Abstract
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 schooling , recalling that education shapes not only individuals , but also communities—locally, nationally and globally. The task of education is particularly urgent in the current context when the demands of schooling threaten to engulf the aspirations of education, and this task requires the courage to challenge the status quo. We discuss what it means to be an educator —connecting with people in the community, communicating with them and contributing to their lives in sustainable ways. We call this ‘education for sustainability ’, encompassing environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, social sustainability, cultural sustainability and the sustainability of persons. We urge educators to advocate for their students and help them to overcome disadvantage by including them, engaging them and enabling them to lead fulfilling lives.
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Notes
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- 2.
That is, a combination of cultural-discursive plus material-economic plus social-political arrangements that together enables and constrains the practice , makes it possible , or holds it in place.
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The philosopher and theorist of practice Theodore Schatzki (2002) defines the social or sociality as ‘human coexistence ’. In his Preface introducing the main lines of his argument, he writes: ‘…the best way to approach [the nature of social existence, what it consists in, and the character of its transformation ] is to tie social life to something called “the site of the social”. The social site is a specific context of human coexistence : the place where, and as part of which, social life inherently occurs. To theorize sociality through the concept of a social site is to hold that the character and transformation of social life are both intrinsically and decisively rooted in the site where it takes place. In turn, this site-context…is composed of a mesh of orders and practices . Orders are arrangements of entities (e.g. people, artefacts, things), whereas practices are organised activities . Human coexistence thus transpires as and amid an elaborate, constantly evolving nexus of arranged things and activities ’ (p. xi).
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The book referred to here, Changing practices , changing education by Kemmis et al. (2014b), contains separate chapters analysing examples of the five practices of student learning , teaching , professional learning , leading , and researching and reflecting. The chapters also show how each of these five practices relates to the others in ecologies of practices .
- 6.
In Chap. 2, we described ‘the Education Complex’ of practices : practices of student learning , teaching , teacher professional learning , leading , and research and reflection . Some of these have influenced each other since the very beginning of education; some, like practices of research and teaching , have become interdependent to a greater extent only since the rise of mass compulsory schooling , with the rise of state bureaucracies to administer schooling .
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Many different kinds of things are ‘raw materials’ for different kinds of processes of production . For example, students might be regarded as ‘raw materials’ for a teacher to shape into an adult (if we think of the teacher as someone in the business of ‘producing’ adults of a certain kind). Knowledge about money or banking might be considered as ‘raw material’ for a different kind of production : for example, for a curriculum developer shaping (producing) a mathematics curriculum .
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Later in the book Changing practices , changing education, the table of invention is used to demonstrate how to do this in the detailed analysis of a lesson transcript; in Appendix, ‘Analysing practices using the theories of practice architectures and ecologies of practices : an example’, pp. 223–272. You might find it helpful to show you one way to make a close analysis of a lesson.
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In Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (1979), Michel Foucault refers to the doubleness of the idea of ‘discipline ’ in education: the discipline is the ‘subject’ to be studied (one might also say, the object of study), but the student is also ‘subjected to’, or made subject to, the subject or discipline by ‘being disciplined’ by the teacher. This doubleness is similarly captured when a teacher or professor is described as ‘an authority’ in a subject, and also ‘in authority’ over the students studying it.
- 10.
After a comprehensive study of schooling in Queensland, Australia (the Queensland Longitudinal Study; Luke et al. 1998), Education Queensland (the education department of the state of Queensland) initiated a process of educational reform deemed appropriate for the new millennium, composed of ‘the New Basics’ (a reformed view of school subjects), ‘Rich Tasks’ (a new view of how to assess students’ learning , and ‘Productive Pedagogies’ (improved ways to teach for the new times). This initiative imagined a new form of education for the new millennium. The initiative contested the already-existing (institutionalised ) forms and contents of education in Queensland (established curriculum subjects, established ways of assessing learning through school-based assessments, and established ways of teaching ). While it would be false to say that, in the first years of the new millennium, the new approach to education foundered, and disappeared without a trace, it seems to be the case that, perhaps in revised forms, and influenced by the development of a national Australian Curriculum , the older approaches regained their hegemony. For a brief description of the new approach, see, for example, Grauf (2001): 2001_new_basics_qld_trials_a_curriculum.rtf.
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Reflexivity is understanding oneself as a subject in relation to an object—‘standing above’ oneself, as it were, to think about one’s interactions with other people and other objects. Once having understood oneself in relation to other people and objects in this way, one is changed—one becomes a different person, who acts differently in the world.
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Denis Fitzgerald is a former President of the New South Wales Teachers Federation, the union representing public school teachers in NSW, and former Federal President of the Australian Education Union.
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Kemmis, S., Edwards-Groves, C. (2018). Education, Practice, and Practice Architectures. In: Understanding Education. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6433-3_4
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