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Introduction

Teaching and learning are intrinsically social practices. They involve intersubjectivities , interrelationships, interactions and interconnectivities within actions which, in the social happeningness of classroom practice, form the sayings , doings and relatings which constitute them. By drawing on the theory of practice architectures as a conceptual framework, the chapter inquires into the enduring question about what goes on in classrooms (Heap 1985); and in particular, what happens in the moment-by-moment unfolding of lessons as teachers and learners encounter one another as interlocutors in intersubjective spaces . In this chapter two distinct but intersecting approaches to this question about social practice are utilised; one from the study of the practice architectures that influence teaching and learning , and the other from the sociological analysis of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction as it occurs in lessons.

Bringing together these two modes of inquiry into lesson practices aims to strike a balance between the analytical attention given to the local accomplishment of practices in-the-moment (offered by methods such as Conversation Analysis ), and the connections that link the enactment of practices to others in space and through historical time (Scollon 2001). This approach aims to reveal the resources produced, and made relevant in the moments of teaching and learning, by making visible the detailed linguistic, activity and relational formulations (or cultural -discursive , material -economic and social-political arrangements) used to ‘get things done’. It also enables us to examine saliences left as traces in the participants’ orientations in lesson practices in-the-moment; these linguistic, activity and relational formulations are displayed, and therefore made accountable, in participant interactions . The approach connects the happenings in classrooms with its history (formation) and its sociality (happeningness) (Edwards-Groves and Grootenboer 2016); points that form the guiding propositions for the chapter.

Striking an Analytical Balance

To exemplify key points across the chapter, selected transcript excerpts from a one hour video-recorded Year One reading lesson will be used. The class, of 24 six- or seven-year-old children, was in a medium-sized school in a rural community in New South Wales, Australia. The empirical material will show that how practices are experienced by teachers and students in-the-moment can only be revealed through fine-grained analysis of participant interactions as they happen in the site of inquiry. It will show that what counts in learning to read is what is locally accomplished (said and done) at the time, and simultaneously, what is made relevant in locally produced interactions and interrelationships.

Transcripts provide the analyst with records of the turn-taking machinery (Sacks et al. 1974) that forms the sequential moment-by-moment discursive actions of the interactive participants involved; in this instance, the teacher Mrs Mott and her class of Year One students as they participated in the ‘reading lesson’. These transcripts form representations of actual ‘reading practices’ in classrooms by showing who does what interactionally (Davidson 2012), revealing how interactive participants orient to one another in the moments of interaction. By using analytic methods such as Conversation Analysis (CA) (derived from the Garfinkel’s 1967 work in the field of ethnomethodology) the procedural (turn-by-turn) examination of practices is enabled . Therefore, what constitutes practices can emerge in ways not clouded by the theoretical, methodological and pedagogical filtres about the reading theories and the teaching of reading that have come to interpose themselves on understanding and enacting the teaching of reading (Freebody and Freiberg 2001). According to Heap (1991):

…unless we attend to procedural definitions, and how teaching and learning activities are organized to produce them, we can never know whether our uses of reading theories are appropriate to the interactional contexts of their application. Those theories, in their flawed ways, tell us what reading is, and how it is done, supposedly in context-free terms. But students’ knowledge of the what and how of reading is culturally and socially mediated through interactions with other persons. We do not know what we are teaching, procedurally, about the value of reading, and how it ought to be done. We do not know how students are acculturated to reading. (p. 133)

Conversation analysis (CA) is a method that attempts to get at the details of the what and how of practices (such as practices encountered in reading lessons ). Its premise suggests that the discursive and nondiscursive practices are local accomplishments to be studied in terms of their moment-by-moment productions and the conversational resources that form the practice in its place of happening , at the time of happening. On the one hand, this approach is necessary because zooming in (Nicolini 2012, p. 16) to closely analyse the fine details of interactions in classrooms illuminates the means by which students actually encounter the language , the activities and other people in actions, interactions and interrelationships in their lessons. It shows the actual influence of talk on locally produced courses of action , revealing the language, the activities and the interrelationships that come to bear on the project (of learning to read) at the time. However, a CA position places strict requirements on researchers in the attribution of particular patterns of interaction to structural features of society (Schlegloff 1991, pp. 65–66). “The researcher needs to show from the data that the aspects of participant actions or the context that we as researchers find relevant to the interaction , are in fact aspects that are relevant to the participants we are observing, and that they show that in their talk” (Freiberg and Freebody 1995, p. 190).

