Theory of Practice Architectures: Parental Involvement Through Sayings, Doings, and Relatings

Abstract

This chapter presents the theory of practice architectures, which allows us to look at and reflect upon parental involvement as a practice with its own traditions. As such a practice, parental involvement is constituted by cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements that Kemmis et al. (Changing practices, changing education, 1st edn. Springer Singapore, Imprint: Springer, 2014) have respectively referred to as sayings, doings, and relatings. This theory allows us to study parental involvement by focusing on each of these aspects, but also on ecologies that are shared with other practices, which is shown in empirical examples from the Czech Republic and Tanzania. The strength of this theory as a conceptual toolkit lies in its ability to capture the complexity of the social practice that PI is, its openness to contextualisation, and its potential for explaining how the same sayings turn into very different doings because of power and solidarity relations.

Living in Practices as a Theory: Sayings – Doings – Relatings

Starting from an assumption that “we live our lives in practices” (Kemmis, 2019, p. 1), the theory of practice architectures aims to unpack and understand these practices, but also to “refresh a sensibility to that fact: a sensibility to how we live our lives in practices, and what that means in terms of our relationships with each other and the world – as well as our relationships with the community of life on Planet Earth and with the Cosmos” (Kemmis, 2019, p. 2). Based on Schatzki’s (2002, 2010) work on practice as a nexus of discursive, physical, and social dimensions, Kemmis et al. (2014) develop a theory of practice architectures whose core elements of sayings, doings, and relatings are thought to shape every practice that occurs.

According to this theory (Kemmis et al., 2014), practices “come into being because people, acting not alone but collectively, bring them into being” (p. 32), which means that individual meanings and actions come into the picture only as “orchestrated in collective social-relational projects” (p. 32). The human collective does not, however, operate in a vacuum, but is instead “framed” by cultural-discursive, material-economic, and socio-political arrangements, which can be abbreviated into sayings, doings, and relatings. All of these aspects come together in Kemmis et al.’s (2014) definition of practice:

A practice is a form of socially established cooperative human activity in which characteristic arrangements of actions and activities (doings) are comprehensible in terms of arrangements of relevant ideas in characteristic discourses (sayings), when 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. 31)

The cultural-discursive arrangements operating in the medium of language and the dimension of semantic space are those that lay the foundation for the discourse(s) that articulate(s) the values, guidelines, instructions, interpretations, or justification of particular practices. In the semantic space of a particular practice, support for, criticism of, and resistance to understanding the practice can be articulated, all of which fall under the category of sayings.

Not all the sayings, however, will reach physical space-time and materialise through activity and work. Material factors (e.g., space, room, accessible artefacts, and tools) and the economy are important factors that allow for activities to happen. Not of a lower importance are the socio-political arrangements, by which the power and solidarity relations underpinning different sectors can facilitate the implementation of particular sayings while silencing others. The socio-political arrangements performed through power and solidarity can emerge from both informal bonds, such as friendships, or more formal connections with organisational functions, positions, or networks. These socio-political arrangements capture “relationships between people and non-human objects” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 32), which can be formed by either (digital) tools mediating communication and relations between people or an individual’s usage of and dependence on particular objects.

What Kemmis et al. (2014) try to capture is the practice as it happens, as “always located in particular sites and particular times” (p. 33). This explains why the theory is much less focused on developing an abstract conceptualisation of practice than on capturing it as it occurs (Schatzki, 2006):

The practices that we observe in real life are not abstractions with an ideal form of their own; they are composed on the site where they happen, and they are composed of resources found in or brought to the site: cultural-discursive resources, material-economic resources, and social-political resources. (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 33)

What all of this means is that the practice emerges out of the sayings, doings, or relatings that either already exist or are brought forth into existence through such actions. The emergence of the practice is about engaging and “orchestrating” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 34, original emphasis) the discursive, physical, and social resources. The happening of a practice also leaves its footprints, which are “particular kinds of discursive, physical, and social traces or residues of what happened through the unfolding of the practice” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 34, original emphasis). This means that the practice engages and becomes entangled with the practice architectures in a particular setting, and thus becomes “part of the living fabric of the place” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 36).

