A Practice Sensibility: An Invitation to the Theory of Practice Architectures

By Stephen Kemmis

This book introduces readers to the theory of practice architectures and conveys a way of approaching practice theory through developing a practice sensibility. It shows that, in order to change our practices, we must also change the conditions that make those practices possible. The book draws on everyday life to illustrate how we can see the world by watching it unfold in practices: it argues that life happens in practices. The theory of practice architectures takes the ontological nature of practices seriously by recognising that practices take place in the real world.

Consequently, the book offers a new perspective on how practices happen amidst a vast world of happenings; on how we participate in the “happening-ness” of the world through our practices. It invites us to consider whether our practices reproduce or aggravate the contemporary environmental crises confronting the Earth, and whether we can transform our current practices to ameliorate these crises. Given its focus and scope, the book will benefit master’s and doctoral students in social and educational theory, early career researchers, and established researchers new to practice theory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Aug 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9789813295391

Book preview

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

S. KemmisA Practice Sensibilityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1_1

1. About This Book

Stephen Kemmis¹  

(1)

Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia

Stephen Kemmis

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

This chapter introduces the book. It introduces the central theme of the book, namely, that we live our lives in practices. It describes the structure of the book, which is composed of 35 short sections (some just a page or two long; some are poems) which are distributed across 6 chapters. These sections offer different glimpses into practices, in a way that aims to foster a practice sensibility—a way of seeing life and the human social world not in terms of the apparently solid objects we ordinarily perceive in the world, but in the flow and the happening of lives lived and conducted in practices.

1.1 Glimpses from a Moving Train

I have been studying practice and practices for more than 40 years, but with a renewed curiosity in the last 15. In recent years, I seem to have turned into a practice theorist. For most of the time, I’ve been studying practices , I have been thinking about how educational practices have come into being, how they have been sustained (sometimes for hundreds of years), how they die out and how they can be changed or transformed. My interest is not solely in educational practices; they are just one species of professional practices, and, even more important, just one species of human social practices . As you will see in the coming pages, I am very interested in the fabric of practices that constitute everyday life .

Many of the articles, chapters and books I have written about practices, have been written in conversation with many wonderful interlocutors, co-researchers and co-authors. In this book, I want to do something a little different: I want to communicate a particular kind of practice sensibility , not in a scientific argument from evidence to conclusions, but by sharing some scraps of writing and thinking in which I peer through different windows to try to see practices from different perspectives, as they reveal themselves through different kinds of topics.

My central theme is that we live our lives in practices , and the collage of topics and fragments of text I present here has been put together in order to awaken or refresh a sensibility to that fact: a sensibility to how we live our lives in practices, and what that means in terms of our relationships with each other and the world—as well as our relationships within the community of life on Planet Earth and with the Cosmos . I will suggest that these relationships are formed and conducted in practices.

I suggested that in this book, I peer through windows into practices. This image may suggest seeing into the three-dimensionality of a house and its rooms, but that is not what I mean. I am not even sure that there is a ‘right’ order in which to read the scraps assembled here. It occurred to me that the window we are looking through might be more like the window of a moving train. We rumble or race along, looking out into the passing landscape—a city, a town, fields, a forest. The railway linearity of our travel is not matched by the tumble of images we see outside, sometimes abruptly changing demography, geography, geology, biology, archaeology, architecture, iconography, anthropology, sociology. We pass through a cutting and emerge to a bucolic idyll; we plunge through a tunnel and back out into the light to see a river dancing alongside us; we ease along the backs of leafy suburban gardens and crawl behind cramped, grimy tenements to arrive in the bustle of a railway station that spills us out into a city centre and the maelstrom of people bustling about in their many and varied practices of business and life. You will also find that later sections of the book return to topics discussed earlier. So perhaps, this train journey is not just one way but, rather, criss-crosses the territory, approaching previous topics from a different direction, or from a different perspective.

The sensibility that this book aims to communicate might be something like the sensibility developed in the train traveller: a sense that the kaleidoscope of images is not just a jumble of juxtapositions. Rather, I hope it will lead to some kind of resolution and coherence as a broader landscape we have passed through, and come to know.

In this book, I am trying to communicate one kind of sensibility about seeing the human social world, and the wider community of life of which we humans are part, as accomplished dynamically, through living. And I hope to show that living is accomplished through practices.

Keep this little prose poem in mind as you read:

Now

is gone.