On the other hand, and as a counter argument often said to be a tension with conversation analysis (see, e.g. Scollon 2001; Wetherall 1998), such a narrow focus on only the interactive moments runs the risk of neglecting the point that the positions, dispositions, histories and orientations of participants in the moments of practice make different possibilities available at the time. Wetherall (1998) believes that an adequate analysis must not only look at the conversational details of talk-in-sequence, but also at the ‘trace’ these detailed linguistic formulations leave through the larger threads displayed in the participant’s orientations. From this position, the chapter attempts to move these related perspectives forward (or to zoom out, as put by Nicolini 2012) to an applied Ethnomethodology/CA position (ten Have 2007) that enables the examination of the nexus of language , activity and interpersonal interactions when in fact these influence the production of classroom interaction practices. Applied Ethnomethodology/CA directs us to a sustained critique of conventional and established concepts of the organisation of social life as it is experienced in classroom reading and the practical application of knowledge based on such conceptions (ten Have 2007, p. 195). This then captures a broader view of the practice landscape (Kemmis et al. 2014) that encompasses the ontological and historical contours of particular practice traditions , like the teaching of reading. Practice traditions “encapsulate the history of the happenings of the practice, allow it to be reproduced, and act as a kind of collective ‘memory’ of the practice” (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 27).

The chapter argues that what shapes naturally occurring talk-in-interaction (Sacks et al. 1974) in classrooms are practice architectures; these are evident in the particular cultural -discursive , material -economic and social-political arrangements found at the site (for instance in a particular lesson at a particular time), and in one sense these hold the lesson together. These arrangements become relevant to the practice when it is made visible in the practice as it happens (Edwards-Groves and Grootenboer 2016). It also becomes relevant when these arrangements visibly influence the talk.

The position in the chapter is not to mount a case for either approach per se, but to argue that what counts as classroom practice, and specifically learning to read as represented in the empirical case presented in this chapter, are the saliences and relevances brought into practices through talk-in-interaction (Sacks et al. 1974). Therefore, what is experienced in the happeningness of classroom teaching and learning practices as they unfold in the sequential moment-by-moment talk-in-interaction is the primary concern. In one way this is a challenging theoretical and methodological task since these two research traditions are generally treated as different spheres of the same phenomenon. Although both are interested in the intricacies of practical action in social life, as methodologies they are treated as fundamentally distinct and separate. But, taking the lead from Nicolini (2012), the chapter seeks to map out the details of a lesson-in-action by examining the forms of discursivity that cycle though specific enacted sequences of talk to uncover what counts as classroom practice in the moments of happening. It positions the theory of practice architectures as a highly relevant conceptual and linguistic resource that enables a rich articulation of the both the intricacies of teaching as a social practice (prefigured but not predetermined by historical conditions and experiences) as they matter in interactive moments and teaching, and that are informed by particular practice traditions .

Getting at a View of Teaching Practice

This chapter is interested in getting at a view of teaching practices that accounts for the multidimensional nature and situated realities of the enactment of practices as they happen in classroom lessons. However, from this broad interest there are fundamental questions concerning the word ‘practice’ that as Bill Green (2009) explains

…is a term that circulates incessantly, and seems constantly and sometimes even compulsively in use, without always meaning much at all. Rather, it seems to float across the surface of our conversations and our debates, never really thematised and indeed basically unproblematised, a “stop-word” par excellence. So it is important to be clear at the outset that practice is not simply the Other of terms and concepts such as “theory” or “policy”, as conventional usage would have it, though it might be linked in interesting ways to them. (p. 2)

In education, Green’s concern has emerged as an unfortunate truism as catch-all phrases such as ‘best practice’, ‘core practice’, ‘student-centred practice’, ‘quality practice’, ‘effective practice’, ‘evidence-based practice’ (to mention a few) have entered the lexicon to describe teaching. And as a consequence, the incessant over use of the word gloss what practice means in education, rendering it rhetorical. These terms have also glossed its usefulness in understanding the multidimensionality and complexities of teaching. It is even argued that glossing, generalising, idealising, or ‘averaging’ the specifics of educational practice allows at best only a vague relationship between educational generalisations and specific, sited and site-specific educational practices (Edwards-Groves and Grootenboer 2015; Freiberg and Freebody 1995). To respond to Green’s (2009) unease regarding the superficial and perhaps shallow usage, ‘practice’ itself, and so what ‘counts as practice’, is positioned as a focal point of examination. On this the characterisation of practice derived by Kemmis et al. (2014) is foregrounded; they define practice as

…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), and when the people and objects involved are distributed in characteristic arrangements of relationships (relatings), and when this complex of actions – or interconnected sayings, doings and relatings - ‘hangs together’ in a distinctive project. (p. 31)

The work of Kemmis et al. (2014) seeks to understand practices from an integrated philosophical and empirical positioning as a way towards a theory and practice nexus that both theorises and illuminates descriptions of practices. Like many practice theorists their research examines the empirical connections between theory and practice in many fields of inquiry; for example Theodore Schatzki (2002) in the field of community practices, or Brian Street’s work (1984) in the field of literacy teaching practices. A main aim of practice theory in education is to show how in classrooms (for example), teaching and learning practices are sites themselves, whereby teachers and students orient to each other through shared, characteristic and socially established actions. Such a movement enables us to form ways to ‘trace’ out and elucidate the socialness of classroom practices as they happen in reality in varying kinds of teaching and learning projects in different discipline areas. These, in turn, foreground the particularity and situatedness of the teaching and learning practices enacted in lessons.