The complexity of practice that captures the individual at its site, emerging out of the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and socio-political arrangements, is clarified by Kemmis et al. (2014) through the model presented below (Fig. 9.1).

Fig. 9.1

Theory of practice and practice architectures. (Source: Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 38)

On the figure’s lowest level, Kemmis shows how all the dimensions of practice architecture are being “bundled together” in a happening practice. The concept of “bundling” comes from Schatzki’s (2012) descriptions of the relationship between practices and arrangements, which he calls practice-arrangement bundles and are treated as bundled together:

Because the relationship between practices and material entities is so intimate, I believe that the notion of a bundle of practices and material arrangements is fundamental to analyzing human life …. To say that practices and arrangements bundle is to say (1) that practices effect, use, give meaning to, and are inseparable from arrangements, while (2) arrangements channel, prefigure, facilitate, and are essential to practices. (Schatzki, 2012, p. 16, cited in Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 37)

Schatzki here is saying that practice architectures (comprising over the material-economic and socio-political aspects) are in a dialectical relation to the practice itself. They constitute the practice, but it is the practice that gives the conditions meaning and effects and influences them. This means that a practice started with the use of very limited economic resources can, by its practising/happening or through the effects its performance gives to the broader society, influence the distribution of material-economic resources. Early childhood education and care is thus a great example of such a practice: starting with the very limited resources of philanthropists, it developed into a publicly funded sector in many countries (Kamerman, 2006).

Changing Practices as Changing Practice Traditions

Following Kemmis et al. (2014), the unpacking of practice in its complexity also allows us to understand why some practices function only at the level of sayings and never reach the dimension of action. Both material-economic resources and relational factors can play a role here. The relational factors can block a new practice in the dimension of sayings, as the power of old, well-established doings and our solidarity with them gets activated.

When considering practice architectures, Kemmis et al. (2014) also talk about practice traditions. These are the footprints and social memories of a practice that are imprinted across all dimensions of practice architectures:

In the semantic dimension, they are stored in the logos of shared language used by people in a particular site. In the dimension of physical space-time, social memories are stored in physical setups and the activity structures of work and life at the site. In the dimension of social space, social memories are stored in such arrangements as organizational-institutional roles, rules and functions or the inclusive and exclusive relationships characteristic of the different lifeworlds people inhabit in the site. (p. 32)

Practices become entangled with all the dimensions and emerge as a “part of the living fabric of the place” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 36). If they change, they change ecologically, with the involvement of all dimensions and, most often, in relation to other practices.

Ecologies of Practice

Practice understood as a human way of living is not a practice happening in a vacuum, but a practice connected to other practices. In other words, “practices are established and exist in sites, in ecological arrangements” (Kemmis et al., 2014, p. 43). The relationships between practices and their architectures may differ. An example given by Kemmis et al. (2014) is the practice of teaching, which becomes a practice architecture for students’ learning:

To put it more precisely, the specific cultural-discursive, material-economic, and socio-political arrangements that come into being and are materialised in the unfolding of a particular practice of teaching (teacher’s sayings, doings, and relatings) in a particular site enable and constrain the way the practice of learning can unfold for the students in the site. (p. 43)

In relation to parental involvement, we can say that the practice of ECE settings’ collaboration with parents becomes the practice architecture of parental involvement. Such an ecology of the practice of parental involvement can explain the “democracy deficit” described by Van Laere et al. (2018), which refers to how “the goals and modalities of parental involvement are defined without involvement of the parents themselves” (p. 189); these goals and modalities are within theories and an effect of ecologies of practice, whereby the ECE practice of collaboration with parents becomes the architecture for the practice of parental involvement. The ECEC settings’ sayings on possible parental doings, the happening doings, and the mixture of power and solidarity between the professionals and caregivers constitute the democracy deficit. Democracy as a value in collaboration between ECEC and families operates, then, at the level of sayings. The theory of practice, and also architecture, thus inspires us to ask, “Whose sayings?” Is it a cultural value underpinning ECE and other social practices, or a directly articulated postulate of specific families or professionals, or maybe even researchers? Many different answers are possible in diverse socio-cultural contexts and regions of the world. My point is that the theory of practice architecture enables reflection and novel explanations of the diverse phenomena included in parental involvement. Accordingly, the next sections of this chapter will focus directly on the practice of parental collaboration with ECE.

