School transformation in minoritized settings: a practice architectures lens

ABSTRACT

This article examines school transformation for students from minoritized backgrounds in a highly disadvantaged Australian elementary school. Employing the theory of practice architectures and ecologies of practices, it analyses the educational practices and arrangements that enable and constrain the fostering of a more holistic educational approach for the school’s diverse and highly impoverished school community. Furthermore, it examines how these practices and arrangements connect to one another in ways that foster enabling conditions for a more holistic approach to educating to emerge. A practice approach to the study of change is crucial for schools in highly disadvantaged circumstances. It foregrounds the non-human, material elements of school transformation, rejects the reification of practices found in adjectival accounts of leadership and acknowledges the funds of knowledge that minoritized communities bring to schooling. In so doing, a practice approach speaks back to the materiality of power in the making. The article concludes by discussing the implications for socially just educational leadership practice, particularly in minoritized school communities experiencing the challenges of highly performative, marketized systems.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer. Howards End, E. M. Forster

Introduction

In the epigraph to the novel, Howard’s End, the main character, Margaret Schlegel, makes a plea for the value of fostering human connections in life. Margaret recognizes that such links are hard forged – for they require connecting what can seem like irreconcilable elements of life – ‘the prose and the passion’. Yet, the endeavor is worth it, for, as novelist, E. M. Forster (2012) maintains through the voice of his main character, it means we will ‘live in fragments no longer’.

This article examines one Australian school’s attempts to connect the ‘fragments’ of apparently irreconcilable elements of contemporary Anglophone schooling systems. It does so to forge a more holistic educational approach for its low socio-economic and minoritized school community. The school attempts to bring together the ‘prose’ of approaches that typically valorize measurability, standardization and narrow notions of evidence – with the ‘passion’ of approaches that attend to the upbringing of the whole child a la Dewey, i.e. their moral, intellectual, social and physical formation. In this article, we employ a practice lens to examine this process of forging connections between educational practices, namely the theory of practice architectures [TPA] (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008), and ecologies of practices (Kemmis et al., 2012). A practice lens allows us to ‘zoom in on the accomplishment of practices’ (Nicolini, 2012, p. 213) in situ to capture the viscerality of the site in which educational practices unfold. Simultaneously, it allows us to ‘zoom out’ to examine the ‘relationships in space and time’ (Nicolini, 2012, p. 212) between key educational practices such as teaching, leading, policy making, student learning, professional learning and researching. These practices constitute the education complex of modern education systems (Kemmis et al., 2014). Crucially for this article, the process of zooming out allows us to examine how such practices are prefigured, but not predetermined by the broader relations of power that constitute the field of schooling in Australia.

In adopting a practice lens, we foreground the non-human, material elements of school transforming. Such an approach contributes to research and knowledge in the field of school reform in several ways. Firstly, one of the classical sociological dilemmas of the study of schools as organizations is why they are so durable and apparently resistant to change. If, as practice theorists argue, the ‘sources of changed behaviour lie in the development of practices themselves’ (Warde, 2005, p. 140), then ‘understanding their emergence, persistence and disappearance is of the essence’ (Shove et al., 2012, p. 2). Secondly, a practice account provides a much-needed corrective to the reification of practices found in adjectival accounts of leadership (Eacott, 2015; Wilkinson, 2021). It does through its close attendance to organizing, teaching, learning and leading as material accomplishments unfolding in the taken-for-granted activities, practices and relationships between practices in sites. Such an approach provides overdue attention and ‘access to the ‘heroic work of ordinary … practitioners in their day to day routines’ (Whittington, 1996, as cited in Carroll et al., 2008).

A practice approach to the study of change is particularly important for schools in highly disadvantaged circumstances such as Osterwild Primary School,¹ the school under examination in this article. This is because taken together, educational practices constitute a field in which ‘practices and their association perform different and unequal social and material positions’ (Nicolini, 2012, p. 214). Hence, to ‘study practice is also to study power in the making’ (Nicolini, 2012, p. 214). Studies of the practices and practice architectures of highly disadvantaged schools are crucial that speak back to the materiality of this power in the making. This is imperative given that Australia’s marketized educational systems are highly unequal when it comes to the outcomes of minoritized groups compared to other OECD countries (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2023). Moreover, schools in disadvantaged circumstances, such as Osterwild Primary School are most likely to be on the receiving end of the prescriptive nostrums that compose the ‘Ikea flat pack’ of the Transnational Leadership Package [TLP] (P. Thomson et al., 2018, p. xii). Such nostrums are often premised on performative measures of ‘inputs, outputs, targets and investment’ such as high stakes testing as the measure of educational ‘good’ (Mockler & Groundwater Smith, 2018, p. 64). The resultant pressures placed on schools risks deskilling teachers, the abandonment of richer, more holistic forms of curriculum, and ‘pedagogies of underachievement’ aimed at transmission of narrow content such as teaching to the test (Thomson et al., 2012, p. 6). They also particularly disadvantage already disadvantaged students and their communities such as Osterwild (Heffernan, 2018; Lingard et al., 2002).