Lessons as Sequentially Accomplished Turns of Talk: What Constitutes ‘A Lesson’

The following transcript excerpt of a Year One reading lesson is presented to show empirically how classroom lesson practices unfold through sequential turn-by-turn interactions between teachers and students. It is presented in four segments that represent four distinctive phases of the lesson.

Excerpt 1

In this first phase of the lesson with the whole class (24, 6 year old students), the students as a cohort are seated on the floor facing a big book entitled “Mrs Washy-Washy” placed on a large stand beside the teacher, Mrs Mott. (Note: The Jefferson notation system is used in the transcripts; see Appendix for details)

Any reading of the lesson transcript prompts questions such as, what are lessons? what are reading lessons ? what do teachers teach in reading lessons? what do students learn about reading? To answer these questions requires a detailed analysis of the practices encountered in lessons. A close CA reading enables detailed attention to be drawn to the specific recognisable interactional resources used by the Mrs Mott and the Year One students to ‘do’ reading in this particular classroom.

First, each turn in the sequence of interaction is a response to a previous turn and influences the next turn. For example, Mrs Mott’s initiating turn, “we’re going to practise reading the big book”, sets in chain what then ‘happens’, what is made salient and what becomes accomplished in the reading lesson. In another instance, Will’s shouting out in turn 41 has consequences for the next turn, it prompts Mrs Mott’s reprimand in turn 42. Second, accomplishing reading in a whole class arrangement, such as the shared reading of the text ‘Mrs Washy-Washy’, is a dynamic rapid-fire multiparty occurrence. As it is experienced by the teacher and the students in reality, many turns overlap (marked by the [ ]), turns are offered simultaneously (marked by the [[ ]]), turns are sometimes latched to a previous turn (marked by =), or quieter (marked by ° °) or louder (marked by CAPITALS); and because of this some turns are possibly not heard or acknowledged (see turns 2 and 4). Third, in turn 1 Mrs Mott explicitly names the project of the practice, “to practise reading Mrs Wishy-Washy again”, which is followed by providing a rationale for doing this task, “because we know it, we can make it (the reading) sound so smooth”. Fourth, it is evident that to accomplish this part of the reading lesson, the teacher mediates the courses of action by doing particular things such as, for example, turning the page (turns 13, 16, 17, 18); pointing to the text (turn 13, 40); directing students to use their eyes (turns 3 and 18), to search at the words (turn 3), to read it (turn 16) and to focus (turn 16); and directing where students they should put their eyes (turn 18, 40). Fifth, the interactional turns or student’s courses of action are also mediated by the teacher’s requests such as calling for cohort agreement (turn 5), to begin reading (turn 9), to read in unison (turns 5 and 11), to keep up (turn 40) and reminders not to shout (turn 42).

For their part, students contribute to the doing of the whole class reading by orienting to the shared, characteristic and socially established actions of reading as a whole class cohort. They do this in ways that show comprehensibility ; that is, they show understanding of what it takes to participate in the reading lesson by complying with the teacher’s mediated patterns of discourse. We know it is patterned and characteristic in this class through the language the teacher uses; for instance, Mrs Mott’s opening statement begins with a call to practise reading by rereading the familiar book ‘Mrs Washy-Washy’; that is practising means rereading. Through such utterances as ‘we know it’, ‘remembering’, ‘doing it again’, reading a ‘familiar book’ and by cohorting in phrases such as ‘doing it together’ and the use of the word ‘we’ the teacher brings into the lesson practices or characteristic ways of doing reading in this class. Additionally, she uses characteristic discourses in the practice, such as using distinctive language associated with ‘real’ reading (turn 42), for instance ‘searching at the words’, ‘reading smoothly’, ‘sounding like real reading’, ‘checking’ and ‘focusing on each sentence’. From this, students learn to read and about reading by hearing and producing (or searching, smooth sounding reading, checking and focusing on sentences). This discursive action orchestrated by the teacher influences what the students display in their actions and what they take reading to be about.

