Stephen Kemmis

Charles Sturt University · School of Education

Edited by Kristin Reimer, Mervi Kaukko, Sally Windsor, Kathleen Mahon and Stephen Kemmis This open access book is the first of a two-volume series focusing on how people are being enabled or constrained to live well in today’s world, and how to bring into reality a world worth living in for all. The chapters offer unique narratives drawing on the...

Aikamme suurin haaste ei ole luotettavan tiedon puuttuminen vaan toimintatapojemme muuttaminen. Kasvatus ja koulutus ovat ratkaisevia, jotta käytäntöjämme voisi muuttaa sosiaalisesti ja ekologisesti kestävämmiksi maapallon ekosysteemien ollessa kriisissä. Tässä artikkelissa hahmotellaan käytäntöteoreettista näkökulmaa kestävän elämänmuodon edistämi...

This chapter discusses diverse viewsWorld(s) worth living indiverse views of of worlds worth living in, as described by different groups of students, young people, and adults. It also highlights how the project of research and writing that produced this volume is an example of criticalPraxiscritical praxispraxisCritical praxis: history making actio...

This chapterLiving well in a world worth living in sets out to articulate and provide a theoretical justification for the view that educationEducation has a double purposeEducation, educatedouble purpose of: the formation of individual persons and the formation of societies. The argument proceeds in four parts. First, it outlines the dialectic of t...

This chapter presents an example of critical analysisCritical analysis: an analysis of the suffering ofUniversitiessuffering of the contemporary Australian university. It also presents the case of the ‘Teacher Talk’ critical participatory action researchAction researchcritical participatory action research project by a group of university teachers...

The chapter presents an argument that changing the world is a matter of changing social practices, rather than (alleged) ‘social structuresStructures (social structures)’. The chapter outlines three different views of change: technicalTransformation(s)technical, practical, and critical. It explores the nature of ‘transformation’, for example in the...

This chapter continues to explore transformations. It explores the kinds of problems and issues that spur contestationContestation (contest, contested) and struggles for change. In our contemporary world, there is no shortage of problems and issues that have prompted and are prompting major transformations in the ways people live and work. The Zeit...

This chapter presents a view of education and Education for SustainabilitySustainability (EfS). It then explores the example of ErinEarth GardenErinEarth garden, an EfS initiative in rural New South Wales, Australia. It shows how ErinEarth is changing the world in its community and beyond.

The chapter focusses on how practices are understoodPractice architectures in the theory of practice architecturesPractice(s)architectures. It begins by introducing the notion of ‘intersubjective space’—the three-dimensional space in which people encounter one another: in language in semantic space, in activity and work in physical space–time, and...

This chapter presents a new conceptualisation of the formation and development of ecologies of practices. In other placesKemmis, S. (e.g., Kemmis et al., Changing Practices, Changing Education, 2014), the conceptualisation has been less empirically precise and less analytically powerful, not yielding as detailed an exposition of how ecologies of pr...

This chapter briefly recapitulates the main lines of argument of the book. It asks the question ‘What is to be doneWhat is to be done??’ in relation to the untoward practices that now bedevil our world—practices that are irrational or unreasonable; unproductive or unsustainable; or unjust and undemocratic. There is no shortage of practices in the c...

This chapter explores ways in which practices are like biological species, and uses some biological notions like reproduction, mutation, and variationVariation to throw light on practices. It also uses some notions from population dynamicsPopulation dynamics, like distribution and succession—to describe the distribution of practices in an environme...

This chapter introduces practice theoryPractice theory and different views ofPractice architectures what practices are. The chapter then argues that transforming social life—including in education and other professional fields—requires changing practices and the sayings, doings and relatings that compose them, as well as the projects (or purposes)...

This chapter presents some resources that may assist researchers using the theory of practicePractice architecturesarchitecturesPractice(s)architectures: an introduction to ‘philosophical-empirical enquiryPhilosophical-empirical enquiry’ as an orientation to research, and some heuristicsHeuristics to guide fieldwork, analysis, and interpretation. T...

This essay uses the theory of practice architectures to demonstrate the kinds of transitions underway as people change their practices to address the current climate emergency, with particular reference to Australia. The individualistic attitude-behavior model of behavioral change is inadequate for understanding these transitions, since they also r...