Adopting a practice lens to examine the transforming of schools also contrasts with the orthodoxy of much school reform research. The latter body of work typically ignores context and overly responsibilises individual schools and their leaders (Lingard et al., 2017). Moreover, it fails to acknowledge the funds of knowledge that minoritized communities bring to schooling, with such communities often viewed in deficit terms (Kaukko & Wilkinson, 2020). In addition, it ignores ‘the need to address wider structural inequalities’ created by government policies and priorities (Thomson et al., 2012, p. 3). A practice architectures lens addresses some of these major concerns via its focus on the materiality and ‘happeningness’ of practices (Schatzki, 2002) in sites and how such practices are enmeshed as part of a nexus of arrangements brought into or existing in the site. Hence, we employ the verb form of the word ‘transforming’, rather than the noun, ‘transformation’ to capture the dynamic nature of this process.

Finally, the theory of practice architectures adopted in this article recognizes that whilst ‘practices are social accomplishments, even when they are attributed to individuals’ (Nicolini, 2012, p. 214), there is nonetheless a space reserved for agency. This is because ‘human agent capability always results from taking part in one or more socio-material practices’ (Nicolini, 2012, p. 214). This is an important point in studies of schools in highly disadvantaged settings, for the reasons noted above.

We begin this article by sketching the broader arrangements that prefigure (but do not predetermine) contemporary conditions of schooling in Australia, particularly for children from minoritized backgrounds. We then outline the practice lens employed in the paper – the theory of practice architectures and ecologies of practices – before detailing the larger study from which this paper draws. The core of the paper draws on interviews conducted with school leaders, teachers, and support staff as part of a case study of Osterwild Primary School.² This case study forms part of a larger study conducted from 2019 to 2021 which examined the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian state school systems.³ The article responds to the following research questions: what are the educational practices and arrangements that enable and constrain the fostering of a more holistic educational approach for Otsterwild’s diverse and low socio-economic school community? How do these practices and arrangements connect to one another in ways that may foster enabling conditions for a more holistic approach to educating to emerge? We conclude by discussing implications for educational practice, particularly in minoritized school communities experiencing the challenges of highly performative, marketized systems. We now turn to a sketch of the broader conditions or practice architectures that are shaping Australian educational systems, particularly those located in disadvantaged settings.

Conditions shaping Australian educational systems

Like many other Anglophone nations, Australian schooling systems have been profoundly reshaped by neoliberal ideologies of marketization, competition, efficiency, and accountability (Heffernan, 2018; Lingard et al., 2015). These are well rehearsed arguments. However, what is less well known is that in contrast to many other western nations, there are peculiarities of the Australian schooling system that give this reshaping a distinct nature. One of these distinctive features is the marked maldistribution and inequity of funding between government sector schools on the one hand, and ‘non-government’ schools on the other hand, comprising respectively the Catholic and Independent sectors.⁴ This maldistribution has worsened, in major part due to key policy moves undertaken by a neoliberal, conservative federal government in the early 2000s (MacDonald et al., 2021). 85% of students from disadvantaged backgrounds are enrolled in government schools (Cobbold, 2020b), with the government sector obliged to enroll all students in their zone. This contrasts with the Catholic and Independent sectors, who, despite receiving federal government funding, are not under the same obligation. 85% is a disproportionate over-representation of minoritised students given that the government sectors enroll 65.1% of all students in total (Cobbold, 2020b).

Furthermore, major inequities also occur within government school sectors. For instance, the wholesale adoption of policies such as parental choice in state jurisdictions such as Victoria, allowed parents to bypass their closest local government school and choose a government school outside their designated area.⁵ This has led to ‘white (middle class) flight’ and the subsequent residualisation of poorer, often nonwhite students in schools such as Osterwild, contrasting with their majority white and middle-class counterparts ‘down the road’ (Ho, 2011). Such policies can deleteriously impact students’ learning outcomes, threaten social cohesion and widen gaps between rich and poor (Greenwell & Bonnor, 2023; Sciffer et al., 2022; Smyth, 2011).

Moreover, as in other nations such as Canada (Yoon et al., 2020), Australian government schools in wealthier areas are more able to attract and retain middle-class professional families. The collective cultural and economic capital of these parent groups allows them to pay ‘voluntary’ parent fees, fund raise and exert political pressure to garner greater resources for their schools (Rowe & Perry, 2020, 2022). This goes some way to ameliorating the funding inequities noted above between the government and non-government schooling sectors, but generates large inequalities between public schools, especially in an era of monetary tightening (Rowe & Perry, 2020, 2022; Yoon et al., 2020). Such inequities deleteriously shape the learning and life outcomes of students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The outcome is that Australia has one of the most inequitable schooling systems in the OECD as measured by student outcomes (OECD, 2023). As noted in the introduction to this article, such inequities can also adversely impact the teaching, leading and professional learning practices adopted by schools. This is particularly the case in a climate of performative pressure which increasingly responsibilises individual schools and their leaders for poor student outcomes (Heffernan, 2018).

In the theoretical approach adopted in this article, the preceding policies are some of the key practice architectures that enable and constrain educational practices for teachers, leaders, and learners alike. What is of interest in this article then is firstly, how government schools with high proportions of minoritized students can create enabling niches (Kemmis et al., 2012) that buck such trends, and secondly, how a practice approach can deepen understanding of this process.

