.g., interviews or policy analysis) outside of the happeningness of practice must be treated with caution because “the specific details of naturally situated interactional conduct are irretrievably lost and are replaced by idealisations about how interaction [and so practice] works” (Heritage, 1984, p. 236). Therefore, to counter this issue in interviewing, it is important to strengthen the rigor of evidence by directly eliciting from respondents specific and detailed examples of practices and the enabling and constraining conditions (e.g., detailed recounts of what happened—what was said, what was done, what kind of relationships, what influenced these, etc.). Thus, even with its ethical challenges, recording and documenting the occasioned interactional work in educational activity are important for identifying the practice architectures that contribute to developing contextually bound information about what, when, how, and that education is being produced, reproduced, or transformed in particular sites (Edwards-Groves, 2018).
Although there is an inherent merit in eliciting accurate “true” and “felt” accounts of practice through the conduct of interviews or focus groups, cautionary notes concerning the deceptive complexity of “the interview” must be recognized (Edwards-Groves & Freebody, 2022; Freebody, 2003, 2021). This is simply because the interview itself is an interactive interpersonal exchange and thus is subject to the practice architectures of the interview as a site of practice; for example, accounts can be influenced depending on the degrees of latitude afforded by the interviewer, how the participant takes up or follows the line of thought, the questioning style, the recency of the participant’s actual involvement in the practice under study, the conditions under which the accounts are expressed, and the fidelity of focus (by the interviewer and interviewee). Therefore, an overreliance on the accounts of practice, without, for example, accompanying observations of practitioners practicing or gathering the relevant materials or policy documents that shape their practices, limits a researcher’s capacity to document the actual ontological realities of practices as unfolding in real time or those particular practice architectures instituted by particular policy demands that simultaneously prefigure their practicing. The theory of practice architectures seeks to alleviate this limitation somewhat by establishing the enablements and constraints experienced by participants, because this an inherent interest for those using the theory.
In interviews, the key line of questioning should remain faithful to illuminating practices (what is happening) and practice architectures (what is influencing those happenings), where understandings of human dispositions, emotions, and feelings emerge organically from the retellings of experiences of practices rather than as an explicit focus of the questioning itself. Finally, the disadvantages of using an analysis of artifacts alone are countered when triangulated with accounts and in situ observations (Bowen, 2009). To counter limitations, many researchers using the theory of practice architectures generally rely on a combination of methodologies to make reliable textual representations and reproductions of sites, practices, and participant activity in those sites and practices. When used together, rather than diffuse the robustness of participant accounts and recounts, transcripts of the activity of practice along with accounts and analysis of artifacts provide a stronger empirical basis for making claims about the multidimensionality and complexity of practices.
Analyzing Practices
A perennial question directed toward the use of the theory of practice architectures is that concerning the processes, methods, and rigor of analysis. A range of data sources, methods, and analyses (summarized in Table 1) are used to allow the researcher to analyze different dimensions of practices and arrangements and to synthesize how practices are variously enmeshed with arrangements in sites and as sites, yielding deeply rich case studies of practices (Stenhouse, 1978).
Table 1. Data Sources, Methods, and Analyses
Practice | Practice Architectures | Accessed via (a) Principal Data Gathering Techniques and (b) Analyses |
|---|---|---|
Sayings | Cultural–discursive arrangements (in semantic space) | (a) Interviews (participants’ interpretations of sayings, and the projects of practices), observation (what is said), debriefing interviews (sometimes using photographs for stimulated recall), field notes, curriculum documents, audio and video records (b) Micro interaction analysis, deductive thematic analysis, conversation analysis of talk-in-interaction, document analysis, discourse analysis, historical analysis, interpretive phenomenological analysis, policy analysis |
Doings | Material–economic arrangements (in physical space–time) | (a) Interviews (participants’ interpretations of doings), observation (what is done), spatial maps (of classrooms or meeting spaces), photographs, audio and video records (b) Micro interaction analysis, deductive thematic analysis, activity system analysis (actants, exchange sequences, artifacts, etc.), interpretive phenomenological analysis, historical analysis |
Relatings | Social–political arrangements (in social space) | (a) Interviews (participants’ interpretations of relatings), observation (how people and things relate), field notes, audio and video records (e.g., speaker–hearer, roles and relationships), spatial maps (showing proximity, directionality, and positionality of actors) (b) Micro interaction analysis, deductive thematic analysis, conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, policy analysis, interpretive phenomenological analysis, historical analysis |
It is important to note that practices and practice architectures (represented in these three dimensions) are drawn apart for analytic purposes, but in reality, they are always interwoven, connected at all points. To establish interrelatablity, some researchers reconnect these data visually though the production of concept maps (see Kemmis & Mutton, 2012; Mahon, 2014) or use a table of invention (see Kemmis et al., 2014) or both. Typical of most qualitative methods, each approach involves systematically coding, decoding, and encoding the close multiple “readings” of data reproduced as texts (e.g., transcripts and written or visual records of observations, accounts, texts, or artifacts) that are assigned labels (codes, themes, or categories) to indicate the presence of interesting, prominent, or anomalous relevant content.
