Understanding curriculum as practice, or on the practice turn(s) in curriculum inquiry

Curriculum can be understood in a threefold fashion: as concept, as practice and as field of study. These three perspectives and foci are interrelated, and while it is best to consider them and their interrelations together, my focus in this instance is specifically on understanding curriculum as practice. Even to highlight this one dimension, however, is far from simple or straightforward: curriculum as practice is certainly not to be seen, as popular or common-sense usages would have it, as the other side of something called ‘theory’. Indeed, what I present here is a practice-theoretical perspective on curriculum, teaching and schooling. That is, I am drawing on what is called practice theory and philosophy, a body of work and a line of thought that is offering the curriculum field rich insights into the nature of curriculum. There are encouraging signs, in fact, that its time may now have come, with several very recent papers in the curriculum field working with similar ideas and arguments to those I am marshalling here, and I consider them briefly in what follows.

How is the idea of ‘practice’ itself to be understood? It should be acknowledged right at the outset that, as Deng (2021) writes, “… there are not one but many visions of education and conceptions of practice which are always competing and conflicting” (p. 190) — that is, practice can be variously described and conceptualised, and what I am offering here is one account, albeit one I hope is both informed and useful, and moreover defensible. The crucial point is the need for “an internal language of description” (Hordern, 2020, p. 8) for practice itself, within “the further development of an internal conceptual language about education” (p. 9). That remains an ongoing project. The starting point here might be to pick up on what is called the ‘primacy of practice’ thesis and the notion of activity — the idea of the world in motion, as being ongoingly enacted.

At issue, first off, is whether or not practice is understood from the ‘inside’ (i.e. subjectively), or from the ‘outside’ (i.e. objectively), or as a matter somehow of both (i.e. “multidimensionally” — Kemmis, 2009, p. 30). Similarly, we must consider if practice is best understood dynamically or synoptically, or both/and? And if practice is always both in the body and in the world, how do we use it for curriculum inquiry to enrich our knowledge of and capacities for curriculum making? These are challenging issues, for practitioners and researchers alike. What I present here is, broadly, a poststructuralist view. It seeks to provide a particular way of thinking about curriculum-as-practice that is illuminating, partly because it has been obscured if not more actively suppressed in recent times.

Elsewhere, I point to “four distinct but related formulations of the practice concept” (Green, 2009b, pp. 42–43), drawn from the philosopher Theodore Schatzki (1996). The first is “learning how or improving one’s ability to do something by repeatedly working at it and carrying it out” (Schatzki, 1996, p. 89). This is familiar enough — ‘practising’. It is what happens in sport and other fields, or learning piano, for example. The second is to see practice as “a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings” (p. 89) — an array of activities, doing and saying things in an organised way, to achieve particular ends. The third way of understanding practice is as “performing an action or carrying out a practice of the second sort” (p. 89). This is performance, or enactment — practising the practice, or playing it out. There is another, fourth formulation, which indicates operating in the nitty–gritty of the so-called real world, commonsensically understood, or, reframed theoretically, “the everyday business of professional practice” (Green, 2009b, p. 43). If we keep the first to one side for the moment, then to speak of practice is to bring these latter three meanings together. Hence:

Professional practice in this light consists of speech (what people say) plus the activity of the body, or bodies, in interaction (what people do, more often than not together) – a play of voices and bodies. In this view, practice is inherently dialogical, an orchestrated interplay, and indeed a matter of co-production. (Green, 2009b, p. 43).

In our case, this is what is being referred in speaking of classroom practice, with all its exigencies and urgencies, its worldliness. This is face-to-face, body-to-body, interactive, affective, dynamic — teachers and students, working together (mostly…) in the same milieu, getting things done. As is well known, teachers do most of the talking in classrooms, with students talking to some degree, in various ways, but also reading and writing, as instructed — ‘voices’ in play, that is, or ‘language-ing’. But there are also bodies in play, or at work: the teacher’s (adult) body and the gendered bodies of the students, sitting, raising their hands, answering back, exchanging glances and perhaps passing notes, attentive or not, etc. There are various architectures to negotiate: walls, windows, desks and whiteboards, along with others that are more virtual in nature but still emphatically material. This is the ‘real world’ of the classroom in action, in motion. And of course it is located, alongside other classrooms, in the school, as an organisation, a worksite, with connections to other practice sites (e.g. Head Office, etc.).