The ongoing ecological crisis and the more recent Coronavirus crisis challenge the grand narrative of Enlightenment that human beings are ‘masters of nature’. For millennia, human social learning has allowed Homo sapiens to outpace most of our competitor creatures and live a comfortable life, but this competitive success has resulted in cataclysmic...

This article illustrates how schooling Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) deploy a future-focused imaginary for a perfectly self-managing society. New building design, coupled with this imaginary, creates possibilities for new ecologies of practices in which there are reframed relationships and pedagogical opportunities. We use the theory of pr...

This final chapter recalls the view of education that animates this volume: education to help people live well in a world worth living in. The authors outline some of the challenging historical, cultural, economic, environmental, social, and political conditions of our contemporary times. These are also challenges for education, which must be renew...

This book critically explores urgent questions that researchers, educators, and policy makers need to consider and address in order to better our understanding and capacity to transform education. Focusing on areas that underpin the empirical, theoretical, and strategic research of the Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) International Research Net...

This chapter reports findings of researchresearch into the practicepractices of teaching conducted by members of the Pedagogypedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) international research networkPedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) international research network, much of it using the theory of practice architecturestheory of practice architectures as...

This article explores academics' learning. Specifically, it focuses on how academics have come to practise differently under the abrupt changes caused by responses to the Coronavirus pandemic. We argue that people's practices-for example, academics' practices of teaching and research-are ordinarily held in place by combinations of arrangements that...

This chapter (Sects. 5.1–5.5) addresses Practices at different scalesthe 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 local sites, they nevertheless connect with other practice...

This chapter (Sects. 3.1–3.14) PracticesIntersubjective space 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 3.2–3.5 then focus on the cultural-discursive...

This chapter (Sects. 6.1–6.4) Living in practicesBeingEarth’s community of life 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 Ea...

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...

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...

This chapter (Sects. 4.1–4.6) PraxisAgencyContestationPower of concern 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 discu...

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...

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 worl...

This chapter makes the case that we live our lives in practices—that we engage with other people, other species, and the world in practices. After introductory remarks expressing my profound thanks to the contributors to this volume, the first section of the chapter makes the case that we engage with the world in practices. It does so by describing...

In this final chapter, we conclude that the most fundamental task of a teacher is, and always should be, to change lives, through initiating people into practices. We present a theory of practice, showing how practices are shaped by practice architectures. We argue that teachers change lives by giving students an education, rather than just schooli...

In this chapter, we argue that education has a double purpose: the formation of individuals and the formation of societies. We examine how these educational aspirations were formed in antiquity, in Aristotle’s views about education outlined in his NicomacheanEthics and in his Politics. We argue that these views are still relevant today and that any...

In this chapter, we explore the roles of education and schooling in reproducing and transforming our shared social worlds. What aspects of a society schools should reproduce and what aspects they should transform are political questions, about which reasonable people may disagree. We discuss Lundgren’s theory of curriculum, and we examine two kinds...

This chapter describes the evolution of educational institutions through a number of stages: the philosophical schools of ancient Greece; schools established and overseen by the Christian Church; the era of the town school (and the advent of universities); the emergence of guild schools; and, finally, the rise of mass compulsory education in the mi...

This short book provides an introduction to the study of education, outlining the dual purpose of education – to help people live well and to help develop a world worth living in. It argues that education initiates people into forms of understanding, modes of activity, and ways of relating to each other and the world that not only help individuals...

This chapter provides an account, from the perspective of one of the authors of the theory of practice architectures, of how the theory came about and has evolved. The theory was first articulated as the ‘theory of practice architectures’ by Stephen Kemmis and Peter Grootenboer in 2008 in the book Enabling Praxis: Challenges for Education. However,...

This chapter introduces the theory of practice architectures and locates it within the theoretical terrain of practice theory. It highlights what is distinctive about the theory as a practice theory, and discusses its affordances as a theoretical, analytical, and transformational resource for practitioners and researchers. We argue that, to create...

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...

In this chapter, we return to the notion of exploring education and professional practices, the key focus of this volume. In the opening chapter, we argued that the theory of practice architectures is simultaneously a theoretical, an analytical, and a transformative resource. Here we highlight some of the ways the chapters in this book have capital...