Theoretical lens

The theory of practice architectures [TPA] and ecologies of practices adopted in this paper switches the gaze from studies of individuals within a practice such as education, e.g. pupils, teachers and leaders, to educational practices themselves, e.g. student learning, teaching, professional learning, leading and researching. It examines what these practices are composed of (practice architectures), and how they relate/do not relate to other practices in the complex web that constitutes schooling (ecologies of practices). It argues that practices, those ubiquitous, taken-for-granted aspects of social life, in and of themselves, constitute much of the motor that drives social life (Wilkinson & Kemmis, 2016). As Ted Schatzki, a practice philosopher puts it, practices are ‘sites of the social’ (2002). Hence, as argued in the introduction, a study of the evolution, unfolding and disappearance of educational practices can help us understand the source of changed behavior, and thus how schools and educational systems can transform for the better.

Kemmis et al. (2014) argue that practices are interactionally secured in participants’ sayings (the cognitive domain), doings (the psychomotor) and relatings (the affective). These sayings, doings and relatings hang together in the project or purpose of a practice – that which gives the practice its distinct shape and recognizability as a practice of a particular kind, e.g. teaching children how to read. However, practices do not spring from a vacuum. Rather, they are enabled and constrained by practice architectures [PAs]. The latter are the conditions that make practices possible and are composed of arrangements that enable and constrain action and interaction. These arrangements include the cultural-discursive, i.e. language and ideas that are found in or brought into a site of practice such as a classroom. They include the material-economic arrangements, such as spatial arrangements, i.e. objects and classroom set ups. Furthermore, they include the social-political arrangements, i.e. system role and lifeworld relationships, such as that between a principal and a teacher, or a teacher and a parent (Kemmis et al., 2014). Although these arrangements and the sayings, doings and relatings that interactionally secure practices are teased apart for analytical purposes, they are enmeshed.

Moreover, some practices, such as that of teaching, may become practice architectures for other practices, such as student learning. Put another way, the specific arrangements that come into being as teacher’s sayings, doings and relatings and which unfold in a site such as an infants’ classroom may ‘enable and constrain the way the practice of learning can unfold’ for these pupils (Kemmis et al., 2014). This dynamic process by which specific educational practices and practice architectures are shaped by others, e.g. teaching and student learning practices, is conceptualized as ecologies of practices. Moreover, this is not an abstract or generalizing claim, i.e. that teaching influences learning. Rather, ecologies of practices examine how this process is realized in the material world – paying careful attention through empirical studies to the particularities of how different practices in a site may create ‘affordances that enable and constrain how other practices can unfold’ (Kemmis et al., 2014). This insistence on the materiality of practices and their arrangements underpins TPA’s site ontological view of practices (Schatzki, 2003), i.e. that practices never exist in a vacuum but can only be realized in their ‘happeningness’ as they unfold in a site (Schatzki, 2002). Transforming schools then requires not only changing teaching practices (and their concomitant arrangements), but the ecologies of practices in specific sites, including practices of student learning, teaching, professional learning, leading and researching. We now turn to the materiality of one such site to examine this process of transforming in more detail.

Materials and methods

Osterwild Primary School⁶ was one of six case study schools from which data had been collected in a three-year Australian Research Council study investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform in government education systems in three Australian states: Victoria, New South Wales [NSW] and Western Australia [WA]⁷ (Keddie et al., 2020). The project investigated the ways in which autonomies granted to principals in devolved public education systems enabled and constrained social justice outcomes.

The findings for this article draw on individual interviews conducted with seven members of staff. Two team members in pairs conducted semi-structured interviews lasting between 30 and 60 minutes. Staff comprised the principal (‘Nanette’), two of the leadership team who were also teachers (‘Hazel’ and ‘Kalani’), the business manager (‘Lilly’), and two support staff members, ‘Maeve’ and the multicultural liaison officer (‘Jade’). The interviews explored the participants’ understandings of school autonomy, especially in relation to how it influenced their capacities to support the students at Osterwild. The transcribed interviews were analyzed using applied thematic analysis as a method (Guest et al., 2012). All interviews were first read through and analyzed inductively, after which the content was coded based on the themes emerging from the transcripts. In the subsequent phase, the authors noted connections between the emerging themes and the theory of practice architectures, especially in relation to how the leading practices were enabled and constrained by the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements of the school; and how the practices of leading intertwined with the simultaneous practices of teaching, learning, researching and professional learning in the school community.

School context

Osterwild is a small primary school (Foundation-Grade Six) in a fast-growing peri urban area, approximately 35 kilometers from the central business district of an Australian capital city. The area in which it is located has a median weekly personal income higher than that of the nation (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023). It is also a ‘whiter’ Anglo composition than the Australian average, with 75% of the population born in Australia, compared with 46% of the Australian population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023). 70% of the population nominated the UK or Australia as the most common ancestry for its population, compared to the Australian figure of 62% (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023). 82% of residents speak only English at home, compared with 72% of the Australian population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2023).

In contrast to this demographic, 66% of the children at Osterwild were from Language Backgrounds Other than English [LBOTE]. Parents had low levels of English literacy and high rates of illiteracy in their first language. LBOTE families at Osterwild PS typically came from the same ethnic and religious (minority Christian) group and had been granted refugee status in Australia, due to religious and ethnic persecution. The heart of this tight-knit refugee community was a local Christian church run by a pastor from the same ethnic background. His wife was a long-term employee at the school as an English as an Additional Language or Dialect [EALD] support staff (‘Jade’).