All of these senses of practice are relevant here, which is why practice is so complex and demanding, as always excessive, as “already always social”, with teaching as professional practice “right from the outset, a distinctive form of social practice, with all its attendant complexity” (Green, 2009b, p. 43). There is much more to be said, in elaborating this view of practice — for instance, how ‘sayings’ and ‘doings’ (Schatzki, 1996) and ‘relatings’ (Kemmis, 2019) and ‘sensings’ (Green, 2021a, 2021b) come together and are woven into the lived and living fabric of practice, how corporeality matters in and beyond the cognitive and the intentional, how professional judgement as phronesis relates to praxis and aporia (Green, 2009a) and all the risks of decision and undecidability, existence and ontology. Suffice it for the moment to say that this remains a task to be done.

Such thinking arises from my engagement, with others, with practice theory and philosophy, in the context of seeking to understand and research professional practice, across a range of professional practice fields (teaching, nursing, social work, clinical psychology, etc.).¹ This was conceived as a comparative research programme, right from the outset, with the view that there was much to be gained by novices (‘newcomers’) in a particular field being exposed to how practitioners in other professions developed over time a professional identity, a habitus, as they moved through their initial professional education and beyond to become authorised and authoritative as professionals. The work is still proceeding, on various fronts (e.g. Loftus and Kinsella, 2021).

An important reference point, and indeed a major impetus for this particular research program, was the publication of The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (1980), edited by Theodore Schatzki, Katrin Knorr Cetina and Chloe von Savigny. The book announced an important initiative in social and cultural inquiry, ranging across the humanities and the sciences, and the assertion of ‘practice’ as “the primary generic social thing” (Schatzki et al., 2001, p.1). Schatzki himself has been a key figure in this ‘practice turn’.² It is worth noting that education was not included in the fields addressed in the book, as a point of reference for “contemporary theory”, and there was no mention at all of curriculum theory. Clearly however there was much that was directly relevant for education, and particularly and more specifically for professional education, including teacher education. This was picked up in our own work (e.g. Green et al., 2017).

A further point of interest here is the positing of two (meta-)traditions in practice theory and philosophy, what I called the ‘neo-Aristotelian’ and the ‘post-Cartesian’ (Green, 2009a), with possibly a third to be identified with American Pragmatism.³ To date, more has been done in the neo-Aristotelian tradition, with Stephen Kemmis’ work on ‘practice architectures’ an exemplary expression of this: although there is also increasingly work being done along post-Cartesian lines, in what might be seen as a ‘postmodernist’ perspective, drawing on notions of discourse and subjectivity. Deweyan work on habit and the body has been also extremely important in this regard, along with his notions of experience and activity. My point is that there are different ways of thinking (about) practice available, and a considerable body of work now in professional education, which might be useful for curriculum inquiry, although there has been little sign of this happening or being taken up until recently, at least explicitly.

This is not to say that these are entirely new perspectives. Neo-Aristotelian inquiry for instance links readily with action research, from John Elliott in the UK to Kemmis and others in Australia (Green, 2018c), and Shirley Grundy’s (1987) exploration of “curriculum as product or praxis” is certainly aligned with neo-Aristotelian practice theories. Of particular significance here is the notion of ‘the practical’, drawn from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere, as an action-orientation or what has been called a knowledge-constitutive interest, involving the relationship between phronesis, or the wisdom of experience, and praxis, as a concept potentially bringing together the good and the political. Also in Australia, Noel Gough (1978, 1984) did important early work along such lines, on ‘deliberation’ and the practical, before shifting to a more Reconceptualist perspective. Poststructuralist influences in curriculum inquiry have become increasingly familiar in the field, although this has been more oriented to language, and to discourse rather than practice, conceptually, even as its use-value in and for practice has become clearer. Deweyan work in curriculum inquiry is clearly evident, again without being focused on theorising practice. A proper synthesis of these various perspectives and traditions has not been made to date, however.

My interest here is in how this way of thinking might be transferred to curriculum inquiry. More specifically, what are the implications of seeing curriculum itself as a form of practice? This depends, in part, on how curriculum itself is understood, of course, and it must suffice here to say that I understand curriculum to involve the articulation and regulation of knowledge and pedagogy. That is a very abstract formulation, I know, though I have begun to elaborate it elsewhere (Green, 2018a, 2021a). Furthermore, a distinction needs to be made between curriculum and schooling — partly because these are all too often simply conflated. Historically, schooling as a particular cultural invention has been the principal means for realising curriculum — as teaching–learning experience — in a mass-industrial context. But schooling serves other purposes, some of which have to do with instilling social discipline and managing populations. We must be careful not to confuse schooling and curriculum.

