Studies in Continuing Education

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A practice theory perspective on learning: beyond

a ‘standard’ view

Stephen Kemmis

To cite this article: Stephen Kemmis (2021) A practice theory perspective on learning:
beyond a ‘standard’ view, Studies in Continuing Education, 43:3, 280-295, DOI:
10.1080/0158037X.2021.1920384

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STUDIES IN CONTINUING EDUCATION
2021, VOL. 43, NO. 3, 280–295
https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2021.1920384

A practice theory perspective on learning: beyond a

‘standard’ view
Stephen Kemmis
School of Education, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this essay, I explore a disagreement with my friend Theodore Received 6 July 2020
(Ted) Schatzki about learning. Specifically, the dispute is between Accepted 18 April 2021
views of learning presented in the (2017) book edited by Peter
KEYWORDS
Grootenboer, Christine Edwards-Groves and Sarojni Choy, Practice Learning; practice; practice
Theory Perspectives on Pedagogy and Education: Praxis, diversity, theory; theory of practice
and contestation, specifically Schatzki’s ‘Chapter 2: Practices and architectures
learning’ and Kemmis, Edwards-Groves, Lloyd, Grootenboer,
Hardy and Wilkinson ‘Chapter 3: Learning as being ‘stirred in’ to
practices’. Schatzki thinks practice theory can accept the
‘standard’ view of learning as the acquisition of knowledge. I aim
to secure an alternative view: that practice theory offers a
different conception of learning as happening in the reproduction
(with variation) and transformation of practices, and the production
of new practices – but the argument also leads me to conclude
that learning itself is not a practice.

Introduction
This essay began as a reflection on my friend Theodore (Ted) Schatzki’s view that prac-
tice theory could accept the ‘standard’ view of learning as ‘the acquisition of knowledge’
(2017, 23–24). It seemed to me, however, that practice theory offers resources for think-
ing about learning very differently. This idea became the seed for my talk at the ProPEL
2019 conference.1 As I wrote and rewrote, however, I began corresponding with Ted to
make sure I was representing him accurately, and he responded with many insights and
suggestions that crystallised the gaps between our positions. Some of this dialogue
appears in the text of this essay; some, in the counterpoint between text and endnotes.
This style echoes my conversation with Ted through the writing of the essay, while
also demonstrating something I count as central to academic practice, namely, that
science and philosophy advance through the ‘conversation of traditions’ that Alastair
MacIntyre (1988, 12) describes – both within intellectual traditions and between them.
Practice theory has opened new ways to understand practice as crucial to human exist-
ence and coexistence. I do not provide an introduction to practice theory here. Schatzki
offers one conception of practice theory (e.g. Schatzki 2002, 2010). Davide Nicolini
(2013) gives a good introduction to some of the main varieties of practice theory. The

CONTACT Stephen Kemmis stephen@stephenkemmis.com

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 STUDIES IN CONTINUING EDUCATION 281

edited collection by Hui, Schatzki, and Shove (2017) demonstrates the conceptual diver-
sity of contemporary approaches to theorising practice.

The ‘standard’ view of learning

At the beginning of his (2017) essay ‘Practices and learning’, Schatzki writes (23–24) that
My view is that practice theory does not foster a new conception of learning, but instead
holds insights regarding learning as standardly conceived.

He goes on (2017, 24) to say that

This essay focuses on knowledge. I do not believe that the acquisition of knowledge alone
constitutes learning. Learning also embraces the acquisition of such items as normative con-
victions, aesthetic judgment, feelings, and the power of reflection, as well as self-understand-
ings, ways things matter, and character traits such as judiciousness, politeness, and
obedience. Indeed, Lave and Packer (2008) have something right when they tie learning
to the ‘ontological transformation’ of people – though not all transformations qualify as
instances of learning … Focussing on knowledge, however, does not deform my account.
For the bearing of practice ontology on theorizing learning when learning is treated as
embracing this fuller set of features parallels its bearing on theorizing qua the acquisition
of knowledge. In addition, knowledge – in its full breadth – is central to these other acqui-
sitions. (24)

Please note that, in the second sentence of this quotation, Schatzki says that: ‘I do not
believe that the acquisition of knowledge alone constitutes learning’. As we shall see,
however, we differ about what constitutes learning.
Later, concluding that essay (2017, 41), Schatzki reiterates the view that practice theory
can accept the view of learning as the acquisition of knowledge, but he also points to
aspects of learning beyond or in addition to this acquisition:
Upholding practice theory does not require jettisoning the traditional conception of learn-
ing [as the acquisition of knowledge] and adopting a new conception that defines learning as
coming to participate in practices. Practices are composed of actions, for which the tra-
ditional conception – duly expanded to include, indeed, highlight practical knowledge –
is well suited. Learning as a result can be understood as the acquisition of the epistemic
(and other) wherewithal that makes participation in practices possible. What the ontology
of practice theory provides to students of learning is what it provides to students of every
aspect of social life, namely, a conception of the site where their topics of concern play
out: learning, like life itself, transpires in the plenum of practices.