In contrast to the relative advantage of the area, Osterwild’s Index of Community Socio-Economic Disadvantage [ICSEA] of 874 placed it well below the Australian norm of 1000 placing it within the highest band of disadvantage. Most of its families (89%), both refugee and Anglo-Australian, were in the two bottom quartiles of disadvantage. Moreover, its large, well-cared for grounds belied the major reduction in its enrollments, which contrasted with other public and non-government schools in the area. The principal, ‘Nanette’ hinted that this decline may have been partially due to white (middle class) flight from the school. As she carefully remarked regarding these disparities in enrollments, ‘it absolutely is a perception held by not the majority [of parents] but, perhaps, by some – maybe as a reflection of the challenges that we all still are facing [as a society] around … issues of racism’. She also noted that despite a recent tightening of requirements, the practice architectures of less stringent policies of school zoning continued to prefigure families’ enrollment practices. She observed, ‘if there’s already a large community of families that go to those kindergartens … once the siblings are in, then their siblings will go in terms of … growing enrollments, that’s very challenging’. ‘Lily’, the business manager observed, ‘people have said out in the community, “Oh, that’s a multicultural school” … which is disappointing. That’s what other staff members have told me; that the kindergartens have said, “No, you don’t want to go there”.’ The question of enrollment numbers and by implication, the viability of the school remained a source of anxiety. As one staff member remarked, ‘and then you have only got three enrollments in Foundation next year or something like that. You want to actually still maintain … Ten kids are leaving Year 6. We want at least ten kids back in there’.

Osterwild was a tight knit community school, which enjoyed low levels of staff turnover amongst both teaching and support staff. This was despite the challenges faced by personnel as they dealt with families who had experienced high levels of illiteracy in their first language, poverty and the potential for ethnic divides between its Anglo-Australian and Christian, non-Anglo families. As measured by the children’s academic performance in the annual National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy [NAPLAN] tests, it was also a highly successful school – with pupils achieving higher results compared to both like schools and higher SES schools in its immediate district.⁸

Despite the performance pressures on principals to achieve high standards in these testing regimes, both its previous long serving principal and current head strongly rejected that such pressures influenced their approach to leading (Heikkinen et al., 2021). Rather, they articulated their commitment to a holistic philosophy of education for the whole child. For instance, when asked if she was under any pressure from the department of education to grow student numbers, current principal Nanette noted, ‘With our enrolment, there would be no concern about that’. Instead, she argued, ‘my focus is not on enrolments. My focus is on making sure that every child in the school, and the staff and the families, have a great experience of learning and education’.

It is noteworthy that Nanette includes staff and families in this ‘great experience’. We now turn to examine in more detail some of the key arrangements that prefigure how this more encompassing perspective of educating unfolded at Osterwild Primary School.

Results

Community-making as a key project of educating at Osterwild Primary School

No school is an island. Osterwild did not adhere to the common myth of modern schooling systems that ‘schools are enclosures that are cut off from not only their community but also the wider world’ (Thomson et al., 2012, p. 2). Rather, a key educational telos of its schooling practices was to foster a socially just, inclusive and democratic education that encompassed the social, intellectual and physical dimensions of educating as a communitarian practice. Community making was a major project of this telos and materialized through a variety of arrangements. For instance, in terms of cultural-discursive arrangements, language and ideas emanating from a broader set of democratic values about the ultimate purpose of education informed the leading, teaching, learning and community making practices of the school. This was illustrated in Nanette’s sayings in the preceding quotation where she stressed a communitarian and inclusive view of education, that is, education was a democratic right that extended not only to ‘every child’ but ‘staff and families’. As explored below, Nanette’s observations contrasted with the mantra of school improvement – which reduces education to a technical and managerialist accomplishment – so often encountered in policies and practices of schooling in anglophone nations such as Australia.

In relation to teaching and learning, a regular pedagogical practice of the school was to organize immersive experiences for the children that wealthier families in the surrounding schools would take for granted. These included, for example, trips to the beach (many children had never seen the sea despite living 30–40 minutes away from the coast); excursions to a science museum and the city’s botanical gardens, and fun activities such as blowing bubbles. Such experiences were seen as a crucial means to enrich students’ lifeworld experiences and foster connections to their learning. As Principal Nanette observed about the dual nature of these activities:

it is access to opportunities as well. We recognise that and … try and provide a broad range of activities, learning activities and experiences … Purely on that basis of having those experiences, or not having those experiences will impact students’ outcomes, particularly in literacy and their understanding … that’s a … key thing that we are acutely aware of and address in the school.

Nanette’s observations reveal the delicate balancing act that principals must strike between the expectations of their system roles in terms of students’ learning outcomes, ‘not having those experiences will impact students’ outcomes’, and the broader lifeworld relationships that need to be forged as part of educating as a holistic practice, providing ‘access to … a broad range of activities’.