Parental Involvement: Sayings Anchored in Cultural-Discursive Arrangements

The cultural-discursive arrangements in the form of sayings that facilitate and constrain parental involvement can operate both internationally and nationally, but they can also be related to very local cultures and values. In the preface of this book, the co-author and me mention the sayings operating at the very global level, the UNCRC (UN, 1989), and the intersection of the child’s right to education (Art. 28) and the child’s right to live in a family (Art. 9). This intersection unfolds the necessity of synergetic practices that facilitate the realisation of these rights. Parental involvement in ECEC is one such practice, and the curricula for ECEC and framework plans in the majority of countries, to a lesser or greater degree, encourage ECEC’s collaboration with children’s parents and families.

In an anthology (Garvis et al., 2022) with the works of authors from 25 countries describing parental engagement in ECE, every chapter starts with a reference to a framework plan, curriculum, or other key steering document. This shows that the sets of understandings of parental involvement that have been initiated, strengthened, and spread through the key policy documents are seen by academics as important for the practice of parental involvement. A lack of these sayings, or a lack of this part of the practice architecture, leaves the practice to others who may be less professional, the more private values and attitudes of teachers, or ECEC’s traditions for collaborating with parents (Garvis et al., 2022).

The sayings of researchers are also an important part of the architecture of parental involvement practice, but this is a discourse that can reveal many diverse and opposing meanings and is much less power marked than steering documents. However, the researchers’ sayings can relate to the official discourse and challenge, inspire, confirm, or reproduce it, and thus eventually initiate or block another way of understanding. The research’s sayings can also channel or narrow the broader policies and thus strengthen and launch only a particular side of them.

A very interesting case of official sayings related to parental involvement being channelled is Tanzania. While the “Curriculum and Syllabus for Pre-Primary Education” (Tanzanian Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, 2016) highlights the crucial role of parents/guardians in the transition to primary school and points out an array of activities in which the parents could be included, the research on parental involvement seems to take for granted that parental involvement is about home-based practices supporting children’s learning and thus measures only this level.

The array of activities that the “Curriculum and Syllabus for Pre-Primary Education” (Tanzanian Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, 2016) states that the parents could be involved in are as follows:

• (i) Decision-making processes on the establishment and management of pre-primary schools in their area.

• (ii) Volunteering in school development activities.

• (iii) Monitoring and evaluating children’s progress both at school and at home.

• (iv) Teaching and learning of the child through preparation of teaching and learning materials, providing funds for purchasing teaching and learning materials, storytelling, and preparation of the teaching and learning environment.

• (v) Assessing the child’s progress (p. 17)

The limited, but quickly developing, research on parental involvement in pre-primary education in Tanzania does not, however, focus on this part of the curriculum. Three academic papers published in high-ranking academic journals (Ndijuve, 2022; Ndijuve & Tandika, 2022; Edward et al., 2022) do not discuss the part of the curriculum that describes the possible ways of getting involved as a parent, but rather the parts where learning goals are described. Taking departure in the knowledge and abilities that the children shall become acquainted with during their education, like pre-reading skills (Edward et al., 2022) or general school performance (Ndijuve & Tandika, 2022), tacitly constrains the parental involvement in home-based activities, which are understood by the parents as supporting the children’s learning. None of these studies explain why they do not measure the correlations of other forms of involvement in children’s learning performance.

