Practice Theory and Education

Diffractive readings in professional practice

Julianne Lynch, Julie Rowlands, Trevor Gale, Andrew Skourdoumbis, Julianne Lynch, Julie Rowlands, Trevor Gale, Andrew Skourdoumbis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317277293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Practice Theory and Education challenges how we think about 'practice', examining what it means across different fields and sites. It is organised into four themes: discursive practices; practice, change and organisations; practising subjectivity; and professional practice, public policy and education.

Contributors to the collection engage and extend practice theory by drawing on the legacies of diverse social and cultural theorists, including Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Dewey, Latour, Marx, and Vygotsky, and by building on the theoretical trajectories of contemporary authors such as Karen Barad, Yrjo Engestrom, Andreas Reckwitz, Theodore Schatzki, Dorothy Smith, and Charles Taylor. The proximity of ideas from different fields and theoretical traditions in the book highlight key matters of concern in contemporary practice thinking, including the historicity of practice; the nature of change in professional practices; the place of discursive material in practice; the efficacy of refiguring conventional understandings of subjectivity and agency; and the capacity for theories of practice to disrupt conventional understandings of asymmetries of power and resources. Their juxtaposition also points to areas of contestation and raises important questions for future research.

Practice Theory and Education will appeal to postgraduate students, academics and researchers in professional practice and education, and scholars working with social theory. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to move beyond the limiting configurations of practice found in contemporary neoliberal, new managerialist and narrow representationalist discourses.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Diffractive readings in practice theory

Julianne Lynch, Julie Rowlands, Trevor Gale and Andrew Skourdoumbis

Introduction

In recent years many works have been published with the term ‘practice’ in the title. Some focus on notions of ‘best practice’ and ‘evidence-based practice’, or ‘how to’ practise within specific professional fields. Others draw on limiting distinctions between theory and practice, or practice and policy, or they do not explicitly engage with the notion of ‘practice’ but instead take it to be an already understood and unproblematic concept/object. However, practice theories proceed from the premise – emphasised by Green (2009a) – that ‘practice’ should not be taken for granted, elevating it for explicit consideration. Practice Theory and Education contributes to this growing interest in practice theories by focusing on how they might be deployed in different contexts and to what end.

Reference to the word ‘education’ within the title of this volume points to the close but sometimes fraught relationship between practice theory and education research. In part this is because of persistent questions, from those within the field and those without, about the potential for and the significance of gaps between theory and educational practice. However, it is precisely because practice theory is integral to much education research that the field of education research has contributed significantly to the development and evolution of practice theory. Indeed much contemporary practice theory used within research more broadly arises from or has its origins at least in part within the field of education research. This is evident when, for example, authors writing on diverse topics well beyond education nonetheless draw on the theories of Bourdieu (1977), Reckwitz (2002), Schatzki (1996) and Kemmis (Kemmis et al. 2013) among others, all of whom developed theories of practice but also wrote about education directly (although not always exclusively). Indeed, Schatzki argues that Pierre Bourdieu was one of the founding practice theorists and that he and Anthony Giddens (1979) are ‘leading exponents of practice theory’ (2012, p. 13), together with philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Jean-Francois Lyotard, who also wrote about education directly (see Lyotard 1984). Bourdieu’s work is particularly influential in this regard because he wrote extensively about education and researched school education, universities and education fields more broadly (see for example, Bourdieu 1988, 1977). His work also serves to remind the reader that education practice does not only take place in classrooms, or indeed, within education institutions (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977).

The contributors to Practice Theory and Education – drawn from the fields of governance and leadership, literary theory, school education and teaching, higher education, counselling, social theory and research methodology – explicitly engage with the notion of ‘practice’ in order to push theoretical boundaries, to challenge and rethink how we understand practice as an object of inquiry, and to examine and illustrate what this means for researching professional practice in a variety of contexts. Practice Theory and Education moves beyond the most commonly cited professional fields to include chapters on literary practices, policy as practice, gender as practice, words as practice and research practices. The collection also includes chapters working outside of particular practice fields, focusing on practice philosophy and extending particular manifestations of practice theory and practice-focused research methodology. Within these works, practice theories are engaged and developed as a possible means of seeking to understand social and professional practice, and as a way of speaking back to the limiting configurations of practice found in, for example, structuralist, liberal-humanist, neoliberal capitalist or narrowly representationalist research traditions.