Example 1: Coding, Deductive Thematic Analysis, and the Theory of Practice Architectures
Much of the research using the theory of practice architectures applies Fereday and Muir-Cochrane’s (2006) deductive thematic analysis, which is a hybrid approach to Braun and Clarke’s (2006) more commonly used thematic analysis. Deductive thematic analysis allows researchers to begin the process with a predetermined coding system, but it also offers scope for inductively updating and refining that coding system as new content is encountered during the process.
Specifically, in studies using the theory of practice architectures, a framework that includes the practices (sayings, doings, and relatings) and the arrangements (cultural–discursive, material–economic, and social–political) is used as a preliminary organizing framework to code and analyze data. This is a researcher-imposed structure that is placed over the data and used as an iterative, interpretive basis to explore those that are aligned with, confirmative of, anomalous to, or disconfirming of the original data (Freebody, 2003). The process includes comparing, contrasting, corroborating, and legitimating findings as aligned with the framework, and it necessitates articulating discrepancies or establishing gaps and mismatches between data sources or both. It involves a highly iterative and reflexive looping pattern of revisiting the data across multiple cycles as additional questions emerge, new connections are unearthed, and more complex formulations are developed along with a deepening understanding of the material (Srivastava & Hopwood, 2009). Each analytic cycle involves approaching the data by explicitly and consistently connecting practices to practice architectures and then refining the focus and linking back to the research focus. This recursive process affords the researcher deeper insights into the characterizations of the practices being studied.
Example 2: The Table of Invention: A Practice Architectures Approach
Many users of the theory of practice architectures develop a “table of invention” as an interpretative analytical apparatus that organizes data (transcripts or field notes) in terms of their interpretation of what happened as related to the schematic frame of practice architectures (Appendix 1). A table of invention9 is based on a concept that can be traced back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric; it provides structure to populate a set of topics or viewing platforms from which to consider practices and their dialectical relationship with practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 224). It involves
recording researcher determinations in a relatively systematic but repeated approach that identifies how a practice (being observed in the field) is composed (in terms of its sayings, doings, and relatings), its project, and the dispositions it requires and develops;
making evidence-informed judgments supported by transcript excerpts of interviews and field observations about how the practice takes place in a particular practicescape;
tracing the historical, political, and disciplinary threads of the practices in question; and
delineating in detailed ways that practices are furnished with resources found in or brought to the site (in terms of cultural–discursive, material–economic, and social–political arrangements), and as a moment in an unfolding practice as part of a tradition that shapes and is shaped by what is happening (at a particular moment in time).
A table of invention allows the researcher to explore something as broad as the history of (the practice of) schooling, for example, or as detailed as a single lesson in a particular school on a particular day (Grootenboer & Edwards-Groves, 2024). One can use the table to consider a practice as vast as social constructivist pedagogy or as narrow as an interchange between a student and a teacher in a classroom reading lesson. It may be impossible to access sufficient evidence about epochs or events on large scales, and thus the practice architectures table may not offer much assistance in making such an analysis; as Kemmis et al. (2014) concede, however, the extent to which the evidence is sufficient is also always a matter of judgment. They note
that the practice architectures framework table is not a machine that spits out a reading of the world; it is merely a prompt for a certain way of making a reading of it. It is the analyst who makes the reading, not the table. (p. 227)
Contributions to Social Science Research
The article presents a description of the theory of practice architectures in educational research. This section draws attention to its contributions to educational theory and practice, extolls its merit and utility, and highlights some challenges and questions. In a general sense, the theory of practice architectures offers researchers and educational practitioners a robust frame to account for the complex of education practices, the dynamic interdependencies between them, and site-based conditions that shape their conduct. Studying educational practices through the prism of the theory of practice architectures is theoretically and empirically influential in its endeavor to illustrate the more complex relationships between different sites of education and the practices and practice architectures that influence how education happens.