Here comes

another one.

Language sometimes seems to flatten time; it stills, and maybe even kills, the dynamism of life, the dynamism of the journey (Stories don’t: they carry us through the arc of a narrative .). We live life—from beginning to end—in motion, not at rest. It is a trick of language that causes us to think that ‘now’ exists. Like matter hurled into the expanding Cosmos at the Big Bang a mere 13.8 billion years ago, we, too, are always on the move, and always on the move in relation to everything else with which we share our own brief moment in the Cosmos.

Much social science treats human beings and societies as if they could be studied at rest, as pinned at a moment in space and time. By contrast, practice theorists try to catch humans and societies on the move, to catch people and societies and events as they happen (Schatzki, 2006). As things unfold. And as they unfold in particular places, being shaped in their unfolding by the moment (the time) and the site (the place and space) and the unfurling circumstances (history) that accompany their unfolding.

I am grateful to my friend Hannu Heikkinen for drawing my attention to Bruner’s (1986, pp. 11–13) distinction between one kind of science and storytelling :

Let me begin by setting out my argument as baldly as possible, better to examine its basis and its consequences. It is this. There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought.

Each of the ways of knowing, moreover, has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness. They differ radically in their procedures for verification. A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude. It has been claimed that the one is a refinement of or an abstraction from the other. But this must be either false or true only in the most unenlightening way….

…. Let me quickly and lightly characterize the two modes so that I may get on more precisely with the matter. One mode, the paradigmatic or logico-scientific one, attempts to fulfil the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation. It employs categorization or conceptualization and the operations by which categories are established, instantiated, idealized, and related one to the other to form a system… At gross level, the logico-scientific mode (I shall call it paradigmatic hereafter) deals in general causes, and in their establishment, and makes use of procedures to assure verifiable reference and to test for empirical truth. Its language is regulated by requirements of consistency and non-contradiction. Its domain is defined not only by observables to which its basic statements relate, but also by the set of possible worlds that can be logically generated and tested against observables — that is, it is driven by principled hypotheses….

The imaginative application of the  narrative  mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily true) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. Joyce thought of the particularities of the story as epiphanies of the ordinary.

The paradigmatic mode, by contrast, seeks to transcend the particular by higher and higher reaching for abstraction, and in the end disclaims in principle any explanatory value at all where the particular is concerned.

This book aims to convey a sense of verisimilitude about practices , and the practice architectures that make them possible.

So: the fragments in this book have been created, at different times, to explore one idea or another that seems to me to be related to a practice sensibility. If I were a master of language, they would be like Jorge Luis Borges’s (2007) Labyrinths or (1956/1962) Ficciones, collections of short pieces written to confound and perplex and surprise their readers into seeing the world anew.

Responding to Borges—in fact, to Borges’s (1942/1952/1999) piece entitled ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’—Michel Foucault began the Preface to his (1970) The Order of Things thus:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild existence of existing things, and continuing long after to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and Other. The passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that (p. xv; emphases in the original).

Sadly, this book will not be like Borges’s Otras Inquisiciones, or Foucault’s Order of Things. More’s the pity, I hear you say. This book aims not to demonstrate the "impossibility of thinking that" but the possibility of thinking about the world in motion, a world in motion that carries us along like a swiftly flowing river, except that we are also part of the flow. I am struggling to disrupt the profound illusion that we are solid entities carried in the flow, and to show that we are in the flow, and, more, that we ourselves are part of the flowing—as well as part of the carrying. I am trying to disrupt the illusion of solidity produced by the familiar landmarks of our thought … the thought that bears the stamp of our age and geography. Rather than seeing us as carried like a surfer on the wave of life, I imagine us as the foam on the breaking edge of a wave, born of the wave, borne on the wave, blossoming when the wave breaks, spreading like a web across the water’s surface as the wave caresses the beach, then sucked back, to disappear once more into the body of the sea. We are part of the flow , not just carried by it.

Before concluding this Introduction, I will say just a few words about the organisation of this book. As I have said, the fragments could be read in various orders, but here is the way I have arranged them:

Chapter 2 (Sects. 2.1–2.6) introduces the theory of practice architectures , although more cryptically than the more extended ways in which it is introduced in other publications (for example, Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008, pp. 37–62; Kemmis, Wilkinson, Edwards-Groves, Hardy, Grootenboer, & Bristol, 2014, pp. 25–40; Mahon, Kemmis, Francisco, & Lloyd, 2017, pp. 1–30).