Maeve, a long-term local, former parent and current support staff member highlighted the lifeworld and community-making aspects of these pedagogical experiences:

we took the kids to the beach. They thought the beach was [a lake in the local area] … they had never been there … [Another time] we took them to an excursion in the city … my son drove the bus … we went to the [gardens; science museum] … out for tea … and it was just to see the difference in the children, because they would never have had that opportunity. And I think that’s where we will make sacrifices to make sure that they have that.

Maeve’s sayings rendered visible key social-political arrangements that prefigured the communitarian nature of educational practices at Osterwild. She repeatedly uses the collective pronoun, ‘we took the kids to the beach … to the [gardens] … out for tea’. These sayings mesh with the doings of the activity where the collective ‘we’ extends to family members who were former students at the school, ‘my son drove the bus; took the kids to the beach’. The resultant relatings that ensue between the adults and the children are made evident in Maeve’s passionate identification with the values that characterize the project of community making in the school, ‘we will make sacrifices’. Moreover, in ecological terms, the pedagogical practices described above in turn created new practice architectures that enabled different kinds of learning practices to be fostered. For example, seeing and experiencing the beach, the city, the gardens, the science museum and going out for tea led to the children gaining new forms of know-how and know-what about the world. As Maeve commented, ‘it was just to see the difference in the children’.

However, to achieve this telos was not possible without funding. In terms of material-economic arrangements then, government equity funding was a crucial part of the practice architectures that made possible enriching excursions and pedagogical experiences, provided extra support services/resources to be purchased and allowed extra support staff to be employed.,⁹ As Hazel and Kalani, two of the leading teachers observed:

having the equity funding to our school is monumental, the impact it has. Big schools make money … just with their funding … if you are in a more affluent area, you know, they will have a fair and they will raise a $100,000. We might have something, and we might raise $200. So, without that extra funding that we get, it would be a completely different place.

Lilly, the business manager explained, ‘The bulk of our spending comes out of the equity funds for resources and things like that; providing extra support staff’. Securing equity funding that supported students’ broader flourishing was a crucial part of the social-political arrangements that helped to foster the school’s telos of providing a socially just, inclusive and democratic education. To achieve this telos required nurturing set-ups and material-economic arrangements that modeled inclusive and socially just doings. As Nanette the principal noted, ‘it is ensuring money is not haves/havenots; that financially, it’s not a barrier to engaging in school programs. So financial is a big factor’.

To realize this aim, of ‘not haves/have-nots’, the school needed to ensure it received the maximum amount of equity funds from government. This meant carefully checking the accuracy of enrollment information from parents. As Lilly explained, ‘we have a lot of equity funding. because the equity funding is based on the enrolling information that parents [provide]. So, we check that … if we capture that correctly, they can’t not fund us; they can’t’. However, this checking of highly confidential information was premised on building substantial relations of trust and care between families and the school before such information could be divulged. Building these relatings was a crucial foundation for the community making project that constituted educating in Osterwild Primary School. This was because most of the refugee families came from authoritarian regimes where formal government officials were viewed with enormous suspicion and distrust. Alternatively, they came from families where schooling had been a highly negative experience. Hence, support staff was crucial as bridge builders between these communities and the school. As Jade, the multicultural liaison officer explained:

Before I work here … most [ethnic minority] parent … don’t come to parent/teacher interview, or they don’t want to come to the school office because of their language barrier. They are very shy and they are scare …

But when I came here … I told them, ‘You have to see what your children are doing at school. So, it’s very important. Like, you support your children for their study’ … And then if I am here, they come to the office; no more afraid, no more shy.

However, having access to substantial amounts of equity funding does not guarantee that holistic and enriched educational practices will ensue. We now turn to educational leading as a collective practice to examine this point in more detail.

Educational leading as a collective practice

One of the striking features of Osterwild was the collective sense of responsibility for education as a holistic endeavor that was engendered throughout the school. This was evident in the sayings, doings and relatings of not only the principal and teachers, but the various support staff, including educational aides and support staff. Instead of pointing to an individual such as the principal as predominantly responsible for this ethos, in practice architectures theory we instead draw attention to the orchestration of specific arrangements and concomitant practices in the site that fostered these more communitarian practices. One such example is the creation of conditions that promoted the flourishing of rich pedagogical practices as noted above. These stood in contrast to the thin pedagogies so often inflicted on highly disadvantaged schools because of the highly performative climate in which Australian schools now operate (Heffernan, 2018; Mockler & Groundwater Smith, 2018).

A variety of practices fostered a collective sense of responsibility for educating in the site. These included cultural-discursive arrangements such as nurturing a set of shared understandings and ideas – sayings – around the importance of education as a collective responsibility of parents, students, teachers, executive, support staff (both paid and volunteers) – rather than teachers alone. The preceding quotations illustrate these understandings. These forms of know-how and know-what did not arise in a vacuum, however. Rather, in terms of material-economic and social-political arrangements, the sayings were realized through a range of actions/doings that enmeshed with relatings between staff and students, staff and the executive and staff and the community. For instance, in relation to hiring practices, all teaching and support staff who were employed at the school shared a common educational commitment to values of equity, social justice and inclusion. This was no coincidence. As Principal Nanette and learning specialist Kalani respectively observed:

I learnt a lot about working with disadvantaged communities; working with students with lots of challenges and families with similar challenges, financial and otherwise; right from the beginning of my career … personally … I grew up in a housing commission house in regional Queensland. (Nanette)