The theory of practice architectures contributes to the field of social science with its capacity to show the nuances and distinctiveness of the practices and practice architectures of education that may indeed remain elusive or undescribed in a multidimensional and highly complex field of study. The theory takes understandings about the conduct of education practices beyond a tacit more instrumental level to reveal the ways practices get accomplished in the everydayness of particular social happenings such as classroom teaching and learning or leading a teacher development session (Grootenboer & Edwards-Groves, 2024). Specifically, the theory offers purchase on how participants in the complex of education projects—involving students, teachers, leaders, researchers, policymakers, and facilitators of professional development—enter into and create shared spaces for understanding and extending each other as learners, teachers, and leaders in the semantic, physical, and social spaces that form their shared work. This is a view that orients to understandings about how the semantic, physical, and social spaces of practice form the intersubjective nature of education. For example, according to this view of practice, students become practitioners of learning practices by co-inhabiting particular intersubjective spaces with their teachers and peers in classroom lessons (over historical time and in physical space–time) and by employing particular sayings, doings, and relatings appropriate to the practices of the particular disciplines they are learning about. The theory of practice architectures advances empirical, theoretical, and conceptual notions about
how educational traditions and knowledges get brought in and are enacted in and through practices in educational settings, and specifically open the scope for discovering how diverse practices become interwoven in local sites or local practice landscapes;
the importance of establishing the particularity of practices because as practices unfold discursively through passages of time, they are particular to the persons involved, particular to the place in which they happen, particular to the actions and interactions of those present, and particular to that moment;
how education practices form semantic, material, and social spaces arrayed in places and enmeshed with people (students, teachers, and leaders) as they encounter one another through language, dialogue, activity, interactivity, and particular ways of relating;
how practices unfold in real timespaces of human activity and at the same time are shaped by site ontological, historical, and ecological conditions;
how specific practices of teaching shape and are shaped by other practices in the Education Complex; and
how educational practices are developed in the local sites with which they are enmeshed, and about the teaching, learning, leading, professional learning, and researching practices necessary for transformation—that supports, develops, and contributes to site-based education.
Conclusion
The theory of practice architectures offers a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing the practices of education—one that accounts for the broader histories and traditions of education but also the subtle and nuanced (and often taken-for-granted) complexities of practicing education in particular sites throughout the world. As a core principle, the theory seeks to understand the interrelatedness and convergences between sites, the constellation of education practices and practice architectures. Its scope of benefit arises from its basic concern with the sociality of practices, from the dialectical relationship between practices and practice architectures, and from the nexus between its practical, critical, and theoretical principles, yielding comprehensive explanations of the inner workings of education itself. Its focus on the particularity and distinctiveness necessitates taking a site ontological view that recognizes the inherent aspiration for education—that is, to educate individuals and collectives in places.
Importantly, the theory is unique in that its distinctive framework is accessible enough for use by education practitioners in the field (e.g., teachers, middle leaders, school and system leaders, facilitators of professional development, and policymakers) to understand the nature of their own practices and the conditions that shape their daily work.10 Thus, in a real sense, the theory is innovative yet practical, in that it provides a strong and transformative basis from which practitioners can realistically study and change practices for themselves. However, empirical questions remain about the utility of the theory of practice architectures for studying practices “at scale.”
In summary, understanding the contours of the practices and practice architectures of education plays a decisive role in allocating life chances for young people and is necessary for securing “best practices” for those young people in the places they reside: The theory of practice architectures is idealistic in its transformative aspirations as a condition for efficacy, development, and sustainability. Ultimately, this requires identifying the practice conditions that advance education in particular places as it leads to broader understandings about how and why some educational practices persist and resist the constancy of change and the pressure of performativity, measurement, and accountability.