Chapter 3(Sects. 3.1–3.14) introduces notions to do with the happening-ness of practices in intersubjective space. After Sect. 3.​1, which suggests that practices are like passages through time, Sect. 3.​2 contrasts the notion of intersubjectivity with the notion of subjectivity. Sections 3.​3–3.​5 then focus on the cultural-discursive dimension of intersubjectivity: semantic space. Sections 3.​6–3.​9 focus on the material dimension of intersubjectivity: physicalor material space-time. Sections 3.​10–3.​13 focus on the social-political dimension of intersubjectivity: social space. This set of sections comes to a close with Sect. 3.​14, about happening and intersubjectivity: the way happening in intersubjective space unfolds, everywhere and all at once, through time (recalling Sect. 3.​1 on practices as passages though time).

Chapter 4 (Sects. 4.1–4.6) looks at particular topics of concerns in the theory of practice architectures . Section 4.​1 explores praxis, the good for the person, and the good for humankind. It is followed by Sect. 4.​2, a poem, ‘Choices,’ that concerns a person’s agency in addressing the life situations they encounter. Sections 4.​3 and 4.​4 discuss contestation, reminding us that practices do not unfold in entirely smooth, untroubled, harmonious ways: their paths are frequently shaped by contests: misunderstandings, disagreements, collisions and conflict. Sections 4.​5 and 4.​6 focus on learning as an element of practices, and perhaps as a process that always shadows practices as they unfold.

Chapter 5 (Sects. 5.1–5.5) addresses the way practices unfold at various scales , sometimes in vast webs, constellations or ecologies of interconnected practices. These sections intend to convey the notion that, while practices may appear to unfold in entirely localsites , they nevertheless connect with other practices to form larger and larger webs that have ramifications for history and nature.

Chapter 6 (Sects. 6.1–6.4) aims to suggest some of the ways in which our practices are located in ‘Big History’: in the happening of the Cosmos , and the community of life on Earth . Sections 6.​1 and 6.​2 are intended to suggest something of how we are connected to the seasons and the community of life on planet Earth through our practices: we live our lives in practices , and practices are the means by which we enhance or erode the community of life on the planet. Section 6.​3 brings us back to concerns from earlier in the book, inviting us to consider whether humankind has by now accumulated sufficient knowledge for us, collectively, to understand our place in Nature and in History, what the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel thought was Absolute Knowledge. It recalls Sect. 3.​3, ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ which introduced the semantic dimension of intersubjective space. Section 6.​4, the poem ‘Bees and Being,’ implies that we have come into Being in space and time, and that, at the end of our own lives, we return in another form to the continuing happening of space and time, the great happening of the Cosmos.

I do not pretend to originality in the pages that follow. There are many others who express more powerfully and profoundly insights that reveal this way of seeing the world. Among so many that I might acknowledge for seeing the world in motion, here I will express my gratitude only to Ted Schatzki (for example, 1996, 2002, 2010) whose writings in practice theory and philosophy, drawing on Wittgenstein and Heidegger (among many others), shattered the way I thought about practices in the early 2000s. He disrupted my thinking about the world of people and societies at rest, opening my eyes to such things as the sheer happenstance of happening, the bundling of practices with arrangements of things to be found in the sites where they happen, and the unfolding of practices in the time-space of human activity (to use the title of his 2010 book). Ted’s work, and the burgeoning work of a new generation of practice theorists, has been immensely generative, changing the ways I think about social the social world, and about practices themselves.

So, dear Reader: ahead of you lies a tangle of tales, some grounded in observation, some in rumination and some in speculation. I hope you find yourself entangled in it. Mostly, I hope you enjoy the journey, and that the journey awakens or refreshes in you a new sensibility about practices: a practice sensibility.

References

Borges, J. L. (1942/1952/1999). ‘John Wilkins’ Analytical Language’. In E. Weinberger (Ed.), Selected nonfictions (E. Weinberger, Trans.). London: Penguin. The essay was originally published as ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’, La Nación, Argentina, 8 February 1942, and republished in Borges’s (1952) Otras inquisiciones.