Lessons as Recognisably Locally Produced Courses of Action

To further the understanding of the nature of teaching and learning as it is experienced in lessons requires understanding the practices as well as the practice architectures that simultaneously constitute (and mediate) and are constituted (and mediated) by situated and locally produced courses of action in classrooms. These courses of action, comprised of interconnected sayings , doings and relatings, are manifest in language , activities and relationships, made visible and relevant (to the practice at the time) through the discursive sequentially enacted interactions in lessons (Edwards-Groves and Grootenboer 2016; Kemmis et al. 2014). What is brought to bear in classroom interactions is revealed through the substance of utterances and exchanges in the moment-by-moment discursiveness of the discourse. Understanding and participating in these courses of action in lessons depends upon students and teachers simultaneously

…orienting themselves and one another to a shared culture (within their classroom, within their school, within their community) through shared language and symbols,

orienting themselves and one another to the same salient features of the material resources and physical space-time inhabited at the time, and

orienting themselves and one another socially and politically amid interrelationships and arrangements that contain and control conflict , secure social solidarities, and give them agency , selfhood and identities as members of classrooms, families, communities and organisations.

It is an achievement secured by human social practices.

(Adapted from Kemmis et al. 2014 p. 2)

Excerpt 2

In this next excerpt from the second phase (whole class comprehension) of Mrs Mott’s reading lesson, as a whole class group the students engage in segments of teacher-led talk directed towards comprehending the meaning of the text.

At first reading, this excerpt from a distinct phase of the lesson (whole class comprehension) can be regarded as a highly familiar segment of classroom talk; found similarly in all the excerpts in this chapter. Considering it first as talk in terms of the speech exchange system (Schegloff 2007) in which students take part, we see features that are unlike ordinary conversation (Freiberg and Freebody 1995). In classroom talk one party (usually the teacher) takes every second turn at talk and generally asks all the questions. At play, is a typical and recognisable turn-taking structure, whereby

  1. 1.

    the teacher, Mrs Mott, makes a place for students’ responses in what is described as ‘transition-relevant places’ (TRPs), usually by asking a question (e.g. turns 43, 49, 51; also seen in turns 81, 83, 85, 88 in Excerpt 3 below) or by leaving a sentence unfinished with an upward inflection (turn 51)

  2. 2.

    a student provides a response of some kind (from either being nominated as in turn 43 or self-initiating like in turns 82 or 86 Excerpt 3 below), and

  3. 3.

    the teacher provides some feedback on that response (e.g. turns 45, 53); the teacher’s feedback can include repeats of the student answer (45, 53), or in Excerpt 3 below new questions (turn 81), reminders (88), or new information (81); and if a TRP is not accepted within a certain time, the teacher will offer a hint as Mrs Mott did in turn 51 or provide a new invitation (51).

Many of these features have been long documented as the three-part teaching exchange, Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) (Mehan 1978; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975). To establish the meaning of the texts, the teacher produces this typical IRF classroom exchange system whereby the teacher initiates a question (I) (“What would you do it you were that mad?”), the students provide a response (R) (“she would scream at them”) which is followed by feedback evaluation (F) (“she would probably scream at them again wouldn’t she?”).

Excerpt 3

In the third phase of the lesson (group work), some students move to smaller learning centre groups based at smaller tables or designated work stations; the remaining four students, the Emus group, stay on the floor facing in a semi-circle toward the teacher. They remain with the teacher for guided reading instruction aimed to address student’s instructional levels; this teacher-led group talk is presented next.

In this excerpt, a CA reading reveals that Mrs Mott directs (“sit at your tables”), mediates (“don’t be silly, don’t make things up”) and evaluates (“no”) the student’s actions and contributions. She mediates what students should and should not do, what they should and should not talk about, and what they should and should not think in relation to the text. To do this, she simultaneously establishes certain routines and procedures for ‘reading’, here and now, in this classroom. This is evident in her utterances “carefully turn over the page”, “let’s read it together”, “point to the first word to start”, “let’s have a practice of another book”, “read it with me now”, “looking at the picture” and “let’s do a summary”. She also provides an interpretation of the text, orienting students toward a particular reading of it; for example “she doesn’t look very happy”, “what would she do?” and “What would you do it you were that mad?” These talk practices create regulatory classroom discourses that influence what the students orient to in their lessons.

Across these segments or phases, Mrs Mott’s talk orients to particular sayings , doings and relatings, creating practice architectures that influence the unfolding of the lesson at the time. For instance in turns 43, 45 and 49 Mrs Mott nominates the next speaker by naming (Trent), pointing to (Willow), nodding at (Nadine) or looking at (Will and Nate) the selected student. Each of their responses were evaluated with an acknowledgement token (reference) such as a nod (turn 45 or 83), her repeating a response (turns 45, 47, 57 and 59), a feedback acknowledgement (e.g. “good, yes” in turn 51, “that’s so funny” in turn 59, “no” in turn 88), or an extended response (e.g. in turn 53 “that’d get rid of the pig”, turn 59, “that’s the end of the pig”, later in turn 88 “don’t be silly, Will, don’t make things up, we don’t do that”).