Here, I will argue that a practice theory perspective has important things to say about
what constitutes learning in addition to the acquisition of knowledge.

A difference of views
Ted and I corresponded over several months about differences between our views.2 In
May and July of 2019, I sent him different drafts of this paper, to both of which he
kindly responded in some detail. Here is the nub of our differences: At the time of
writing his (2017) essay, Ted said, ‘I thought to myself that a situation in which at t 1 a
person does not possess knowledge and at t 2 does is a situation in which learning has
taken place’ (pers. comm., May 21, 2019). On this view, it might be sufficient to say
282 S. KEMMIS

that learning is the acquisition of knowledge – although it might not be only that. By con-
trast, my colleagues and I (Kemmis et al. 2017) argued that learning is ‘coming to know
how to go on in practices’. As Ted incisively put it in his rejoinder to me: ‘maybe your
focus was and is on the coming bit – whereas mine is and was on the change from
not knowing to knowing’ (pers. comm., 2019). I agree: this is one key difference
between our views. In his essay, Ted focused on the fact or the achievement of the acqui-
sition, while in our essay, my colleagues and I focused on the process by which learning
happens.
Ted also raised another distinction between our views (pers. comm., July 3, 2019):
Here is a second distinction, based on this first, that seems to clarify the disagreement
further: the distinction between a definition and an account. Thus, whereas I was interested
only in a definition of learning, I think that you (and your colleagues) are interested in an
account of the phenomenon, one that characterizes the full phenomenon of the process of
learning.

Ted is right: I did indeed read his (Schatzki, 2017) essay as if he were aiming to give an
account of learning, rather than just to define it.
These give rise to other differences. While Ted is generally satisfied that practice
theory can accept a ‘standard’ view of learning as the acquisition of knowledge, my col-
leagues and I think that practice theory needs a view of learning that, in addition,
accounts for the process of learning: a view of learning in practice.
Still another difference between us is that, for Ted, what is acquired by learning is
knowledge in a broad and inclusive sense, while my colleagues and I want to articulate
the view that learning involves the reproduction (with variation) and transformation of
practices, and the production of new practices: a view of learning as coming to know
how to go on in practices, or coming to be able to go on in practices, or coming to partici-
pate differently in practices, or, most simply, coming to practise differently.

The acquisition of knowledge and ‘epistemic wherewithal’

Early in his essay, Schatzki (2017) recalls and enriches understandings of the nature of
knowledge. He recalls Ryle’s (1946) distinction between knowing how (or know-how)
and knowing that (propositional knowledge), and, after critically reviewing debates
about it, he proposes three kinds of knowledge, each associated with a form of learning:
The first kind of knowledge is know-how. When one acquires know-how one learns to X.
(37)

The second type of knowledge is knowing that (propositional knowledge). When one
acquires knowledge that X one learns that X. (37)

The third sort of knowledge, acquisition of which constitutes learning, is acquaintance. …

Acquaintance is familiarity with things perceived or dealt with in experience. … This type of
knowledge can be dubbed ‘knowing X’. When one acquires acquaintance with X one learns
X. (38)

And thus:
Learning is coming to know how to X, that Y, and Z. (39)
 STUDIES IN CONTINUING EDUCATION 283

In Schatzki’s view, the fruits of learning are these three kinds of knowledge. He then goes
a little further:
Learning as a result can be understood as the acquisition of the epistemic (and other) where-
withal that makes participation in practices possible. (41)

Broadly, I can accept these three kinds of knowledge,3 and that people acquire them by
learning. But it is a very particular way of looking at the matter to say that learning is no
more than this acquiring, as Schatzki agrees (pers. comm., May 2019). His view neverthe-
less focuses on the fact that learning happens, and knowledge is acquired. But it is not
necessary to constrain either the definition of learning, or conceptions of the nature of
learning, only to the knowledge that is acquired by learning. My view, by contrast, is
that learning is a process greater than the knowledge that is acquired by it.
I nevertheless agree that learning is, in part, the acquisition of knowledge, and that
knowledge makes participation in practices possible.
If Schatzki’s (2017) argument suggests that learning is principally an epistemic
achievement (the acquisition of knowledge, or ‘the epistemic wherewithal that makes
participation in practices possible’), then this ‘standard’ view of learning seems to offer
practice theory a rather narrow view of learning.