Borges, J. L. (1956/1962). Ficciones (Ed. and Intro. A. Kerrigan). New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

Borges, J. L. (2007). Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings (Ed. D.A. Yates and J. E. Irby; Intro. A. Feinstein; Foreword A. Maurois; Illustrated N. Packer). London: The Folio Society.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock.

Kemmis, S., & Grootenboer, P. (2008). Situating praxis in practice: Practice architectures and the cultural, social and material conditions for practice (Chapter 3) In S. Kemmis & T. J. Smith (Eds.), Enabling praxis: Challenges for education (pp. 37–62). Rotterdam: Sense.

Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). (Chapter 2). In Changing practices, changing education (pp. 25–40). Singapore: Springer.

Mahon, K., Kemmis, S., Francisco, A., & Lloyd, A. (2017). Introduction: Practice theory and the theory of practice architectures (Chapter 1). In K. Mahon, S. Francisco & S. Kemmis (Eds.), Exploring education and professional practice: Through the lens of practice architectures (pp. 1–30). Singapore: Springer.

Schatzki, T. R. (1996). Social practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Crossref

Schatzki, T. R. (2002). The site of the social: A philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Schatzki, T. R. (2006). On organisations as they happen. Organisation Studies,27(12), 1863–1873.Crossref

Schatzki, T. R. (2010). The timespace of human activity: On performance, society, and history as indeterminate teleological events. Lanham, MD: Lexington.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019

S. KemmisA Practice Sensibilityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9539-1_2

2. Introducing the Theory of Practice Architectures

Stephen Kemmis¹  

(1)

Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia

Stephen Kemmis

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

This chapter (Sects. 2.1–2.5) introduces the theory of practice architectures, although rather more cryptically than the more extended ways in which it is introduced in other publications. We encounter Baby Miles coming home after his birth in a hospital, and bringing a range of new practices into the household. We find a description of the theory of practice architectures illustrated by Baby Miles participating in the practice of bedtime reading with his parents. We see the song ‘You’re my world’ interpreted through the lens of the theory of practice architectures. We read a letter written by Stephen Kemmis to participants in a forthcoming workshop on the theory. And we find out how Marx’s Third Thesis on Feuerbach inaugurated a view of praxis and practice that lives on in the theory.

2.1 Finding Space for New Practices: Baby Miles Finding His Place in the World

¹

At nearly 3 weeks old, baby Miles is settling into life in the Big World. Breastfeeding is now going more routinely, and he is learning to manage transitions more calmly: like being changed before being settled for sleep. He appears to be learning that the end of one activity is not a catastrophe, but a shift, bumpy or smooth, to another activity. Miles seems to me to be building up some sense that life is composed of activities or routines, which are not always precisely the same, but roughly the same, and that one routine follows another.

2.1.1 Opening up Activity Time-spaces: The Formation of Practices

As a practice theorist, it’s hard not to be excited by watching this. For example, it is exciting to watch how the practice of breastfeeding becomes established as an activity time-space ² (Schatzki, 2010) in which activities are distributed between mother Alice (who is my stepdaughter) and baby Miles, but also involving others like father Shannon and even me. And these activity time-spaces entangle activity with objects like Alice’s breast, the Boppy Breastfeeding Pillow Miles rests on while feeding, and, most importantly, embodied Alice entangling lovingly with embodied Miles. It is interesting to see how these practices unfold, and how one activity time-space gets chained to another, like changing the baby after breastfeeding, and settling for sleep after changing (or returning to feeding).

The particular activity time-space of ‘awake time’ for baby Miles was initially perplexing for Alice and Shannon: if ‘awake time’ is neither sleeping nor feeding nor settling nor changing nor bathing, is it a legitimate activity, or should baby Miles really be going into one of the other activities? As if to resolve this perplexity, a couple of days ago, Alice described Miles’s awake time as ‘mapping the world time’. This seems to me to be a very good way to think about it, rightly giving this activity its own legitimacy and authenticity, so we can all think about it as a time in which Miles develops his perceptual constancies (how to understand edges of objects, and arrangements of foregrounds and backgrounds, how sizes change when nearer or further way, etc.), and learns the faces and embraces of those who care for him, among many other things. ‘Mapping the world time’ has become established, and maybe transitioning into something else, like ‘free play’ or ‘play time’.