Most publications focused on practice theory dedicate some discussion to terminology and the different referents of the word practice. This work is similarly taken up by each of the chapters in this collection as they engage with particular theoretical traditions. This is important because practice is a word in common use and used in diverse ways even within a single context. The principal distinction often made within practice theory publications is between practice as an uncountable noun (this is the object of practice theorists who ask ‘what is practice?’ and then find themselves engaged in onto-epistemological considerations) and practices as a countable noun (the/a practice) that points to particular configurations of bodies acting with and on other bodies in particular settings. However, further distinctions are usually required and made, particularly in relation to the countable practice/s. For example, Reckwitz (2002, p. 250) distinguishes between a routinised practice or way of doing, and the unique actions of an individual who effectively ‘carries’ that practice; that is, the practices through which ways-of-doing manifest. Schatzki (2001, p. 56) makes similar distinctions between what he refers to as ‘organized nexuses of activity’ (e.g., farming practices), ‘actions’ (e.g., building fences) and ‘doings’, ‘sayings’ and ‘relatings’ (e.g., hammering), which manifest in the unique performances that are usually the object of empirical studies. Within particular practice theories, frameworks for theorising particular practice/s are usually underpinned by explicit ontological considerations, and diverse practice theories share characteristics that contribute to the ontological sense of practice theory. For example, Feldman and Orlikowski (2011, p. 1240) explain that central to practice theory is an understanding of social life as an ‘ongoing production’ that emerges through people’s recurrent actions. Thus a tension with which practice theories engage is between the productive and reproductive flows of the social, and this tension serves as a key ontological engine for provoking new understandings: the social is constituted via manifestations that are both singular in their materiality yet recognisable in a formal sense as practices.

So the terminology of practice theory is slippery, and precision of terminology within particular theories and deployments of theories is important, but this is not the only source of slipperiness when working with practice theory. The object of inquiry itself is theorised as one that is difficult to nail down. Green (2009b, pp. 39–40) usefully characterises practice theory as ‘a distinctive post-Cartesian strand of thinking about practice, one that is sceptical about and seeks to problematise modernist views of both representation and subjectivity, linked in turn to received notions of knowledge and identity’, thus pointing to the epistemological problematics engaged by practice theory. Scholars working with practice theory often postulate alternative, non-representational configurations of practice that focus on, for example, materiality, embodiment, situatedness and relationality, with some theoretical trajectories challenging the notion of individual human subjects and the distinction between subject and object in social research. In this book, such challenges are performed with reference to theorists such as Barad, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze, Latour, Charles Taylor and Vygotsky. These theorists problematise the methodological presumptions of modern sociology by identifying risks associated with reflective research logics and tools that seek to represent practices, and by raising questions about what and how we might know. Here the risk is that research methods and representations merely reproduce established conceptual frameworks and fail to capture aspects of practice that escape the net of such frameworks. Thus practice is theorised as an object of study that calls for new methods of inquiry and presentation.

Some scholars working with practice theory have noted methodological trends within practice approaches, through which empirical researchers seek to capture the temporal-spatial enactments and transformations of practices without losing a sense of the complexity and dynamism of practice. For example, Miettinen et al. (2009, p. 1314) write of a ‘methods agenda’ within practice theory, noting the examples of ethnography, ethnomethodology and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as approaches for studying ‘a living practice “here and now” ’. Others have developed particular methodological approaches that they believe respond to practice ontologies – for example, practice-focused ethnography as described by Trowler (2014). These methodological approaches have been developed in response to a desire to move away from the reductivism of realist, idealist and relativist approaches to researching practice.¹ Others have expressed concerns about taking established methodologies as a starting point. For example, St Pierre (2014), in her work on post-qualitative inquiry, has argued that considerations of ontology are more fruitful than engagements with particular methodologies. In this vein, Green and Hopwood (2015, pp. 5–6, citing Kemmis) describe a trend in practice research towards what they call ‘philosophical-empirical inquiry’, where researchers ‘bring together conceptual sophistication with empirical rigour’. Many of the chapters in this collection engage with these methodological challenges, and some deploy or advocate for particular ‘philosophical-empirical’ strategies that attempt to respond to these challenges.

Challenges relating to how we might know practice are taken up in the chapters in this collection, with some employing noted practice theories and methodologies in relation to particular empirical contexts and others providing close, critical engagements with the onto-epistemological writings of eminent practice theorists and philosophers. In this chapter, we draw on the concept and practice of diffraction to introduce and provide a productive reading of the fifteen contributions that constitute Practice Theory and Education.

Diffraction: Reading through the chapters

In her much cited 1992 essay The Promise of Monsters, Haraway described the interference patterns produced by diffracting rays of light. She employed this concept to write against the reproductive logics of science – the logics of reflection – and to invoke an ontology of emergence and contingency, where ‘very rarely does anything really get reproduced’ (Haraway 1992, p. 299). Diffraction is a physical phenomenon that can be observed when light, water or particles encounter some sort of interference or move from one medium into another, generating new forms and movements. The term diffraction is also used to describe the process that occurs when waveforms encounter other forces (an object or another wave), or move from one medium to another, resulting in a transfer and transformation of forces and the production of new waveforms. Referring to waveforms in water, Huygen’s Principle states that every point on any wave can be regarded as a new source of secondary waves. These productions only occur through encounters, and encounters necessarily produce new forms. Within the humanities and social sciences, diffraction provides a disruptive metaphor and has been taken up by many who seek to pursue non-representational research agendas and non-representational (affirmative, productive, advocative) research ethics. In relation to practice, an ontological grounding that assumes an immanent logic of interference and the production of difference is particularly attractive because of the promises it holds for social change and emancipation from relations of domination. If practices are not simply reproduced, then they can be done differently. In fact, they are always done differently.