Examining these courses of action throughout the comprehension phase of the lesson reveals that, for their part, with the teacher students co-produce or ‘conspire with each other to produce the order of things’ (Latour 2010, p. 148). Through particular socially organised and/or mediated interactional methods and actions (Button and Lee 1987; ten Have and Psathas 1995), the teachers and students orient, discursively, to a shared social culture and social order about how to be a student and a teacher in this classroom. From the outset, teachers and students orient to the same salient features of the material resources (the books) and physical space-time inhabited at the time (in turn 43 sitting still, turning to their elbow partner, facing the front, looking at the picture or in turn 61 moving to the learning centre groups). Through language they orient to, and demonstrate comprehension of, the substance of the text and their participation rights as they engage with one another as interlocutors in interaction in this lesson (Freiberg and Freebody 1995; Kemmis et al. 2014).

Teachers and students also orient to a shared understanding of their locally produced social culture and moral order (Freebody and Freiberg 2006). This is displayed clearly in their contributions; for example, that it is funny and acceptable to say Mrs Wishy-Washy will make the pig into salami in turn 52, knowing that salami-making would be a common activity in their Italian farming community, or in turn 47 acting surprised at Jimmy’s inappropriate contribution about kicking, or that it is silly and unacceptable to say the kitten would be in the dog’s mouth in turn 86. By following instructions, looking at and responding to the teacher when directed, the students are orienting socially and politically to their identity and agency as students. Students also demonstrate their sense of solidarity (as a group of students in this classroom) for instance, when they laugh at each other’s jokes about kicking (in turns 48), turning pigs into salami (in turns 56 and 58), and kittens in the dog’s mouth (in turns 87).

Spaces and Media of Participating in Lessons

What constitutes a reading lesson, in this instance, therefore is participating in site-specific locally produced social transactions about text (Mrs Wishy-Washy) in ways that are co-produced in the intersubjective space of their particular classroom interactions . The teacher and the students in this space orient to one another:

  • semantically, as they shared meanings (about text, talk and tasks) through the medium of language; for example Mrs Mott when explained “that a summary means we talk about the main ideas”;

  • in physical space-time, as they engaged in interactions through the medium of activities using particular resources or material objects; for example Mrs Moss reconfigured the interactive arrangements so that the students worked as a whole class sitting on the floor facing the front, in a paired configuration when they turned to their elbow partner for a discussion, small learning centre groups sitting at tables or sitting down on the floor in a guided reading group of four students; and,

  • socially, as they encountered each other in different kinds of interactions that enabled different kinds of roles through the medium of relationships which attribute different positions of power, solidarity and agency .

These students became practitioners of literacy practices (or specifically reading practices in the case of the excerpts presented) by co-inhabiting these particular intersubjective spaces with their teacher and peers in their classroom reading lesson (in-the-moment in physical space-time and over historical time). They employed particular sayings, doings and relatings appropriate and distinctive to the discipline of learning to read. It is in the specificity of interactive moments that students not only encounter other students and the teacher as interlocutors in interactions in the intersubjective spaces they co-create by their very presence, but these interactive moments are the sites where students encounter and make relevant the curriculum (or traces of it).

In one sense, what could be taken from the empirical material presented so far is that lessons need to be considered to be “participation in an evolving interactive event” (Edwards-Groves 2003). Reflecting a sociological viewpoint, and as we can see in the transcripts, in fact this view of a lesson occasions the consideration that teaching is about bringing practices of learning into being through participating in discourses in the discursive flow of talk-in-interaction . Discourse “is first and foremost, a form of action , a way of making things happen in the world, and not a mere way of representing it” (Nicolini 2012, p. 198). In this respect discourse is viewed as discursive social action that forms a nexus of practices (Nicolini 2012) mediated by practice architectures. Through discourse, these interactions (always enacted in sequence) make evident what counts as lessons, what reading lessons are taken to be, what lessons teachers teach in reading lessons and what students learn about reading, participating and behaving.

This shifts the typical textbook view of a lesson that suggests it is a specified or organised period of time for teaching and learning, bounded by specific content in different disciplines; that is, an arbitrary technical construct. In education texts, for instance, it has been defined as “a planned focus for learning developed from the teacher’s program” (Hinde McLeod and Reynolds 2007, p. 100) or as a “subdivision of a unit, usually taught in a single class period or, on occasion, for two or three successive periods” (Carjuzaa and Kellough 2013, p. 96). These perspectives provide characteristic parameters for understanding the concept of a lesson but neglect what counts as a lesson as it is constituted in-the-moment; that is, how it is experienced by students as it unfolds in the happeningness of real time actions and interactions . Respecifying ‘lessons’ to be about participation in interactions in practices, as suggested in this section, may be useful in addressing a superficial glossing of the term ‘lessons’ that may result in limiting understandings of its complexity and multidimensionality.