Towards a more dialectical view: a strategy to avoid making a dualism of

knowledge and action
In my thinking about practices, I adopt a strategy intended to avoid making a dualism of
knowledge and action. I take a dialectical view of practices,4 according to which practices
occur in the intersubjective space5 in which people encounter one another and the world.
On this view, things that appear to be properties of individuals (like their knowledge,
including cognitive understandings, material skills, and social values and emotions)
can be understood as always already presupposing an intersubjective space, beyond
the individual, in which they are anchored and grounded, and from which they arise.
In my view, individuals enter this intersubjective space through their practices: practices
are the principal means by which individuals participate in the world cognitively, mate-
rially, and socially, that is, in their being and their happening.
In my view, this intersubjective space has three dimensions:

(1) semantic space, in which we encounter one another as interlocutors, in the medium
of language, among the cultural-discursive arrangements found in or brought to a
site (like the language we speak there, and the things we talk about there);
(2) physical space–time, in which we encounter one another and other things in the
world as embodied beings, in the medium of activity and work, among the
material-economic arrangements found in or brought to a site (like the familiar
objects found there, and the times we spend there); and
(3) social space, in which we encounter one another as social beings, in the medium of
solidarity and power, among the social-political arrangements found in or brought
to a site (like the changing and sometimes contested relationships we have with
people there, in all their intersectionality in terms of things like race and gender
and class and age and sexual orientation, for example).
284 S. KEMMIS

In parallel with these dimensions, I see practices themselves as composed, respectively,

of (1) sayings, (2) doings and (3) relatings,6 all of which hang together in the project of a
practice. These sayings, doings, and relatings are things that happen. It is true that prac-
tices ‘hang together’ in the practitioner’s ‘project’ for the practice: its meanings, inten-
tions and ends; what the practitioner thinks they are doing. So interpreted, the project
of the practice is an epistemic object. I nevertheless think that my view of practices as
shaped in intersubjective space avoids making a dualism of knowledge and action, since

(1) the meanings of people’s sayings, doings, and relatings are formed intersubjectively:
as subjective ‘knowledge’, their origins are in intersubjective space, and they are
formed in the many different kinds of language games (Wittgenstein 1958) in
which we (learn to) use words to mean;
(2) the actions of saying and doing and relating are realised ontologically in physical
space–time that we share with others; and
(3) people generally relate to one another in the sayings, doings and relatings of their
practices in shared social spaces in which each participant has only a partial role
in the production of the collective social life being lived there.

By contrast with my view that we encounter one another in intersubjective space,

Schatzki (for example, 2002, 2010) says that human coexistence occurs in sites. My col-
leagues and I accept and adopt his views both on sites, and a site-ontological view of prac-
tices. We thus see the sayings, doings, and relatings of practices as enmeshed with the
particular arrangements that are found in or brought to particular sites. Schatzki
(2012) calls these ‘practice-arrangement bundles’. Arrangements enable and constrain
what happens when practices unfold in a site; they form conditions of possibility for
the ways that practices can unfold in the site. Taken together, we have argued (for
example, Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008; Kemmis et al. 2014) that these conditions of
possibility form practice architectures that enable and constrain the ways particular prac-
tices unfold. Nevertheless, as Schatzki points out (for example, 2002), such conditions
only prefigure practices, they do not pre-determine them.
Sites are particular locations in intersubjective space. We inhabit (the abstract) ‘inter-
subjective space’ only in an abstract sense. In reality, we always inhabit concrete places
that exhibit this three-dimensionality. Think of a setting like a hospital ward, a classroom,
a mechanic’s workshop, or a supermarket. A particular language is spoken in each of
those places, frequently about particular, familiar kinds of topics. Particular, often fam-
iliar, things are found there, and we inhabit this or that particular place at particular, fre-
quently familiar, times. And there are very often other people there – particular, often
familiar, people with whom we have particular kinds of relationships of power and soli-
darity, and there may be conflict and contestation between different kinds and groups of
people who inhabit the place together.
On this view, the sayings, doings, and relatings of practices happen in intersubjective
space. Any practice is more than what any one participant intends by it, or what they
think they are doing when they do it, however; it also has an ‘objective’ side as it
happens in a site, in the ‘external’ world.
On the view that practices happen in intersubjective space, however, both the ‘external’,
‘objective’ manifestation of the practice in the world, seen from the perspective of an
 STUDIES IN CONTINUING EDUCATION 285

observer, and the ‘internal’, ‘subjective’ side of the practice, seen from the perspective of
the practitioner, have their roots, their grounding, and their anchoring, in intersubjective
space. They are manifested in interactions between people and others, and between
people and the world. I conceptualise intersubjective space in terms of dialectical
relationships of mutual constitution between

. the knowledge and the action in a practice,

. the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’ sides of a practice,
. the epistemological and the ontological aspects of a practice,
. the practice and the arrangements that enable and constrain it in the site, and
. the particular action-in-history of an individual person’s practices and the local and
larger histories (like histories of class relations, gender relations, and race relations)
that prefigure and frame that person’s particular actions-in-history at this moment
and under these particular circumstances.