I was [at a local school] about 17 years. Doesn’t have the EAL component but the low socioeconomic and the disadvantaged backgrounds; and loved it. (Kalani)

In turn, these practices of leading connected up with and created the practice architectures for educating practices to flourish that nurtured a more collective sense of responsibility for education as a holistic endeavor throughout the school. Although word length precludes us documenting them in detail, these encompassed pedagogical practices such as the forging of networks across and between families and the school, and applying for grants to build a community vegetable garden that drew on the funds of knowledge of the school’s minority ethnic community. They included professional learning, teaching and students’ learning practices such as the careful adoption of a small number of whole school programs that nurtured the school’s ethos, i.e. a school wide positive behavior program and respectful relationships. Finally, they encompassed researching practices, such as connecting up with other small schools in the region to form a community of practice that carried out regular cycles of research inquiry into their literacy and numeracy practices.

However, it is in the practices of data collection, analysis and its use that we see potential challenges to Osterwild’s project of nurturing a collective sense of responsibility for educating. These practices reveal how tensions play out between the seemingly insatiable demands of the system for measurable and quantifiable outcomes on the one hand, and on the other hand, how lifeworld relationships between educators, and educators and children can be preserved rather than sacrificed, despite these performative pressures. An examination of the practice architectures that prefigure these data practices reveals how conditions were engendered to foster a more collective sense of responsibility for educating in the school.

A crucial project of educational practice at the school was the collection and analysis of data to steer pedagogical and overall educational decision-making practices. These practices are characteristic of a key set of practice architectures of current Australian schooling. Indeed, one of the most striking sets of sayings emerging from interviews with the teaching and executive staff was the repetition of phrases such as ‘data’ and an ‘evidence-based approach’ to justify the school’s educational approach.

Staff noted that data were drawn from a range of sources: NAPLAN testing, parent climate surveys, school wide positive behavior results, and ‘a small schools alliance cycle of inquiry in term 2 and term 3 of each of every year; and usually it’s one literacy and one numeracy’ (Principal Nanette). Kalani, the school’s learning specialist, was employed two days out of five, coordinating the data collection for the school. This was a considerable material-economic investment by the school in terms of commitment of teaching time and expertise. Kalani explained her role in those two days as follows:

it’s a data-driven, evidence-based approach; in terms of our teaching and learning/assessment practices and all of those things … evidence-based approach. So, we have the evidence/data to support, to say, ‘Well, this is a need for our students. And we know that because we have this evidence to support that. Therefore, we can spend this money on these things.

Kalani’s sayings, doings and relatings in this quotation draw directly from the language and ideas of school improvement research adopted by anxious, risk averse governments and schooling systems (Thomson et al., 2017). Her repetition of the phrases, ‘data-driven, evidence-based approach’, and her stress upon the importance of accountability when it comes to justifying their approaches, ‘we have this evidence to support that. Therefore, we can spend this money’ hint at the terrors of performativity characterizing schooling practices in nations such as Australia (Ball, 2003).

Kalani continues:

within the Department [you can] … compare the performance of, say, students who are equity funded versus non equity funded … between boys and girls … EAL versusnon EAL. You can do those checks to see where your need is or if there was a particular inequity that you could then address.

However, there are important contrasts between the project of the practice that characterized Osterwild’s data collection and analysis compared to other disadvantaged schools that might be motivated by fear of failure in high stakes testing. As discussed in the previous section, the pedagogical practices the school adopted did not lead to a narrowed curriculum and employment of thin pedagogies (Heffernan, 2018). Why might this be so? Firstly, the telos of the data collection and analysis practices noted by Kalani were directly and predominantly aimed at identifying educational inequities that needed to be ameliorated. This was a crucial material-economic arrangement of the school’s commitment to social justice and inclusion. As Principal Nanette explained in relation to the hiring of Kalani:

because we use our equity funding to support having a learning specialist, then you have to make sure that the learning specialist role is very closely aligned to what the intentions are of that equity funding. You can’t just spend it on whatever you would like.

Secondly, and relatedly, the school appears to have adopted an alternative accountability approach aimed at ‘respect[ing] teachers’ professional judgment’ and foster[ing] ‘sophisticated assessment literacy’ amongst staff (Thomson et al., 2012, p. 2). For instance, when it came to teachers’ professional learning around the Schoolwide Positive Behaviour Program – a ‘major part’ of Kalani’s data collection and analysis role – she noted the following:

But all the staff are involved. We kind of use the [executive] as the base team, I guess. The last training process, the whole staff did it; because it just made more sense for everyone to be there, rather than three and then go and tell … other people what we have all done.

In relation to ecologies of practices, the practices of professional learning that were adopted to implement the program for the whole staff illustrate how the conditions can be fostered for more inclusive and participatory teaching and learning practices. Put another way, the decision to train the whole staff as a collective was not a ‘one-off’ but was founded on a range of practice traditions in the site (Kemmis et al., 2014), that foregrounded collective responsibility for the education of all children. Although one could attribute this sense of collectivity to the reality that it was a small school, this would be to overlook the site-specific arrangements that had nurtured this sense of collective responsibility. As Maeve, a support staff member and former parent reflected:

I think our biggest challenge is actually promoting ourselves as a fabulous school; because we all know it’s a great school … our school is suited to students that … have a different outlook than a lot of other students. There’s got to be somewhere for them to go and our school accommodates those students beautifully.