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Appendix 1 Sample Table of Invention for Analyzing Practices
Elements of practices | Practice architectures in the site | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Project In this cell, we describe what we take to be the project (or telos or purpose) of the practice we are studying, based on the evidence available (for example, the content of a transcript and other related observational, interview or documentary evidence available). When a participant sincerely answers the question “What are you doing?” they describe the project of the practice (from their perspective). | Practice landscape In this cell, we describe how people and objects are differently enmeshed in the interactions (that is, in the activity-timespace) of the practice being studied. Different people and objects may be involved at different stages or in different episodes or in different aspects of the practice, and they may participate in different roles or from different perspectives. Some objects not apparently relevant to the activities (the ceiling, for example) may in fact play a role in enabling or constraining the practice and in this way be enmeshed in the activity-timespace of the practice. | ||
Sayings | In the cells on the left, we identify the principal sayings, doings and relatings that compose and “hang together in” the practices under study; alongside these, on the right, we identify (respectively) the principal cultural–discursive, material–economic and social–political arrangements that are resources that make possible (prefigure) the sayings, doings and relatings we observe. In the analysis, we aim to identify at least the most significant proximal arrangements that shape the sayings, doings and relatings observed (things present in the site), and, where relevant, more distal conditions (like more widespread languages of policy or theory, more extensive material layouts, or wider sets of social relationships in or beyond organizations) that are significantly enmeshed in the practices under study. Together, the cells on the left describe the practice in terms of what is said and done and how people relate in it; together, the cells on the right describe the practice architectures that form the niche (on the model of an ecological niche) that permits the practice to survive in the site. | Cultural–discursive arrangements | |
Doings | Material–economic arrangements | ||
Relatings | Social–political arrangements | ||
Dispositions (habitus) In this cell, we describe what we take to be the most significant dispositions (or habitus) called on or developed in the principal participants as they participate in the practice. Bourdieu (1990) describes the habitus as a set of dispositions developed by a participant enacting a practice in cultural, material and social fields (for example); these dispositions are what give the participant the “feel for the game” that makes it possible for them to act appropriately in the field. In our view, dispositions include knowledge, skills and values. Knowledge relates chiefly to the sayings and cultural–discursive resources (in language, in semantic space) present in or brought to the site; skills relate chiefly to the doings and material–economic resources (in activity and work, in physical space–time) at the site; and values relate chiefly to the relatings and social–political resources (in power and solidarity, in social space) at the site. | Practice traditions In this part of the table, we comment on the practice traditions that appear to be in play, reproduced, or transformed in the practice. This sets the interactions that compose the practice against a longer history of practice, including at least the history of practice in the local site (for example, in terms of how the participants have acted and interacted as part of the practice in the site over previous days, months or years). Where relevant, we also comment on the practice interpreted against a broader history of this kind of practice (for example, how practice in a particular classroom might be an expression of a practice tradition like progressive education or a particular approach to literacy education). | ||
Reproduced from Kemmis et al. (2014, p. 226).
Notes
1. Kemmis and Mahon (2017) provide a more detailed timeline and history of the theoretical influences that contribute to the development of the theory of practice architectures.
2. Led by Stephen Kemmis, initial conceptualizations of the theory of practice architectures were published by Charles Sturt University’s “Pedagogy Education and Praxis” research group members in chapters appearing in Enabling Praxis: Challenges for Education, edited by Kemmis and Smith (2008). Initial proponents of the theory include Stephen Kemmis, Tracy Smith, Peter Grootenboer, Christine Edwards-Groves, Helen Russell, Ian Hardy, Jane Wilkinson, Roslin Brennan Kemmis, and Willian Adlong (in chapter order).
3. For example, discussions took place about works by Bourdieu (1990, 1998), Carr (2007), Carr and Kemmis (1986), Garfinkel (1967), Gherardi (2008), Green (2009), Habermas (1987), Hadot (1995), Kemmis (2009), Lave and Wenger (1991), MacIntyre (1981), Schatzki (1996, 2002), Schatzki et al. (2001), Vygotsky (1986), and Wittgenstein (1958, 1975 ).
4. Informed by the work of Iris Marion Young (1990), who described justice and injustice in terms of three ideas: self-expression, self-development, and self-determination.
5. The discussion of the double—the individual and the social—purpose of education runs back through Dewey to the ancients, such as Plato (424/423–348/347 bc) and Aristotle (384–322 bc) in Ancient Greece. Dewey’s (1916) Democracy and Education is a classical statement of the view.
6. The PEP research network involves researchers from Australia, Canada, Colombia, Finland, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Trinidad and Tobago, and Sweden.
7. International research using the practice architectures has appeared in many co-edited and co-authored volumes (in English), including those by Wilkinson et al. (2016), Grootenboer et al. (2017, 2020), Mahon et al. (2017, 2020), Edwards-Groves et al. (2018, 2019), and Edwards-Groves and Rönnerman (2021). It is important to note that research using the theory has been published in a range of languages, including Finnish, Swedish, and Spanish.
8. The idea of practice traditions resembles Schatzki’s (2010, pp. 104–105) notion of “practice memory.”
9. The most comprehensive description of analyzing data using a table of invention appears in Kemmis et al. (2014, pp. 223–271).
10. For some comprehensive examples of the application of the theory of practice architectures for education practitioners, see Edwards-Groves et al. (2014), Grootenboer (2018), Grootenboer et al. (2020), Edwards-Groves & Rönnerman (2021), and Wilkinson (2021).