Pedagogy, Education, and Praxis (PEP) network is a cross-institutional, collaborative research program, which brings together researchers from Australia, Columbia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Caribbean, the Netherlands, and the UK. Since 2005, PEP researchers have been investigating the nature, traditions, and conditions of PEP and how they are un...

Critical participatory action research emerges from critique of conventional social and action research, recognizing that action research itself is a social practice—a practice changing practice. It arises when people share concerns and work together to make their individual and collective practices less irrational, unsustainable, and unjust. By pa...

This chapter aims to challenge the narrative of the university in decline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, by showing how earlier forms of university life and practice persist within emerging forms. It uses the resources of practice theory—more precisely, the theory of practice architectures —to illuminate the analysis. The c...

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...

At a time in history in which the aspirations for transforming the conditions for education are being pressured by a “performative audit culture”, educators across the globe have become increasingly locked into regimes of standardisation, managerialism, accountability and performativity. The Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) network is a grassro...

The Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) network is a cross-institutional, collaborative research programme which brings together researchers from Australia, Columbia, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Caribbean, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. These researchers are investigating the nature, traditions and conditions of pedagogy, education and p...

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...

A fully-updated and reworked version of the classic book by Stephen Kemmis and Robin McTaggart , now joined by Rhonda Nixon, The Action Research Planner is a detailed guide to developing and conducting a critical participatory action research project. The authors outline new views on ‘participation’ (based on Jürgen Habermas’s notion of a ‘public s...

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 chapter conceptualizes change in education or any field as the transformation of social practices. It introduces a new view of practices as composed of distinctive sayings, doings and relatings that “hang together” in the project of the practice. It shows how practices are made possible by practice architectures that provide their content: how...

This chapter presents eight resources to assist you and your co-participants in the planning and conduct of a critical participatory action research initiative. Resource 1: Creating a public sphere and identifying a shared felt concern guides you through the process of working with your co-participants to identify who will participate in the initia...

This chapter provides a theoretical framework and practical advice for conducting a critical participatory action research project. It presents a new view of what ‘participation’ means in critical participatory action research, drawing on Jürgen Habermas’s notions of ‘communicative action’, ‘communicative space’, and the ‘public sphere’. Communicat...

This chapter presents five examples of critical participatory action research from different kinds of settings. The first, from ‘Braxton’ High School in Canada, describes a project in which senior students initiated waste recycling. This example has been referred to extensively in preceding chapters. The second example is from a Canadian elementary...

This chapter begins by describing the thirty-five year history of how this book came to be. It outlines the overall structure of the book and what each chapter is intended to achieve. The authors define critical participatory action research as a collaborative commitment to engaging in iterative cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting...

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...

This chapter presents critical participatory action research as a response to the critique of traditional social enquiry traditions of research. By reconceptualising the traditional view of the relationship between theory and practice participants seek to transform for themselves (1) their understandings of their practices; (2) the conduct of their...

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...

In these reflections, I make some brief comments about how the theory of practice architectures has been used in this volume, and then take up two specific issues. The first concerns the European notion of Bildung and its relationship to the English notion of education; the second concerns the nature of the relationship between ‘teachers’ and ‘rese...

Abstract Contested architectures of mentoring: support, supervision or collective self-development Jessica Aspfors, Christine Edwards-Groves, Göran Fransson, Stephen Kemmis In this paper, we describe contested practices of mentoring within and between Australia, Finland and Sweden. Our study is based on national policy documents and empirical data...

This study explored conditions shaping several kinds of practices of nine Australian university lecturers teaching inclusive education as part of the initial professional development and learning of pre-service teachers: preparing inclusive education curricula, teaching (including lectures, tutorials, workshops and in field settings), modelling des...

This paper describes two parallel research programmes exploring educational practice/praxis. The first, including a theory of ‘practice architectures’, aims to contribute to contemporary practice theory that views practice from the perspective of a spectator. The second aims to contribute to an emerging (practical philosophy) tradition of ‘research...

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...

Education, properly speaking, has a double purpose: it aims to promote the good for each person and the good for humankind. Put another way, it aims to help people to live well in a world worth living in. Although we ordinarily think of schooling as giving people an education, schools can be non-educational or even anti-educational. The elaborate m...