The Contours of Lessons: Understanding the Shifting Practice Architectures Across Phases

Examination of the fine-grained details of the daily, often taken-for-granted, practices encountered in classroom lessons illustrates the ways in which students access (or have access to) literacy and curricular knowledge through classroom participation. Conversation analysis , for example, enables the exemplification of how the literacy–curriculum relationship gets done in practice with a highly intricate level of detail, rather than speculating on how it could or should be done (Freebody 2003). In a practical sense looking at classroom practice at this level of talk-in-interaction , described by Anstey (1996) as the micro level of practice, has enabled a picture of what constitutes teaching and learning in ‘lessons’ and what is made available about literacy and curricular knowledge in classroom actions. And as shown, these actions are visible, and made salient, in the interconnected mutually formative, informative, and transformative nature of the sayings , doings and relatings encountered by teachers and students. However, these change shape across the phases of a lesson.

An examination of the lesson presented in this chapter (as sequential excerpts from a complete transcript) makes apparent the changing contours of lessons. Interactively, we have seen different phases shaped by different practice architectures in dynamic ways. For instance, in Excerpts 1 and 2, the first and second phases of the lesson, the material -economic arrangements make the particular whole class reading activity and teacher mediated interactions ‘that came into being’ possible. That is to say, the physical positioning of the students (seated on the floor as a cohort ‘facing the front’), the teacher (sitting on a chair facing the students) and the material resources (the book on the stand beside the teacher) directly orients interactions to be teacher mediated and for the teacher to take every second turn (in the IRF speech exchange system). This arrangement meant the teacher took up more of the talk time and fewer students had opportunities for participating. In phase two, when students worked in a paired configuration, when they turned to their elbow partner for a two-party discussion, different social-political conditions were created since all students had the opportunity to talk to one another. Similarly, the shift in the use of physical space in the third phase (see Excerpt 3), that had students move to smaller learning centre groups based at smaller tables or designated work stations, created the possibility for students to work independently from the teacher thus reforming and rearranging other dimensions of the practice.

As the material-economic rearrangements unfold across the period of time (signalled in the talk), so do the interactive possibilities and opportunities; these reshape the cultural-discursive and social-political arrangements . Consequently, changing practice architectures across the lesson make different sayings between teachers and students, different doings and activities and different ways of relating with one another in the space possible. A final example of this occurs in the final excerpt.

Excerpt 4

In this fourth phase of the lesson, the students in the small guided reading group move to face outwards with backs facing each other (with the teacher crouched behind them) to read independently. Mrs Mott then positions herself behind the students to ‘listen’ to the reading.

In this exchange a different portrayal of learning to read emerges; this happened because the practice architectures changed. The change was signalled by the teacher’s turn 191 “I would like you to turn face out, have a go at reading to yourself and I’ll listen to you”. Specifically, as the students faced outwards away from each other and away from the teacher, the book and the attention to their book emerged as a focal point for their concentration; they were enabled to read it to themselves (turn 191). As the teacher physically repositioned herself behind the students, other practices like students reading independently or the teacher listening to individual students reading aloud were made possible. Such a shift in the practice architectures (or the physical arrangements at the time in this instance) prompted a shift in other practices of learning and teaching.

On this occasion, the language about doing reading shifted to higher degree of specificity when students were expected to read ‘by themselves’. In excerpt 4, focused mainly on the teacher interacting with Joel, the discourse of how Joel was to do reading turned specifically to him “having a go, checking, matching, rereading, correcting mistakes, following, reading it with your finger, remembering, looking at the pictures, pointing and trying”. For Joel, it is the growing specificity of the talk encountered here that is central to the literacy learning-curriculum relationship.

Changing Practice Architectures in Lessons About Learning to Read

Zooming out (Nicolini 2012, p. 16) a little further enables us to ‘trace’ out and elucidate the particular practice architectures that influence what happens, and what is enabled and constrained , in the courses of action, like those experienced when reading a big book as a class or reading in smaller groups. For instance, having the students sitting on the floor as a cluster facing towards the big book at the front (as evident in Phase 1) creates a physical space or setup that enables the students to orient to material resources required to do the shared reading activity. Such physical setups form particular material -economic arrangements that enable shared reading to be done in this class, in this way. These material -economic arrangements also simultaneously makes different ways of relating with one another possible in this lesson; for instance, because of her positioning (on the chair at the front with all students facing her) the teacher has the authority and power to control the turns at talk, the setups, and to decide on the right ways to behave (not to call out, to face the front, to read smoothly).