I suggest there are, in effect, two sites of curriculum as practice: one operating at the policy level, regarding what has been called “the technical curriculum” (Luke et al., 2013a, 2013b),⁴ and the other with regard to the classroom curriculum (Green, 2021a), in everyday action. The two are related, although not as directly or as smoothly as sometimes supposed. The first can be observed in the Australian Curriculum or, in terms of state jurisdictions, in the recently reviewed NSW curriculum. In both cases, the outcome of curriculum-making is a material policy document — a ‘curriculum’⁵ — designed and developed by educational bureaucracies, with the aim of directing what is to be taught and learnt in schools.⁶ Producing this official curriculum involves working within a predetermined template or framework, more often than not based to varying degrees on a classic Tylerian model. How the people charged with doing this go about it is not well documented, certainly in any clearly articulated ethnographic sense. As Luke (2013, p. 4) writes: “The categories for curriculum developers, writers and consultants charged with developing state and system syllabus documents are more often than not ‘given’, fixed a priori in both philosophic and political senses and presented as beyond criticism”. He provides here, in fact, a striking snapshot of what tends to happen in such circumstances, from how the meetings are set up, with their “marching orders”, etc., to the format(s) made available:

[I]n terms of the technical vocabulary, taxonomies and categories to be used, these meetings are more often fait accompli. Key decisions about curriculum philosophy and paradigm have already been made prior to these meetings beginning. Typically, the boxes to be filled in have been determined. An overall grid or map of the curriculum has already been set well before people sit down to debate. (Luke, 2013, p. 3)

Such an account advocates for greater attention to the so-called technical curriculum, on the basis that its significance has been greatly underestimated, and also because there is little (‘practical’) guidance available to those involved in this level of curriculum-making. My point is that there is nonetheless a recognisable practice evident here — purposive, integrated, and oriented towards a particular end — albeit one that is highly constrained, partly based on experience and precedent. In practice-theoretical terms, it is most likely characterised as techné, focused as it is on a final product, achieved as effectively and efficiently as possible, as required. This is notwithstanding the sometimes different, even conflicting dispositions and interests, and hopes, that participants might bring with them, or be working with, at least some of the time. Nonetheless, it is clearly a matter of getting things done, in (ideally) a systematised and organised way, drawing on whatever resources are available — a particular form of (educational-bureaucratic) practice: the practice of curriculum.

The other site is more focused on the classroom curriculum, and the everyday life of classrooms, the site par excellence of curriculum as practice. I take a normative stance here: this is where curriculum is realised in its purest form, in teaching–learning experience,⁷ and the interaction and exchanges of teachers and students, in particular circumstances, and with regard to particular knowledges. While there might well be other levels of curriculum, this is surely what they are ultimately concerned with at their best, at least ‘theoretically’, or nominally. So how are we to think about this curriculum as practice? At issue is partly the everyday-ness of classrooms, as lived sites of educational experience, especially their complexity, which always threatens to be overwhelming, and which must therefore be carefully and skilfully managed. Voices are involved, and bodies, and shifting speeds and intensities, “flows and ebbs of affect and primal resistance in teachers and taught from moment to moment” (Boomer, 1988, p. 171), stretched-out moments of boredom and flashes of insight, successes and failures, and elsewhere other classrooms, other worlds. Whether this is approached from a professional practice perspective, with the teacher positioned as centrally shaping what happens, as indeed she must be officially, legally, or whether it is seen as more a matter of co-production, a “moment-by-moment dance between … teacher and student” (Boomer, 1988, p. 171), this is recognisably a practice, “purposive, embodied, situated, … dialogical’” (Hager, 2013, p. 19), at once preconfigured and emergent. Activity and experience come together, thoroughly, inescapably saturated with context.

It might be objected at this point that curriculum is more than teachers and students simply ‘being there’, in the classroom, in all its complexity — and that is indeed the case. Teachers for instance are still engaging in curriculum-as-practice when they are programming, i.e. planning and developing units of work/study (Carlgren, 1999; Deng, 2021). So too are students when they are doing ‘homework’ or using the school library. Similar points can be made regarding teachers’ professional development activity, or their work with and for professional associations, as ‘extended’ professionals (Stenhouse, 1975), or even when seconded to curriculum committees and the like. How these various spheres or realms of practice are connected is something still needing to be adequately mapped. But being in the midst of the practice of curriculum-as-practice, caught up in the flow of classroom life — ‘curriculum-ing’, as Boomer put it — remains somehow crucial. This may well be the case, too, for those for whom the classroom is no longer their primary reference point, their primary worksite, who have moved into leadership and management roles, or into curriculum policy development and syllabus writing, or indeed academia. What seems to matter in these cases is that such people are able to call upon their professional experience, in the strongest sense, their body memory, and their lived sense of the practice of curriculum. How long this persists is debatable, however. Can it be renewed, or refreshed? Again that is unclear – although it might be worth reconsidering and elaborating the notion of “the practitioner standpoint” in this regard (Reid & Green, 2009).