This paper reports some findings from an investigation of educational practice in ten (formal and informal) education for sustainability (EfS) initiatives, to characterise exemplary practice in school and community education for sustainability, considered crucial to Australia’s future. The study focused on rural/regional Australia, specifically New...

This chapter explores the relationship between praxis and phronēsis in professional practice, and especially the aspiration of the educators of professionals to teach phronēsis so that the professionals they teach will act wisely. The chapter takes the view, however, that phronēsis cannot be taught directly; it can only be learned from experience (...

In this chapter, I first consider Pedagogy i as a discipline and tradition, and some of the various traditions that have existed within Pedagogy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into the twenty-first. Second, I consider the notion of praxis which, in the view of Marcus Aurelius (120-180AD), consists in acting for the good for the...

This chapter celebrates Susan Groundwater-Smith as a self-reflective practitioner who has not merely been an advocate for practitioner inquiry but has also been an exemplary model of the self-reflective practitioner. It uses the six elements (elaborated in the chapter) of a new definition of critical participatory action research as a framework for...

I started work at Deakin in 1978, not long after my thirty-second birthday. Deakin itself had been founded three years earlier. I had been appointed as a Senior Lecturer, tenured from Day One, to establish curriculum research in the new University. Our Faculty of Education was to be good at three things: Psychology (the Psychology group was in the...

Action research concerns action, and transforming people’s practices (as well as their understandings of their practices and the conditions under which they practise). Sometimes we may feel that action research works best when it contributes to our understandings. In this paper, by contrast, I want to explore the ‘happening‐ness’ of action and prac...

Practice is a rich and complex notion whose nuances remain elusive for many practitioners, researchers, policy makers and administrators. The theoretical density of practice is frequently underestimated by researchers who too frequently view it from narrow and limited perspectives. This chapter presents a framework that aims to illuminate the richn...

Educational action is a species of praxis in both an Aristotelian sense and a post‐Marxian sense: in the first, it involves the morally informed and committed action of the individual practitioners who practise education; in the second, it helps to shape social formations and conditions for collectivities of people. In this paper, it is argued that...

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...

Action research changes people’s practices, their understandings of their practices, and the conditions under which they practice. It changes people’s patterns of ‘saying’, ‘doing’ and ‘relating’ to form new patterns – new ways of life. It is a meta‐practice: a practice that changes other practices. It transforms the sayings, doings and relating th...

La retórica de la "educación de transición" es, a nuestro parecer, una forma de plantear determinados problemas fundamentales a los que se enfrentan las escuelas, pero además es un modo de imponer sutilmente una "solución" a esos problemas-pero una solución en la frontera entre la escuela y la sociedad, no dentro de las escuelas o dentro de la soci...

This paper discusses the way "right conduct" in education - praxis - is embedded in social practices - practice architectures - which enable and constrain conduct in three dimensions: cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political, or "sayings", "doings", and "relatings". It is argued that changing professional practices like mathemat...

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This article elucidates criteria which might be helpful in evaluating praxis‐related research. The authors explore both sides of the research and development (R & D) project. They examine different ways of understanding contributions to knowledge through research but more especially exploring ideas about contributions to changing praxis. Changing p...

En: Kikirikí : cooperación educativa Sevilla 2006-2007, n. 82-83, septiembre-febrero ; p. 14-35 (available in English at: Available in English at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14681369800200043) Se exploran los cambios en las condiciones del aprendizaje que los estudiantes están padeciendo en la modernidad. Primero se estudia la integ...

Some action research today lacks a critical edge. This article identifies five inadequate forms of action research, and argues that action research must be capable of ‘telling unwelcome truths’ against schooling in the interests of education. It reasserts a connection between education and emancipatory ideals that allow educators to address contemp...

This article presents the learnings from PASP, the Priority Action Schools Program expressed in the meta-evaluation â-˜Knowing Makes the Differenceâ-™. PASP, jointly supported by the NSW Department of Education and Training and the NSW Teachers Federation, was designed to provide intensive support to 74 schools with concentrations of students from...

The notion of ‘professional practice knowledge’ has been significant in some recent explorations of the nature of practice and discussions of the development of practitioners and practices. This article begins by outlining ‘professional practice knowledge’ as a window into practice, but suggests that practice has features that cannot be understood...