In the last couple of days, Miles has spent some of this time in what Alice and Shannon call his ‘gym’: a soft cloth mat, printed with jungle and animals, that unrolls on the floor, with a flexible frame that crosses above him, supporting several hanging objects that Miles can look at. He lies on his back for 40 min or so, apparently happy and occasionally vocalising quietly, looking around him at whatever he can see, and sometimes twisting himself to look in the direction of a human voice, especially if it is Shannon’s or Alice’s.

By naming ‘mapping the world time’, Alice has isolated it as a distinct activity time-space (Schatzki, 2010, p. 38). She has given baby Miles’s practice a teleology , a purpose that this practice is aimed towards (‘mapping the world’); and she has also given it a space as an activity that Miles can legitimately be engaged in when he is fed and changed but not wanting to sleep—when he is motivated ‘to map the world’ or ‘to play’ (something he departs from). And ‘mapping the world time’ has its own distinct places and paths anchored at entities, like being put into his ‘gym’, looking around while he is in it, and being taken out of it to go on to the next activity.

2.1.2 Practice Landscapes and Ecologies of Practices

The routines of the family have changed over these first 18 days at home, since leaving the hospital: new activities and practices are being established, and some old activities and practices have been pushed out of the way to admit the new practices of caring for the baby. In Miles ’s first days home, many of Alice and Shannon’s everyday activities like shopping, showering, cooking and exercising were suddenly threatened in the everyday ecologies of practices ³ of the household, and in the household as a practice landscape .⁴ To allow the new parents to attend to the new demands of baby wrangling, and to allow new practices of caring for the baby to become established, grandparents and friends took over some tasks (practices) like cooking, washing dishes, shopping and doing the laundry. Similarly, the new parents had to learn to catch sleep and take showers in the short windows between one breastfeed and the next, when baby Miles has sometimes been sleeping for as little as 50 min or an hour before waking to be fed (although sometimes, mercifully, for three hours). Alice and Shannon also had to learn that they have to find time for all the additional maintenance activities the baby demands: changing diapers (‘nappies’ to me), so Miles is not uncomfortable or getting diaper rash (‘nappy rash’ here in Australia); bathing, to ensure he is dry and clean; washing Miles’s clothes and ensuring clean clothes are always available… As days have passed, however, there has also been a transition to Shannon and Alice reclaiming some tasks (like cooking and cleaning) when grandmother Vinette returned to her home town, and, each evening, when I left for the nearby hotel for the night. In the absence of these support people, those everyday practices are gradually being reabsorbed into Alice and Shannon’s daily lives, anticipating the days to come when they, and Miles, become the sole permanent members of the household.

2.1.3 A Widening Sociality

In recent days, we have also been fitting in visits from close friends who come to see baby Miles and congratulate Alice and Shannon, restoring bonds of friendship attenuated while the family has been preoccupied with this new person who now calls the shots in the household. A place is being found for new baby Miles in these friendship bonds and networks: as these friends of the family goo and gaa and bless Miles, they are admitting him into their lives as well, and opening the possibility that they may be surrogates for Miles’s parents, able to offer love and nurture and care, and resources of various kinds, at different moments in Miles’s life and the lives of his parents. And, of course, they come bearing gifts of welcome, objects like baby blankets that will, one way and another, become entangled with Miles’s body and in his life.

It is amazing to think how irreversible all these transitions are in the practice landscapes of home life, and how life has just become much, much busier—and will be for years ahead. In the coming weeks and months, first, Shannon, and, later, Alice, will return to work, and more dramatic transformations and reconfigurations will occur for all the inhabitants of the household.

As a practice theorist, it is intriguing to watch this household reconfigure itself as an ecology of interconnected practices , and as a practice landscape in which multiple, very different, practices simply coexist. It is to see not just the new baby and the new equipment that has come into the house, but how the life that is lived here is composed of activities and practices that have to be reconfigured to fit into, and find a place in, daily life: the activity time-spaces of family life in the household. Will Alice ever get time for a walk? When? With whom? What will need to be done by others when she goes for a walk? (As I wrote this, by the way, she was indeed taking a walk, with Miles in the pram sleeping, Shannon at home doing some necessary tasks, and me in my hotel over the road, writing this.).

2.1.4 Praxis⁵

It is wonderful to see the part that love plays in this constellation of changing practices. The imperative of parental (and others’) care for the baby seems almost as tangible as Miles’s physical being; we apprehend it in life here in Alice and Shannon’s apartment as an almost instinctual ‘force of nature’. Yet we also know that this imperative is intensely social,