Here it is useful to consider supplementing available accounts on and approaches to ‘knowing practice’ (Doecke et al., 2007; Kemmis, 2005). Of particular relevance is the argument in practice theory and philosophy for the need to problematise representation, including the relationship between language, body and practice, the body in practice (Green & Hopwood, 2015). This opens the way to ‘non-representational’ accounts of curriculum-as-practice and thus experiments in how to make sense of and communicate such practical knowledge, or ‘knowings’. Already there has been some very interesting work done on narrative in this regard (Polkinghorne, 1997), which I have endorsed in terms of a “close and productive association between practice and narrative” (Green, 2009a, p. 14). The links with narrative work in teacher education and elsewhere are clear.⁸ It may well be, however, that there is value in looking to go beyond narrative, in the conventional sense, to embrace more ‘poetic’ modes, consistent with a postmodern(ist) view of practice and expressivity. It may be particularly apt to accommodate accounts such as those of Shotter (2011), concerning the role of intuition and abduction vis-á-vis embodiment, and what he calls “relational-orientational knowing”, as ‘knowing from within’. Sometimes more prosaic, discursive renderings miss the point, especially when it is a matter significantly of affect or sensation, of ‘feel’.

Moreover, there are good reasons at this point for turning to notions of action research and practitioner inquiry, with reference to what has been explicitly described as “a new view of practice” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 65). I argue, nonetheless, that these notions need to be re-articulated explicitly within the frame of curriculum inquiry — that is, with regard specifically to curriculum as concept and practice. My feeling is that, to date, this has been left largely tacit, or more or less assumed, and hence taken-for-granted. Here, it would be interesting to explore what might be called the ‘internal goods’ of curriculum practice, as ‘curriculum-ing’. In reflecting on practice, from within, and then planning for the future, what comes next, what ‘data’ is gathered and how? Presumably, this will be in some form of ‘text’. But that is far from straightforward, even though this has often been obscured. Undoubtedly, some aspects of curriculum practice can indeed be recorded and hence made available for reflection and the like. Is it the case for other aspects? — those that retain the ‘mystery’ of practice, as Bourdieu and others maintain. What is that skilled teachers do? — some of which, undoubtedly, eludes rational(ist) explanation. How do classrooms in action hang together, how do things that happen in them (inter)connect and cohere? How is this linked to other classrooms, both synchronically and diachronically?⁹ What can be said about teachers’ agency in this regard? What do teachers do to make this happen, or at least to influence its emergence and unfolding? How implicated and active, and in what ways, are student-learners? Are there other ways of making and sharing sense that might need to be accounted for, in somewhat different realisations of action research and practitioner enquiry?

I indicated at the outset that there were now somewhat belated signs of an emerging awareness of the so-called practice turn in curriculum inquiry, and I briefly turn to this now. Ingrid Carlgren (2020) for instance refers explicitly to Schatzki et al. (2001), noting that “[c]onsidering the great impact of the so called practice turn in social theory … it seems a little odd that this does not seem to have impacted the concept of knowledge as such in educational discourse”, adding “[e]specially since the practice turn has exerted such a great impact on learning theory […]” (p. 324). Her starting point is the knowledge debate in recent curriculum inquiry, and she seeks to bring an emphasis on what she calls “knowings”, or knowledge as activity and perspective. As she writes: “If the aim of education is to produce knowledgeable people, it is the knowing of the known that is primary in teaching. It is the knowing, developed in transaction with specific knowns, that is capacity-building” (Carlgren, 2020, p. 332). For her, it is the tacit, the embodied, the relational, what might be even called the ‘non-representational’, that needs to be greater accounted for, both in the knowledge made available in and through curriculum and in teachers’ own professional practice knowledge. This seems an important perspective to take on board here. Importantly, she draws attention to the work of the educational philosopher Paul Hirst (1993) a “troubled rationalist” as she describes him (p. 329), whose own “practice turn” pre-dated Schatzki and his colleagues, as he asserted “practice as the primary value in education” (p. 331). It is noteworthy too that she draws specifically on Dewey and his ‘transactional’ pragmatist philosophy of knowledge (p. 331).

