**5. The theory of practice architectures: a conceptual framework for understanding pedagogy as site based education**

The interest in practices and practice architectures presented in this chapter stems from decades of theoretical and empirical work highlighting the sociality of teaching and learning. Utilising the theory of practice architectures offers some new insights into questions concerning pedagogy; these are summarised briefly next.

#### **5.1. New contributions of this theoretical position**

Broadly, the theory of practice architectures draws attention to *how* local or site based, as well as systemic external, conditions influence the conduct of pedagogical practices. Thus, it offers a fresh perspective on what happens in lessons in schools against the relatively volatile background of performativity, the measurement of the efficacy of teaching practice and student learning outcomes, and the rigidity being applied to the implementation of curriculum. It affords a view of pedagogy that necessarily accounts for the ways a constellation, body or assemblage of locally produced and intertwined practices and practice architectures shape what happens in sites of practice. The theory of practice architectures *re-centres* the significance of the sociality, situatedness and happeningness of classroom practices at both a *molar* and *micro* level in ways that enables the analyst *to get at* the diversity that exists in pedagogical practices.

While many traditional accounts of pedagogy as method place great store in technè or the techniques of teaching for learning, the theory of practice architectures contributed to the field of social science for its capacity to show the nuances and distinctiveness of the practices and practice architectures of pedagogy that may indeed remain elusive in a highly complex field of study. It takes understandings about the conduct of pedagogy beyond a tacit more instrumental level to reveal the ways practices themselves get accomplished in the everydayness of particular social happenings like classroom teaching and learning. In particular, it offers purchase on how teachers and students enter into and create shared spaces for understanding and extending each other as learners and teachers in the semantic, physical and social spaces that form lessons. This is a view that orients to understandings about how the semantic, physical and social spaces of practice form the intersubjective nature of learning and teaching in classrooms. According to this view of practice, students become practitioners of learning practices by co-inhabiting particular intersubjective spaces with their teachers and peers in classroom lessons (over historical time and in physical space–time), and by employing particular sayings, doings and relatings appropriate to the practices of particular disciplines. Going further, the study of transcripts, like those presented in this chapter, reveals 'the collaborative ways in which members manage their conduct and their circumstances to achieve the orderly features of their activities' ([28], p. 7).

Returning to the questions that framed this chapter, the discussion shows how *the theory of practice architectures* adds insights into understandings about pedagogy as a practice, the ways the framework of the theory of practice architectures helps to conceptualise the sociality, situatedness and happeningness of pedagogy as it is produced in lessons. Furthermore, it offers enhanced perspectives about the local and broader systemic conditions or the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that influence pedagogical decision making as it happens in the flow of instruction. From this position, understanding the practice architectures of pedagogy, strictly applied, counters more narrow but universal conceptualisations about pedagogy as method to liberate an inherently social view of teaching and learning. It opens up more restrictive and ambiguous perspectives of pedagogy to reveal an intersubjective positioning that orients to this view: *that to speak about pedagogy is to speak about how practices are socially, dialogically, ontologically and temporally constituted*.