Discussion and conclusion

In examining the site-specific arrangements that prefigure the broader educational project of change that is unfolding at Osterwild Primary School, our aim is not to romanticize its achievements, nor overly responsibilise other schools in similar circumstances. Indeed, a valid criticism of research that documents the apparent successes of schools such as Osterwild may be that we are contributing to the myth that educational transforming can be undertaken by schools alone. This is not the case. Instead, as we have attempted to demonstrate in this paper, lenses such as the theory of practice architectures can be enormously helpful in capturing the messy, dynamic and invariably precarious nature of school transforming in all its happeningness. To that end, we employed the verb form, ‘transforming’ to describe the ongoing evolution of educational practices as a process of continually coming into being, rather than one that can be fixed, measured and classified. This contrasts with dominant accounts of school transformation that attempt to fix or stabilize the object under investigation or reduce it to a one size fits all formula of school improvement.

Secondly, we have argued that understanding the transforming of educational practices requires rich intellectual tools by which to grasp the complex interplay between context - the broader arrangements that prefigure individual schools, and individual sites - the material, site-specific practices and practice traditions that characterize schools such as Osterwild in their haecceity, as this site, rather than that one. A frequent criticism of school reform accounts adopted by schooling systems in Anglophone nations is that they lack nuanced understandings of context and how it shapes but does not necessarily predetermine how practices evolve in individual sites. The theory of practice architectures provides a means by which to comprehend this complex interplay whilst not reducing it to formulaic mantras of ‘what works’.

Moreover, in employing the theory of practice architectures, we are not suggesting that there are no other useful scholarly lenses that may serve similar purposes. The opposite is true. For instance, studies of school transforming utilizing first generation practice scholars such as Bourdieu (c.f., English, 2012, 2016) or Foucault (c.f., Gillies, 2013) have been greatly insightful in understanding this process. However, a critique of such lenses is that they do not provide the means by which to unpack in all its granularity and specificity, the materiality of the process of school transforming, without lapsing either into determinism (Bourdieu), or privileging the role of discourses over the materiality of sites (Foucault). The theory of practice architectures’ careful attention to the recursive nature of the practices and arrangements of school transforming attempts to address such critiques. Furthermore, although having much in common with other theories such as actor-network theory [ANT] (c.f., Latour, 1996, 2005), a major difference is that the theory of practice architectures does not ascribe agency to material artifacts (Mahon et al., 2017). As Mahon et al. (2017, p. 15) observes, ‘how … the material matters, is still seen as a matter of human sense-making’.

Our research aligns with key findings amongst other studies when it comes to school transformation in minoritized settings. For instance, Pat Thomson’s (2002) study of leadership of schools in an Australian industrial ‘rustbelt’ mapped how the individual and neighborhood contexts of these schools, their thisness, were rarely considered when it came to policy approaches to addressing issues of social justice. MacDonald’s (2023) study of the social justice understandings of three primary principals working in the most disadvantaged primary schools in the state of Victoria synthesized a wide range of social justice leadership research. Its conclusions align with our study in terms of leadership practices for social justice. These practices include amongst other things: a ‘focus on pedagogy’ - for both students and professional learning for staff; promoting a ‘shared ethos of social justice’ as a key agenda across the school; championing supportive social relationships, ‘with and between staff, students and in the staff’; and being ‘critically reflective, and critically reflexive’ (MacDonald, 2023, p. 162). These practices are similarly identified in Shields (2009) lens of transformative leadership theory, a critical theory of leadership that shares much in common with leadership for social justice (Theoharis, 2007) and culturally relevant leadership (Khalifa, 2018). However, where our work differs from these highly salient research and theories is its focus on practice, the arrangements that enable and constrain these practices and the careful mapping of potential ecological connections between practices and arrangements to understand school transformation. This contrasts with the persistent focus on the individual or collective participants in a practice that lenses such as transformative leadership theory adopts, or the focus on structures (and their interplay with habitus) employed by thinkers such as Bourdieu and employed in Thomson and MacDonald’s work.

Finally, we acknowledge the potential limitations of using a theory such as practice architectures when it comes to diverse educational contexts. For instance, one critique is that TPA’s utility to theorize unequal power relations and how diverse hierarchies of relatings in relation to gender and ‘race’ can play out in specific sites such as schools has not been fully realized and needs further development (Wilkinson, 2021). Nonetheless, we argue that employing thinking tools such as the theory of practice architectures can counter discourses of despair by training a stereoscopic lens on how the broader purposes of education can be achieved in highly performative, marketized systems. In this sense, we aim to move beyond the cul-de-sac of critique by contributing to a politics of progressive school change. In an era characterized by global social and political volatilities and uncertainties, the endeavor to contribute to a politics of progressive school change that ‘makes hope practical’ (Williams, 1983) assumes a particular significance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP190100190].

Notes on contributors

Jane Wilkinson

Jane Wilkinson is Professor of Educational Leadership at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. She is one of the lead developers of the theory of practice architectures. Her research interests lie in the areas of educational leadership for social justice, theorising leadership as practice (drawing on practice architectures, feminist and Bourdieuian approaches)and refugee education. She is currently leading an Australian Research Council Discovery grant which is examining the emotional labour of Australian government school principals.