Hordern (2020, 2021) similarly takes up the practice turn, directly referencing Carlgren’s account and seeking to problematise her argument concerning knowledge, experience and practice. His frame is still the ‘powerful knowledge’ (PK) debate, however, which means that he is working with a particular view of curriculum, consistent with that debate, and indeed recent developments in curriculum inquiry. Here and elsewhere (Green, 2018a), I have sought to challenge that view, which foregrounds knowledge and effectively backgrounds pedagogy, sometimes even subordinating if not refusing it. Hordern (2020, p. 6) introduces the notion of “a normative view of practice”, drawing on Hager (2013), Rouse (2007) and others, which he sees as a refinement of Carlgren’s rendering of what she describes as “the so called practice turn”. This is broadly a neo-Aristotelian view, with MacIntyre (2007) in particular evoked regarding the “internal goods” pertaining to a practice (Hordern, 2021, p. 6). This leads to an argument for differentiating between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ views and understandings of educational practice. As he writes, intriguingly: “… the outsider view cannot substitute for direct acquaintance with, or immersion in, the practice, in terms of making judgements about what is appropriate performance of the practice” (Hordern, 2020, p. 6). His account is intriguing, and potentially generative, especially in terms of making a case for the specificity and integrity of educational practice. His concern is with education more generally, however, and not curriculum per se, and it might also be said that his emerging view of practice remains itself indeed classically modernist.

Zongyi Deng (2021) has also entered into this ‘practice’ debate recently, building on his now quite extensive work on the state of contemporary curriculum inquiry, and on his own rendering of the knowledge debate. Here, as elsewhere, he is fiercely critical of the Reconceptualist perspective, seeing it as over-valuing ‘theory’ at the expense of ‘practice’, and indeed shifting radically “away from practice and the inner work of schooling and towards theoretical discourse” (p. 179). “Practice” and “the inner work of schooling” are thereby identified and linked together. This is a particular view of ‘practice’, however, one which echoes and reaffirms an older, rather different tradition of curriculum scholarship. Significantly, he brings together European and North American perspectives in this regard, the latter exemplified in the work of Joseph Schwab. As he writes: “curriculum studies is a practical discipline centrally concerned with practice (curriculum planning, curriculum development, curriculum enactment or classroom teaching) for the advancement of education” (Deng, 2021, p. 179). Moreover: “[P]ractice and inner work of schooling provide the essential point of departure for curriculum theorizing” (p. 179). The problem is that, despite its insights (here and elsewhere), Deng’s account excludes or glosses much that is not only relevant to understanding curriculum as practice but that I argue is essential, including due regard for the practice concept itself. His is largely a neo-Aristotelian and modernist view, albeit leavened by Eastern wisdom traditions. It is also, arguably, overly institutionalised. In this regard, Deng’s work is linked programmatically to an earlier strand of curriculum scholarship associated centrally with Schwab and running through Ian Westbury and William Reid, usually described as the Deliberationist tradition, and clearly neo-Aristotelian in its orientation.

In summary: All three accounts — by Carlgren, Hordern and Deng, respectively — are noticeably congruent with current trends and tendencies in curriculum scholarship, which has recently been undergoing something of a renaissance, partly resourced but clearly marked by growing engagement with European work in Didaktik studies and the like. This is certainly to be welcomed. But they also share some shortcomings and blind spots, as I see it. Their various views of practice seem curiously abstracted, and unduly ‘doxic’. They operate within a received view of (modernist) schooling, liberal education and the socio-political order of things. Their programmatic refusal of relevant aspects of the Reconceptualist tradition is unfortunate and misguided. Nonetheless, such work is a positive sign that attention is shifting more explicitly in the curriculum field to what I have identified as the ‘primary of practice’ thesis.

This paper has sketched out what might be involved in seeking to understand curriculum as practice, as an important aspect of contemporary curriculum inquiry, in large part by working with practice theory and philosophy. It draws on work already available in professional education, which has been noticeable for its recent engagement with such a problematised, reconstructed view of practice (Hager et al., 2012). It therefore contributes to recent shifts in attention in the curriculum field to what I think can still be described, rhetorically, as a ‘practice turn’. I have acknowledged here that various other practice ‘turns’ can be observed in the field, and it may be that there is considerable value at this time in making this explicit, and in working towards a truly productive synthesis. The curriculum dialogue to date has been rather skewed in this particular regard, unfortunately, and at best a complicated conversation that might even be called an internecine struggle between entrenched positions. Elsewhere (Green, 2018b), I have proposed a rather different way of looking at recent debates and conflicts in scholarship, suggesting for instance that ‘Deliberationism’ and ‘Reconceptualism’¹⁰ — two undoubtedly important perspectives in curriculum inquiry, historically — might be brought and thought together, notwithstanding their differences, to good effect. This paper, sketchy as it is, continues such speculation. My hope is that there are possibilities that now can be discerned that contribute to enriching and regenerating curriculum inquiry in Australia, and beyond.