Such narrowing of the official sayings on parental involvement may risk underrepresentation of other parental voices. Interviews with refugee parents gathered in Tanzania as part of a joint research project by Ndijuve and me (Sadownik & Ndijuve, in press) discuss not only the parental need to support the children’s learning and academic performance, but a need for diverse forms of contact, communication, and collaboration with the pre-primary class. Below, I quote some of the parental utterances found in this project. The first two refer to a fundamental way of getting involved that is about “seeing the children off to the pre-primary class”:

I need to know how safe she is. I need to know who her teachers are, and I even need to know what she eats at school. Look, as a parent, I must know everything about my child while she is away at school. Very unfortunate – and I tell you this is very unfortunate: she leaves early in the morning; she is nowhere to be seen for six hours and is in the hands of strangers. (…) I cannot see her off to school every day because I have to work, and I think teachers don’t like to see all parents at school every morning; it would be chaos. (RM12_T)

The fact that seeing the children off to school is not appreciated by the pre-primary class also appears in the next utterance:

We are from a war-torn country; we are former child soldiers; we were abducted and forced to fight, so sometimes our past experiences make us feel insecure about our child’s safety on the way to school. I wish the school allowed us to see off our children in person. (RF1_T)

I interpret these two quotes as demonstrating a need for knowing and understanding the school better and for the possibility for communication with teachers, which seem to be related to point (ii) from the curriculum on volunteering in school developmental activities. The next parental utterance refers to a lack of involvement in decision-making processes while “having something to say”:

We (immigrant parents) do not have much say in what children learn and how. That’s for teachers and other authorities to decide. But at least we have more understanding about our children than them (teachers), so they need to regularly consult us. In Burundi, we were always consulted on various issues, especially during joint meetings with parents and the school.

However, because of relatings, the “we” – that may either relate to being a parent, or a migrant parent – even though emerging in the practice architecture, is not mirrored in the material-economic dimension of activity and work (regardless of being mentioned in the curriculum). Making these parental voices heard may have a potential influence on further researchers’ sayings, whose research practice seems to follow their own practice tradition, built on a tacit assumption that the acquisition of knowledge and skills can be supported only by home’s providing analogical activities to school. In such a case, as published by Edward et al. (2022), many parents do not seem to be knowledgeable enough (p. 28). Some of the teachers’ responses quoted in Edward et al. (2022) put it as follows:

Many parents here are not ensuring that their children attend school and learn as required, primarily because they do not know about teaching children. They do not follow up on children’s school progress. (pp. 28–29)

Here, there are many challenges lowering and preventing children’s [effective] acquisition of different skills including Kiswahili pre-reading skills… Parents do not encourage their children to attend school because they leave them with home responsibilities like taking care of their young children. (p. 29)

The understandings of a “good parent” and “parental involvement” resting behind these sayings of the teacher constitute the architecture of parental involvement. This is a very narrow and tight architecture of parental involvement that many parents do not fit and thus must “drop out” from. By spotting the constraints of the teachers’ sayings, practice architecture theory allows us to think about how to challenge such sayings and practice traditions and to extend the possible ways for parents to become involved with their child’s school. These are ways in which the parental resources and competencies would be sufficient to participate and in line with other sayings (i.e., the curriculum).

Because of the wider social relatings connected to poverty, socio-economic inequalities, and parental level of education, the parents do not have an equal basis from which to understand the practice and value of pre-primary education; thus, they do not have the same opportunities to support their children. Therefore, extending the possible doings of getting involved could allow the parents to participate and possibly develop a solidarity-like relation to the school or other dispositions, allowing new ways of supporting their children’s education to emerge.

Kemmis et al. (2014) clearly state that participation in diverse practices develops diverse dispositions among individuals, which they, after Bourdieu, call habitus (p. 60, 78, 186, 248). Changing parental dispositions is thus dependent on their participation in the pre-primary class, which is why extending the terms of involvement so that very diverse families and parents can experience being a part of the parental community in caring for their children’s lives and futures needs to come first.

Ideas of how to extend/transform pre-school-based involvement, which are further developed in Chap. 11 on posthumanism, also seem to be relevant here. For instance, there is the idea of forming a parental choir, or participating in joint cleaning endeavours, fixing toys and materials, or preparing food or meals (see Chap. 11). It is worth researching whether making the pre-primary school more open and familiar to parents, especially those of the parents who are classified as providing “unsupportive home learning environments” (Edward et al. 2022, p. 29), could change their understanding of and experience with education and transform home practices. Even in saying this, I am aware of how far away, both discursively and culturally, I am from the Tanzanian sites of pre-primary classes and research. This means that there are layers of complex relatings that I do not even know about, which may make my suggestions impossible or even ridiculous. However, I believe that challenging the Anglo-Saxon tradition of school readiness (Bennet, 2010) as the central focus of pre-school-family collaboration, could be a new relating of a decolonising character.

