179Practice, Praxis and Practice Architecture
Much of the activity and action within the three projects discussed in this chapter
involve ‘doings’, ‘sayings’ and ‘relatings’ which are key components of what
Kemmis et al. ( 2013 ) refer to as practice.
A practice is a form of socially established cooperative human activity in which character-
istic arrangements of actions and activities (doings) are comprehensible in terms of arrange-
ments of relevant ideas in characteristic discourses (sayings), and the people and objects
involved are distributed in characteristic arrangements of relationships (relatings), and
when this complex of sayings, doings and relatings ‘hangs together’ in a distinctive project.
(p. 30).
Kemmis et al. ( 2013 ) describe how practice impacts upon those involved and
posit a theory of practice architecture whereby these doings, sayings and relatings
(i.e., the practices) are enabled by and/or constrained by a set of preconditioned
arrangements. These can be in the following forms:
- ...cultural-discursive arrangements... that are the resources that make possible
the language and discourses used in and about this practice... - Material-economic arrangements (in the medium of activity and work, in the
dimension of physical space-time) that are the resources that make possible the
activities undertaken in the course of the practice... - Social-political arrangements (in the medium of power and solidarity and in the
dimension of social space) that are the resources that make possible the relation-
ships between people and non-human objects that occur in the practice... (p. 31)
With these arrangements, practices ‘come into being’ because people collec-
tively bring them into being or rather that ‘practices, individual will, individual
understanding and individual action are orchestrated in collective social-relational
projects’ (Kemmis et al., 2013 , p. 31). The authors of this chapter argue that the
three educational projects are products of these educational practices and practice
architectures.
We also argue that these projects embrace the notion of praxis (Kemmis and
Smith, 2008 ), with an inquiry approach to action and learning. The projects draw on
the Aristotelian definition of praxis that involves the combination of practice and
theory to support change for various groups in society. We then look towards Paulo
Friere’s ( 1996 ) understanding of praxis as the:
bringing together of social practice and theorising of the world in order to transform the
world into something better...This unified concept of praxis as action, reflection, theorising
and change in cycles of constant social practice therefore conceptualises knowledge as aris-
ing from community necessity in relation to the purposes, viewpoints and constraints of
others. (Eckersley et al., 2011 , p. 12)11 Professional Experience and Project-Based Learning as Service Learning