Jane Wilkinson

Charles Sturt University · School of Education

This paper reports on the findings from a multi-site case study conducted in Australia, Finland and Jamaica which explored the conditions that enabled and constrained the autonomy of school principals. Systematic data collection was carried out in the form of interviews of school principals and the data was analysed using a qualitative approach. Th...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how Catholic district offices support school leaders’ instructional leadership practices at times of major reform. Design/methodology/approach The paper employs the theory of practice architectures as a lens through which to examine local site-based responses to system-wide reforms in two Australian...

What are the possibilities for education in an era of schooling? This is a persistent question and indeed challenge, for educators and educational researchers in contemporary times. At its core, education is always a promise for and process of renewal, growth and change; thus, the job of renewal, growth and change too must work to fulfil its promis...

Theory is often used to speak across and for cultural contexts and sites, in that it explains phenomena and helps us apprehend experiences and practices at various levels. Rarely is theory used to speak within sites, such that it provides a means for entering a conversation of knowing practices in action within sites, particularly when that knowing...

•The study examines the practices of mentoring of new teachers in Finland and Australia. •The study's aim was to reflect on how mentors and mentees understood mentoring as a social practice. •Five mentoring categories emerged: opening up, facilitating, counselling, guiding and leading. •Educators need to be more explicit about differing aims, goals...

This book is a Festschrift for Emeritus Professor Stephen Kemmis, who has a long and eminent career as an educational researcher and academic spanning over 40 years. His work in curriculum, evaluation, critical practice, action research and practice theory has been influential across all continents of the world. The book examines critical perspecti...

This chapter explores a collaborative practice of comparative data analysis through the researching activities of four researchers from Australia and Finland. We interrogate the ontological and empirical reality we experienced while engaged in a practice of analysing narrative data on mentoring. In this chapter, we are not reporting on the outcomes...

This chapter asks how the theory of practice architectures is travelling, in terms of the way it has been used, primarily in this volume. The chapter (1) clarifies some key terms in the theory including (a) the relationship between practices and practice architectures, (b) the ideas of ‘enabling’ and ‘constraining’, and (c) the relationship between...

The development of information literacy and learning practices in everyday spaces is explored. Data for the study was collected using photo voice technique. Data analysis was conducted using photos and analysis of group transcripts. Participants describe how they tapped into social, physical and digital sites to draw information in the process of (...

This chapter provides a ‘societist’ (Schatzki in Philos Soc Sci 33(2):174–202, 2003) account of ‘learning’ using the theory of ‘practice architectures’ (Kemmis and Grootenboer in Situating praxis in practice: Practice architectures and the cultural, social and material conditions for practice. Enabling praxis: Challenges for education. Sense, Rotte...

Mentoring is a practice widely utilised to support new teachers. However, in locally formed systems, the practice of mentoring is conditioned by traditions and arrangements specific to the site. To understand ‘good’ mentoring, these local arrangements cannot be ignored. In this article, the theory of practice architectures is employed to make expli...

Mentoring is a practice widely utilised to support new teachers. However, in locally formed systems, the practice of mentoring is conditioned by traditions and arrangements specific to the site. To understand ‘good’ mentoring, these local arrangements cannot be ignored. In this article, the theory of practice architectures is employed to make expli...

Inspired by Theodore Schatzki’s ‘societist’ approach—in which he advocates a notion of ‘site ontologies’—in this article, we outline our theory of practice architectures (a theory about what practices are composed of) and ecologies of practices (how practices relate to one another). Drawing on case studies of four Australian primary schools, we exa...

In this chapter, a view of praxis and practice is outlined that allows us to re-imagine the work of teaching, learning and leading. It does so, first, by reconnecting with a lifeworld perspective on practice as a human and social activity with indissoluble moral, political and historical dimensions. Practice always forms and transforms the one who...

In this Chapter, we describe how teachers in a school district re-imagined professional development as practice development. While many people in education see professional development and professional learning as the development of people, here we discuss it as a practice of developing practices. The chapter is organised in four parts. First, we p...

In this chapter, we briefly revisit the key themes and ideas of the book before picking up the argument that: (1) that education always occurs in local sites and that changing education, no matter how it is imposed or encouraged, always sets in train processes of ‘site based education development’; and, (2) that a theoretical, practical and critica...

In this chapter, we focus not on teachers but on teaching as a practice. We show how teaching practices bring practices of learning into being, how teaching creates practice architectures for practices of student learning, and how teaching initiates students into practices. We also show that nurturing the practice of teaching requires seeing it not...

Around the world, urgent efforts are being made to transform education for the globalised cultures, economies and politics of the twenty-first century. Despite these transformational aspirations, classrooms and schools have remained strikingly stable as social forms, still clearly recognisable as the progeny of the late nineteenth century schools c...

This chapter explores how educational practice was formed, re-formed and transformed through practices of researching in our case study sites. We position research in this chapter within an emerging tradition of researching practice from within practice traditions, where we take seriously the movement towards educational research becoming the domai...

In this Chapter, we place an emphasis on how the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions for transformed practices in schools can be created by reshaping the arrangements amidst which educators practise. Specifically, we focus on leading as a practice, rather than as series of traits or capabilities invested in sovere...

This book aims to help teachers and those who support them to re-imagine the work of teaching, learning and leading. In particular, it shows how transformations of educational practice depend on complementary transformations in classroom-school- and system-level organisational cultures, resourcing and politics. It argues that transforming education...

The phrase ‘learning practices’ has two meanings: on the one hand, it can refer to people learning some (other) practices; on the other, it can refer to practices of learning. In many cases, learning as an initiation into other practices occurs without any ‘teacher’ being present: a person simply ‘learns’ by participating in and often by reflecting...

This chapter proposes that a fruitful way to think about practices is to view them as living things. Thought of this way, practices are interdependent with one another, being connected in ‘ecologies of practices’. The key idea underpinning this approach is that practices themselves are embedded in ‘practice architectures’. This approach takes us be...

This symposium explores advances in practice theory that offer new ways of understanding education in a range of settings. In particular, it will explore the notion of 'ecologies of practice', a conceptual development beyond the notion of 'practice architectures' proposed by Kemmis and Smith (2008). Ecologies of practice are distinctive interconnec...

Access to health services in rural Australia has been particularly problematic because of the vast geographical areas and the sparse population distribution across the inland. The focus on health servicing has been very much on primary health care with most attention being giving to the distribution of doctors in rural Australia. This study takes a...

This paper discusses the lack of women in leadership positions in Australian agriculture. Using a feminist framework, it examines the gendered nature of power and organizations and analyses the processes that operate to exclude women. The role of the state in supporting male dominance of agriculture is discussed, as is the role of Australian femocr...