The complex perspective of practice architectures provides space and a conceptual toolkit to holistically reflect on the practice of parental involvement and, at the same time, encourages deeper exploration into, for example, sayings generated by different and differently related actors in the field, as they are entwined in asymmetric power and solidarity relations, which opens up and constrains pathways for the possible doings.

Parental Involvement: Doings Anchored in Material-Economic Arrangements and Relatings

The fact that material-economic arrangements and access to diverse resources have a lot to do with making different doings possible (or not) is well known in the ECEC world. In the process of tracing human collective practices, Kemmis et al. (2014) suggest that the question of “What are you doing?” is better than “What do you have the resources for?” Starting with the first question allows us to depict the person’s project/aim with a practice, and thus dig deeper into the discursive, economic, and social conditions for the activity.

A study by Kampichler (2021, 2022) conducted in the Czech Republic is an interesting example of a way of asking these questions of parents and pre-school staff at six different sites in one city in the Czech Republic. Specifically, Kampichler asks about practices and the reasons for them, which allows her to draw certain conclusions about the parents’ and teachers’ rationalities. Even though she does not use practice architecture for theorisation, this theory can be used to describe and explain the findings, as the research design and the gathered material fit the dimensions of practice architecture. What is so interesting and relevant about this study’s design is that the ECEC settings that were part of the research represent a wide context of socio-political and economic relatings, which turn out to be a differentiating criterion for the happening doings between ECEC and parents, even though they are anchored in the same sayings of the Czech curriculum for pre-school education, as well as the EU anchored, “Strategy for the Education Policy of the Czech Republic Up to 2030+” (Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, 2020).

As the ECEC market developed rapidly after the socio-political transformation in 1989 (from socialism to liberal democracy and capitalism), which transformed homogenous state-socialistic centres into a diverse array of private and public settings, the following ECEC settings were chosen for the study:

We used purposive sampling to choose 6 ECEC facilities for our interviews: we selected three public facilities, with high, medium, and low parental demand (based on the number of applications per place offered), and three private facilities offering their services at high, medium, and low prices (in the context of our city for research). (Kampichler, 2021, p. 253)

As Kampichler (2022) describes, in the public high-demand facility, the possible parental doings represented a very wide spectrum of activities, including meetings before the child’s start in the facility, an adaptation period tailored to the needs of the child and the family, regular parental conferences and the availability for spontaneous talk, the possibility of joining the child for the day in the pre-school, and several events during the year for both parents and children (e.g., common work in the facility’s garden). Moreover, the parents were encouraged to organise self-initiated events in the building of the service, such as a sleepover for all the children.

While this public facility opened the arena to doings for the parents, the high-price facility was more focused on satisfying the wishes of the customer: the parent. A lot of information in the form of videos, pictures, and stories was shared with the parents through social media, a pie chart mapping the child’s development and progress in different areas was systematically updated, and the ECE offered an array of extracurricular developmental activities, thus “releasing” the parents from their duties.

In the public medium-demand facility, the collaboration between parents and the ECE mainly occurred through daily talks and 2–3 annual events (i.e., Christmas, Easter, and the end of the school year) in the setting. There were no regular conferences, and the staff complained about the parents’ low interest in being involved and ceding their educational work on the institution.

The lack of parental interest was, however, not an issue in the medium-cost private facility, which was a forest pre-school, where parental involvement was a demand. Each family was responsible for one task during the whole week, such as providing water for the whole group. The importance of parental involvement was highlighted in the settings’ communication of values (sayings), the spatial arrangements providing room for parents’ presence, and the possibility of meeting other parents during the ECE day.

The low-price public setting, analogous to the medium-demand public one, struggled with a low parental interest in involvement; however, they also had very engaged parents. This may be because the facility offered the continuous possibility for teacher–parent interviews and tutorials.