Noticeably, as the practice architectures changed shape across the lesson phases, so did what counted as reading; this was explicitly oriented to in the interactional exchanges between the teachers and the students. These exchanges became deeply consequential for learning about reading and learning how to read. The practice arrangements and rearrangements occurred across the “lesson” as intertwined or entangled (Hodder 2012) dimensions of practice, enabling particular kinds of sayings, doings and relatings to be made relevant as they “hang together ” in the practice of reading and learning to read. In other words, practice architectures are arrangements that enable and constrain what happens, and so what counts, in practices of learning (to read). For instance the teacher builds through language , activities and ways of relating what it means to read for and in different phases of the lesson (see Table 10.1).

Table 10.1 What counts in learning to read across lesson phases
Full size table

Across the four phases of the lessons presented in the transcript excerpts in this chapter Mrs Mott produced 55 instructions about how to do reading, revealing the complexity and multidimensionality of learning to read in Year One. A closer examination of the table makes available two distinct understandings of learning in classroom reading lessons . These 24 students in the Year One class were required to engage in reading activities involving both learning the substantive practices of reading (e.g. making reading sound smooth, searching, rereading, checking or practising) at the same time as being initiated into practices of learning (e.g. sitting still, turning to your elbow partner, facing the front or checking the task board) (Kemmis et al. 2014). In this reading lesson, Mrs Mott brought her Year One children into the language of reading and participating that allowed them to understand such concepts as ‘searching’, ‘re-reading’, ‘characters’ or ‘turning to talk to your elbow partner ’. She created conditions in which the students could speak the language of reading and participating in answers to questions or directions, or in conversations with one another about the texts in which the ideas were relevant. At the same time, she invited the students to join into the activities of the class, for example, the activity of looking at the pictures to secure a shared meaning or sharing their ideas with their elbow partner. She also invited the students to enter ways of relating to others and to things (to her and the other students; and to texts and other materials found in the classroom).

As Heap (1985) suggested, the lesson excerpts exemplify the ways in which students’ knowledge of the what and how of reading are culturally and socially mediated through interactive moments with the teacher and their peers. Heap’s point reminds us of the significance of the moments both in terms of the pedagogical relevance of the exchanges and how the participants ‘do’ reading as they orient to each other relationally; but also how they relate to, and make relevant, the artefacts and the activity of the reading lesson and the particularity of the language which together make this interaction distinctively a reading lesson. Examining the excerpts shows the saliences brought to bear on the accomplishment of lessons of one kind or another; notably, these may or may not always be about the substantive practice of reading in a lesson designated ‘a reading lesson’. Although, primarily, the excerpts show how students encountered lessons about how to do reading through specific language signalling that this is a reading lesson; at the same time, in the same intersubjective space , the excerpts also show how the Year One students encountered lessons about behaving in school in particular socially acceptable ways, lessons about how to participate, lessons about complying and orienting to the teachers questions, and lessons about meeting requests and following directions.

For the Year One students, therefore, learning to read was about being both initiated into substantive practices of reading by being stirred into particular learning practices. For them, “learning [to read] is an initiation into other practices in which the ‘learning’ may be more or less inseparable from the practising of the practice being learned” (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 56). In this case, the activity of reading and participating in interactions round reading were inseparable. Kemmis and colleagues (2014) suggest these inseparable dimensions of participating form the socialness of practices. They suggest that “learning a practice [like reading] entails entering—joining in—the projects and the kinds of sayings , doings and relatings characteristic of that particular practice” (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 58).

Historicising Practices in Lessons: Tracing Prefigurement

Practices in lessons are embodied and enacted in-the-moment. But practices are not simply this. Lesson practices are also shaped by traditions, and professional and individual histories that are traceable in the cultural -discursive , material -economic and social-political arrangements made salient and relevant in the moment of enactment. Teachers and students use their knowledge and past experiences of those contexts to generate appropriate behaviours (or actions comprised of interconnected sayings, doings and relatings), and the appropriateness of those behaviours, in turn, serve to define the context in which they interact (Edwards and Furlong 1979). This historical positioning for viewing practice sits alongside a long history of inquiry into teaching practice as being both social and situated, and locally produced in interactions (see e.g. Alexander 2008; Barnes 1976; Britton 1970; Cazden 1972; Edwards and Furlong 1979; Freiberg and Freebody 1995; Heap 1985; Sinclair and Coulthard 1975).