The diffraction metaphor has been taken up by diverse cultural and literary theorists as an attempt to move away from representational logics of analysis where texts are scrutinised for their referents or meanings, or where texts are compared with other texts to determine which is the ‘truer’ representation of the object of concern. Instead, diffraction suggests approaches that attend to what is produced when two or more entities encounter each other – for example, the bodies of readers with texts, texts with other texts. Feminist theorists have argued that diffraction is not only a useful metaphor but is also an ontological precondition of all material-discursive becomings (e.g., Barad 2007). They point to both the methodological and ethical implications of an onto-epistemology of immanence constituted via diffractive encounters, in which presumptions to represent are not only feeble and ill-informed, but can also be damaging, and where attempts to overcome the shortcomings of representationalist intentions via, for example, self-reflection or reflexivity are naive (Haraway 1992).

In this chapter, we take up diffraction as a material strategy for presenting the contents of the book. This approach was employed by Barad when she proposed to read Foucault and Butler through Bohr in the service of new productions. We do not, therefore, look at these texts to work out what they mean or what they show us or in what ways they are true. Instead, we ask, What ‘patterns of resonance and dissonance’ (Barad 2007, p. 195) are produced as we encounter and assemble these texts, and where does this take our understandings of practice? Thus our engagements with these chapters do not aim to be ‘transcendent and clean’ (Haraway 1996, p. 439) as though we have taken the role of honest and balanced commentators, but – more honestly than that – we work the chapters to see what is produced through and for us. In what follows, we offer four diffractive readings produced by the proximity of chapters within each of the four sections of the book: (1) discursive practices; (2) practice, change and organisations; (3) practising subjectivity; and (4) professional practice, public policy and education. These themes provide the structure for the remainder of this introductory chapter, and allow us to read across chapters drawing on diverse theories, empirical settings and methodological approaches to see what are produced as the key matters of concern in contemporary practice thinking in relation to professional practice, education and change. This grouping risks overplaying the commonality between chapters, as well as failing to leverage potentially generative connections between grouped chapters and those in other sections. Thus are the constraints of a linear text! We start each section below by offering a sense of the chapters – possibly contrived as a representational move, but heartened by Barad’s (2014, p. 185) note that ‘reflection and diffraction are not opposites, not mutually exclusive, but rather different optical intra-actions highlighting different patterns, optics, geometries that often overlap in practice’.

Section 1. Discursive practices: Practising words, writing and theory

Dorothy Smith opens Section 1 with an experimental chapter, where she identifies different practices of words and how ‘word-referent relations are implicated in organising what people do’ (Smith 2017, p. 25). Moving us through a tour of five ‘specimens’, Smith illustrates some of the different ways in which words as practices – while accommodating divergent pathways – also organise complexes of possible, intelligible responses. This tour is intended to open the way for ethnographers to treat words in new ways: as concrete presences that enter into material relations. In the second chapter, Steven Hodge and Stephen Parker examine the works of philosopher Charles Taylor to discuss how theories and practices interact and how these interactions can effect changes in the social imaginary. Hodge and Parker (2017) argue that Taylor – like other practice theorists – sought anti-idealist explanations of the social, but that – unlike other practice theorists – he sought to provide a systematic account of the efficacy of theory. This account distinguishes a meaning-giving background of practices which Taylor goes on to describe in terms of social imaginaries. Taylor’s analysis suggests that it is the infiltration of theories into the social imaginary that accounts for the apparent efficacy of theory in the realm of practice. The chapter by Julianne Lynch and Kristoffer Greaves focuses on research-writing practices, drawing on Michel de Certeau’s conceptualisation of everyday practice to characterise these discursive practices as a dialogue between reproductive and productive operations. Employing de Certeau’s conceptualisation of reuse, they write of the interplay between the normative meta-narrative structures and conventions of research-writing products and the spaces for play produced by the emergent nature of practice. In the final chapter in this first section, David Harris draws on Deleuzian and new materialist thought to provide a critique of representationalist ambitions in and analyses of literary practices with respect to ecological crises. Harris moves forward from this critique to theorise other intensive functions of literature, providing examples from contemporary Australian fiction.

In reframing the deployment of discursive materials (words, theories, research writing, literature) as implicated in and imbricated with practices – bound together with the movements of other materials in dynamic and mutually constitutive ways that are both singular and recognisable – each of these chapters attribute work to discursive materials that move beyond representations of referents. In Smith’s chapter we see a move away from the temptation to treat words as mimetic within ethnographic research towards words as practices that assemble and organise bodies (human and non-human, child and table). Hodge and Parker examine the different ways theories manifest in the realm of practice, the effects they might have within specific historical contexts, and how this might interact with the social imaginary. Lynch and Greaves (2017) write of the reproductive tendencies served by the conventional forms and logics of research-writing practices, where the meta-narrative stru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: Diffractive readings in practice theory
• Section 1 Discursive practices: Practising words, writing and theory
• Section 2 Practice, change and organisations
• Section 3 Practising subjectivity
• Section 4 Professional practice, public policy and education
• Index