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.