**3. Theoretical framework**

In recent years, a new line of enquiry in practice theory offers a new way of conceptualising practice and practice development. Among others, Green [19], Kemmis and Grootenboer [20] and Schatzki [21] have sought to show how practices–like practices of teaching and learning – are held in place by distinctive preconditions which enable and constrain particular kinds of interconnected activities, language and relationships which together constitute a practice of one kind or another. Theoretically, the chapter draws on the theory of practice architectures [20, 22] which proposes that practices – like teacher education, teacher learning and teaching – are informed and shaped by particular *cultural-discursive* arrangements (the sayings of a practice), *material-economic* arrangements (the doings of a practice) and *social-political* arrangements (the relatings encountered in practice) which prefigure, but not determine, the practice.

In this vein, the multidimensionality of the practice arrangements of learning to teach during school-based professional experiences is explored. This theory seeks to understand teaching and learning practices in the sites within which they happen *as* they happen; that is, it seeks to make meaning of the existential and site ontological dimensions of practice in school classrooms [23]. After Schatzki [21] and Kemmis et al. [22], considering the existential (that which actually exists in time and space) and site ontological (where practices actually happen) dimensions of practice means grappling with the robustness and complexities of lived realities and site-based conditions that influence the social orders that exist in actual sites or places where social practices like teaching and learning are enacted. Through empirical material, the chapter seeks to provide dynamic descriptions of the particular conditions that stimulate and support the practice development of PSTs through their interactions with students in classroom sites.

Specifically, participant accounts and how the particular practice arrangements of interacting with students in classrooms form the intersubjective mechanisms for understanding how learning about teaching dialogically take place will be presented. This view of practices aims to provide the means to analyse practices like teacher education and to discover the conditions (the practice architectures) which make them possible. Practically, the nature of the interactions PSTs have with students in classrooms as a platform for learning about teaching, learning about learning and connecting this to theory will be examined. What PSTs learn about dialogic teaching from listening to and interacting with students in classrooms and the value they place on this as formational for understanding teaching from their first session of study will be highlighted.
