Abstract
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, Rotterdam, pp. 37–62, 2008; Kemmis et al. in Changing education, changing practices. Springer Education, Singapore, 2014). Drawing on observations of classrooms, schools and a school district, the authors argue, first, that people ‘learn’ practices , not only ‘knowledge ’, ‘concepts’ or ‘values’, for example. They suggest that learning a practice entails entering—joining in—the projects and the kinds of sayings , doings and relatings characteristic of different practices. The metaphor that learning involves being ‘stirred in’ to practices conveys the motion and dynamism of becoming a practitioner of a practice of one kind of another, like learning or teaching. Being stirred into practices suggests an account of ‘learning’ that elucidates the process, activity and sociality of learning as a practice.
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Notes
- 1.
For a fuller account, see Chap. 4 (pp. 55–91), ‘Student Learning: Learning practices’, in Kemmis et al. (2014).
- 2.
We concede that the metaphor of ‘stirring in ’ suggests that someone, a teacher, say, does the ‘stirring’ while someone else, a student, say, is ‘stirred in’ to a practice. Despite this limitation of the metaphor, we want to assert that people can also ‘stir themselves in’ to practices that are new for them simply by imitating others, or by ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991, p. 27), or by reading a book, for example.
- 3.
B is a Boy, G is a Girl, Q is one of the interviewers.
- 4.
Kemmis et al. (2014, p. 70, Fig. 4.1), show a photograph of a long vocabulary list from this classroom, including words like ‘carbon’, ‘energy’, and ‘greenhouse effect’.
- 5.
Kemmis et al. (2014, p. 55) make the distinction between ‘learning practices’ and ‘substantive practices’. A learning practice is a practice whose project is to help people learn (like interacting with others, taking turns in conversations, listening, or web-searching).A substantive practice, by contrast, is the practice to be learned—a practice whose project is to be able to do something in the world (for example, practices like reading a factual text about rainforests, reciting poetry, making a speech, building a Lego tower, or the practice of critiquing practices of schooling). In formal learning settings, learning practices and substantive practices frequently overlap and intertwine.
- 6.
Of course it is not necessarily the case that that all students come to know (or come to know equally) how to go on in language games, activities and practices going on around them in their classrooms. It is frequently the case that learners resist or refuse or are too confused to enter the language games, activities and practices on offer in their classrooms.
- 7.
Wittgenstein (1958, p. 88e, §241): ‘“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in forms of life’.
- 8.
Wittgenstein (1958, p. 107e, §329): ‘When I think in language, there aren’t “meanings” going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought’.
- 9.
One is tempted to use a sequence like the five-stage sequence ‘novice’, ‘advanced beginner’, ‘competent’, ‘proficient’ and ‘expert’ employed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) to describe the progress towards ‘virtuosity’. But the apparent logic of this sequence only holds when the sequence is viewed from the perspective of the ‘expert’, who is expert in this or that particular way, in this or that particular practice. It is not always clear from the perspective of the ‘novice’ what virtuosity will develop from practising a practice. One learner develops virtuosity in pretending to read, for example, while another develops virtuosity in reading; and one learner develops virtuosity in physics from practising mathematics, while another’s practising of mathematics develops his virtuosity in playing poker.
- 10.
The idea of the evolution of practices relates closely to the notion of the evolution of knowledge described by Stephen Toulmin in his (1972) Human Understanding, Volume I: The collective use and evolution of concepts. In an epigram at the beginning of the book, he quotes the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (from Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony): ‘Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals’.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council for the 2010–2012 Discovery Project (DP1096275) ‘Leading and Learning: Developing ecologies of educational practice’.
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Kemmis, S., Edwards-Groves, C., Lloyd, A., Grootenboer, P., Hardy, I., Wilkinson, J. (2017). Learning as Being ‘Stirred In’ to Practices. In: Grootenboer, P., Edwards-Groves, C., Choy, S. (eds) Practice Theory Perspectives on Pedagogy and Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3130-4_3
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