Katrina MacDonald

Katrina MacDonald is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education. Her research and teaching interests are in educational leadership, social justice and the sociology of education through a practice lens (feminist, Bourdieu, practice architectures). Her research has focused on school reform and social justice in Australian public education, the social justice understandings and practices of principals working in some of the most disadvantaged locations in Australia. Her thesis won the 2020 AARE Ray Debus Award for Doctoral Research in Education.

Amanda Keddie

Amanda Keddie is a Professor of Education at Deakin University. Her research interests and publications are in the broad field of social justice and education. Her work examines justice issues associated with school governance and educating for diversity with a particular focus on gender justice and masculinities. She recently completed a Fulbright Senior Scholarship which focused on exploring educative approaches to supporting gender justice in the USA and is currently leading projects that focus on engaging boys and men in gender and social justice.

Brad Gobby

Brad Gobby is a policy sociologist whose research examines education policies and programmes, with a focus on governance, school autonomy and marketisation in diverse contexts. Brad is an Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University and an adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University.

Scott Eacott

Scott Eacott, PhD is Professor of Education in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Educational Administration at the University of Saskatchewan. Building on his experience working in schools and studies across the social sciences, Professor Eacott’s work is primarily concerned with the organisation of education. This work has led to advocacy for the pursuit of equitable excellence in school provision.

Richard Niesche

Richard Niesche is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His research interests include educational leadership, the principalship and social justice. His particular research focus is to use critical perspectives in educational leadership to examine the work of school principals in disadvantaged schools and how they can work towards achieving more socially just outcomes.

Jill Blackmore

Jill Blackmore is Alfred Deakin Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, former Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Futures and Innovation and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia. Her research interests include, from a feminist perspective, globalisation, education policy and governance in universities, TAFE, schools and community; international and intercultural education; educational restructuring, leadership and organisational change; spatial redesign and innovative pedagogies; teachers’ and academics’ work and equity policy.

Notes

1. All names employed in this article are pseudonyms. All identifying details have been removed.

2. In Australia, primary schools typically educate pupils from the ages of five to twelve years.

3. Australia has a federal system of government comprising six states and two territories. The states and territories have constitutional responsibility for education, but the idiosyncrasies of federalism means education is co-funded (MacDonald et al., 2023). The Commonwealth is supposed to provide 80% of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) funding to non-government schools, and 20% to government schools, and States/Territories are supposed to provide up to 80% for government schools and 20% to non-government schools. In reality, government schools are underfunded (an average of 87% of the SRS) as neither the state nor commonwealth governments fully provide their funding commitments (Cobbold, 2023). 64.5% of all students are schooled in the government education systems, 19.7% are enrolled in Catholic schools and 15.9% attend the independent schools’ sector, which comprises predominantly faith-based small schools with a small handful of large elite schools (Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority [ACARA], 2023). Despite receiving federal funding, neither the Catholic nor Independent sectors are obliged to enroll all applicants in their zones. In contrast, government schools must enroll students in their zone and hence, disadvantaged students are overwhelmingly represented in this sector (Australian Government Productivity Commission, 2023).

4. The state of Victoria has recently wound back these policies. It now requires all families to enroll their child in the government zone in which they are residing, with some exceptions.

5. Pseudonym.

6. We confirm that relevant ethics approval was obtained from the Deakin University Human Ethics Committee.

7. NAPLAN is a series of standardized tests focused on basic skills that are administered to Australian pupils in year 3, 5, 7 and 9. The collated data is used to show all schools’ average performance against other schools in the country on the federal government’s My School website. There has been much controversy over the tests, including accusations that schools and teachers are forced to teach to the test, leading to the kinds of thin pedagogies noted in the introduction to this article.

8. In Footnote 4, we provided a brief overview of funding of Australian government schools. Equity funding is allocated differentially, with the neediest students receiving the largest allocation. Overall, lower parental income corresponds to higher equity funding (T. Delany, personal communication. March 7, 2024). Moreover, allocation of funding to both primary and secondary government schools with equity needs is through the Student Resource Package [SRP] for additional learning needs. The SRP provides equity funding where additional funding is required to compensate for additional learning needs. Learning needs covered by specific equity funding include social disadvantage, mobility, students with disabilities and English as an Additional Language [EAL] (Victorian Department of Education, n.d.). Schools are expected to use SRP funds for the purpose for which they are allocated (Victorian Department of Education, n.d.). However, there is some flexibility in the use of funds (such as the Social Disadvantage fund) to support students’ flourishing, for example, through excursions to the beach, gardens and science museum as noted above (T. Delany, personal communication. March 7, 2024). For a more detailed explanation of school funding, equity and disadvantage in Australian schools, see, for example (Cobbold, 2020a, 2020b; MacDonald et al., 2023; Rorris, 2020, 2023; Rowe & Perry, 2022).,

9. For a more detailed international overview of important discussions about the relationship between school funding, equity and disadvantaged students, see, for example (BenDavid-Hadar, 2016; Jackson & Mackevicius, 2021, 2024; Thapa et al., 2020).,