As the transcripts show, particular practices are made relevant and meaningful through participant displays in their talk-in-interaction ; it is also true that these actions are prefigured by history, coming to exist in practice over time forming historical traces that leave remnants from the past on moments in the present:

These historical traces are not ‘just history’, ‘the past’, ‘what’s done and dusted’ - somehow divorced from present conditions and circumstance. Rather, these historical traces are key elements, key parts of the architecture of practice, the ‘practice architectures’ which we recognise as influencing current practices… Acknowledging and valuing how current day practices, and their associated doings , sayings and relatings, are not just site-based but deeply historically embedded, enables us to better understand the conditions for practice, and how more productive conditions might be brought about in practice, and supported in policy. (Hardy and Edwards-Groves 2016, n.p)

From a conversation analysis position, historical past moments may be considered as just past in a previous turn in a conversation, or as past like-interactions in that or a similar context or situation, where, as the transcript shows, interactive experiences influence and are influenced by other past interactions. That is to say that each turn in the classroom exchange act has a catalytic effect on the next turn; this happens turn-by-turn and in sequence as each turn of talk lays down a mark in the history of the occasion. And as was shown in the previous section, these interactive experiences are similarly, and simultaneously, influenced by practice architectures.

The broader practice landscape of the classroom reading lesson is not serendipitous or happenstance , it has been prefigured by history. For instance, Vygotsky ’s (1978) seminal work on scaffolding learners and constructivist teaching, Brian Cambourne’s (1988) work on the establishing conditions for effective literacy learning in classrooms through immersion in whole text reading, feedback, engagement, demonstration, and the 1970s push to learn to read by reading from Kenneth Goodman’s research (1967) into a more wholistic language approach to teaching have influenced the approach to teach using whole texts and big books (as seen in phase 1). In another example, tracing out the substance of the orchestration of the types of classroom interchanges presented in the transcript excerpts above enables developing a sense of how the interactions about comprehending text entered the classroom discourse. For instance developing reading comprehension through talking about text as shown by Mrs Mott’s orienting talk about developing a summary of what was read stemmed from very early work by Henderson (1903), Thorndike (1917), Bartlett (1932) (cited in Pearson, 1984). Retelling or summarising texts in extended conversations was brought to the fore in educational thinking and practice by theorists such as James Britton (1970) and Douglas Barnes (1976).

The theory of practice architectures even further illuminates practices in the time-space of human activity (Schatzki 2010) by getting at the particularity of site-based circumstances found in and brought to the practice (and the profession) at the time, in time and over time. It emphasises that practices occur and are entangled with particular kinds of nuanced arrangements found at specific sites, like particular classrooms in particular schools in particular communities in particular moments in history. “Retrieving a sense of our intellectual history is not an antiquarian pursuit” (Doecke et al. 2003, p. 100), but is one that reconnects empirical practices with the theoretical ideas that shape them; these, in turn are prefigured by practice traditions . Detailed interaction analysis using methods such as CA (as an ontological approach concerned with the here and now of talk-in-interaction ) works in a complimentary way to enable us to get at the specificity of these practices traditions (formed in history) as they happen (formed in the present).

Conclusion: What Counts?

An underlying position of this chapter has been that what shapes naturally occurring talk-in-interaction (Sacks et al. 1974) in classroom lessons are practice architectures. Empirical material from a transcribed classroom Year One reading lesson was used to show how the moment-by-moment interactions display particular cultural -discursive , material -economic and social-political arrangements found at the particular site and how these ‘hang together ’ in the practices of the reading lesson. As was shown in the talk that occurred in the reading lesson, these arrangements—displayed in the discursive flow of interaction —enable and constrain situated action . At the outset, the chapter proposed that to understand what counts in classroom practices means to understand how together, the semantic , physical and social spaces of practice (as it happens in situ) form the intersubjective , interactional, interrelational, and interconnective nature of the activities associated with the learning and teaching that happens in classrooms. Furthermore, the use of the theory of practice architectures with the conversation analytic approach strengthens the portrayal of teaching and learning reading in classroom lessons.

To give ‘‘accurate portrayals of the realities of social situations in their own terms, in their natural or conventional settings’’ (Cohen et al. 2000, p. 110), the chapter has argued that an ontological approach is required to understand the what and how of classroom practice as it occurs in socially and locally produced situated occasions of interactivity. Examining practices in situations as they occur and unfold in actions and interactions enables us to take account of more nuanced representations of what counts as practices like teaching and learning are enacted (Heap, 1991). But added to this, is the view that to understand the nuances of practices also entails historicising practices as a way to trace why this now; why particular actions (or sayings, doings and relatings) come to be relevant, and so salient, in particular practices in particular places as displays in classroom talk. As presented, bringing these two ideas together entails capturing the practice architectures that shape or even prefigure classroom interaction practices, at the same time provide scope for a more detailed micro analysis of naturally occurring interactions as they occur in lessons. This ‘both ways look’ allows us to study teaching and learning at a small grain-size and reconsider broader questions concerning what counts in classroom practice—what counts as a lesson? what counts as reading lessons ? what counts in teaching reading lessons? what counts as learning? what is made relevant in the embodied and enacted practices of teaching and learning reading?