In all these settings mentioned above, the practice of parental involvement was emerging out of the ECEC’s arrangement with the parents, who saw themselves as active co-creators of the education and care offered to their children (as in the forest pre-school), or as customers “outsourcing” their parental responsibilities through competent experts. Such a choice of one’s own role and way of collaborating with the ECE setting was, however, not available for the parents in the public, low-demand facility located near an excluded Roma neighbourhood. In this public setting, the official sayings of ECEC being a remedy for social inequalities, which led to doings focused on the families’ lacks and compensating for them. In the teacher’s stories, the Roma mothers lacked basic knowledge about their children’s needs, the equipment necessary for the children in the facility, and the basic attitudes needed in life (Kampichler, 2021). These deficiencies constituted the starting points for the ECEC’s work (doings) with the families. As one of the interviewed teachers put it,

C6: [H]ere they learn self-reliance, responsibility, and taking responsibility. Yeah, you just need this for life here, and they need that especially… (Kampichler, 2021, p. 257)

When analysing the sayings surrounding such lack-compensating and inequality-mitigating doings, Kampichler (2021, 2022) asked about the excluding terms on which the practice of “inclusion” is founded:

What does it actually mean for the children and their parents? Do we talk about equalizing opportunities to fulfill the child’s individual potential or rather normalizing and assimilating children and their parents into pre-defined paths? (Kampichler, 2021, p. 70, original emphases)

What this implies is that the researcher’s sayings are based on an understanding of the deeper socio-economic, asymmetric relatings that, together with cultural-discursive arrangements, allow the ECEC staff to do in the parental involvement by limiting the parental agency and influence regarding child-rearing ideas or individual notions of parental involvement. In that sense, the research sayings challenge and stimulate critical reflection over doings (of an assimilating character), especially when the official sayings on providing all children with equal opportunities, regardless of their individual characteristics and needs, are implemented in relation to a socially unprivileged group. As I understand Kampichler to be saying (2021, 2022), she would support the idea of extending the arena of possible doings connected to parental involvement (different examples of which are presented in Chaps. 10 and 11), so that different groups could be met and seen not only through their lacks, but also through their resources and strengths.

Both the examples from Tanzania and the Czech Republic show how the ECEC settings’ practice of collaborating with parents becomes the practice architecture of their involvement. In some cases, a very wide and flexible architecture may be apparent (like for the middle-class parents securing spots in a high-demand public ECEC or a high-priced private one in the Czech Republic), or there may be very limited agency from the parental side, whereby the parents either do what they are expected to, or “drop out” from involvement. In the latter case, the critical sayings of research, which trouble the assimilation-like doings, are of great importance.

Summary

The theory of practice architectures is an interesting contribution, as it allows us to re-think the theoretisation of more-than-parental involvement in early childhood education as a practice. This theory’s sensitivity and moving towards each practice’s complexity and contextuality embraces the aspects of more-than-parental involvement highlighted in Chap. 1. Its focus on practice and not particular social actors allows it to embrace diverse family and caregivers’ configurations around the child. The agonistic, conflict-valuing aspect flows into this theory through the tension and dynamic tension between the sayings, doings and relatings.

Specifically, this theory allows us to unpack the complexity of parental involvement, as well as its constituting cultural-discursive, material-economic, and socio-political arrangements, and thus to realise that what is communicated in the sayings of official documents may be done very differently in diverse sites (both the sites of countries, as well as the sites of the same city, as shown through the examples used in this chapter), depending on relatings. Moreover, the theory allows us to understand different practices in ecologies and co-dependencies upon one another.

Nevertheless, it also allows us to justify the conscious decision of looking at “just” the sayings, or “just” the doings, if there is limited time for research. The complexity of practice that the theory of practice architectures allows us to capture and reflect over is its definite advantage. The operationalisation of what can be classified as cultural-discursive, material-economic, or socio-political content in the case of a particular site is up to the researcher applying the theory. On the one hand, this opens up pathways for local and contextual adjustments, but on the other hand, it may lead to the three dimensions of practice architecture, not always being explained with ontologically or epistemologically compatible concepts (depending on how the theory is applied).