In the opening paragraph of the Preface of his (2002) book The Site of the Social,
Schatzki describes a site this way:
The social site is a specific context of human coexistence: the place where, and as part of
which, social life inherently occurs. To theorise sociality through the concept of a social
site is to hold that the character and transformation of social life are both intrinsically
and decisively rooted in the site where it takes place. In turn, this site-context, I claim is
composed of a mesh of orders and practices. Orders are arrangements of entities (for
example, people, artifacts, things), whereas practices are organised activities. Human coex-
istence transpires as and amid an elaborate, constantly evolving nexus of arranged things
and organised activities. (xi)

Clearly, the concept of ‘intersubjective space’ as I use it is not the same as the concept
of ‘the site’ as Schatzki here describes it. But, as Schatzki conceptualises it, the site
shares with the concept of ‘intersubjective space’ the notion that practices occur in
places – ‘a specific context’ in which ‘social life … [is] intrinsically and decisively
rooted’; a place where people encounter one another, amidst entities, where their
practices transpire, and where practices are bundled with the arrangements that
occur there.
The notion of the site is central to Schatzki’s site-ontological view of practices: practices
not only transpire in sites; they are entangled in various ways with the sociomateriality of
the things that are found there. Perhaps more than any other, it was this idea that won me
to Schatzkian practice theory. Nevertheless, unlike Schatzki, I describe intersubjective
space in the dimensions of semantic space, physical space–time, and social space, popu-
lated, respectively, by the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political
arrangements found in or brought to particular sites: particular places. We agree,
however, that practices, as they unfold, are profoundly entangled with such arrange-
ments; practices are enabled and constrained by arrangements; and practices are made
possible by arrangements. In my argument here, these are crucial agreements; as the
argument unfolds, I will suggest that these things we agree about are central to under-
standing why practice theory should not accept the ‘standard’ view of learning as the
acquisition of knowledge.
286 S. KEMMIS

‘Learning, like life itself, transpires in the plenum of practices’

It should be clear from my description of practices unfolding in intersubjective space that
I agree with Schatzki (2017, 41) when he says that ‘learning, like life itself, transpires in
the plenum of practices’. In my view, learning happens in practices, and learning shapes
and reshapes practices. While an effect of learning might be that an individual acquires
knowledge, I do not think that Schatzki is right to conclude that (2017, 41) ‘Upholding
practice theory does not require jettisoning the traditional conception of learning [as the
acquisition of knowledge] and adopting a new conception that defines learning as
coming to participate in practices’. This ‘new conception’, by the way, is one that my col-
leagues and I have proposed (Kemmis et al. 2014), for example by describing learning as
‘being stirred in to practices’ (58), ‘being initiated into practices’ (56), and, following
Wittgenstein (1958), ‘coming to know how to go on in practices’ (57).
When Schatzki (2017, 41) says that ‘learning, like life itself, transpires in the plenum of
practices’, what strikes me as most powerfully and compellingly true is the unadorned
phrase ‘like life itself’, a phrase that seems to me to lie behind much of Schatzki’s view
of practice in this essay and in other writings. The phrase opens an extraordinary vista
– a way to think about human lives as composed of practices (a view explored, especially
in relation to social change, in Schatzki 2019; see also Kemmis 2018, 2019).
For me, the insight that life transpires in practices is what shatters the preconceptions
and presuppositions of some versions of psychological and social theory about the dis-
tinctions between subject and object, and between knowledge and action. It is why I
put intersubjective space at the heart of my theorising of practice: it is the space in
which lives are lived, in which subject and object, and knowledge and action, interact.
It is the space where practices become real and manifest themselves. While we may
accept that knowledge is acquired in learning, I believe that a practice theory perspective
offers more powerful ways of understanding learning, practising, and living. The unique
power of practice theory is that it addresses what happens: how life unfolds – and how
practices unfold – in the intersubjective spaces in which we encounter one another
and the world, in what Schatzki describes as ‘the plenum of practices’.

Are all practices ‘practices by which knowledge is acquired’?

Schatzki (2017, 41) concluded that practice theory offers no particular view of learning
other than the ‘standard’ view that learning is the acquisition of knowledge. I now
want to challenge this assertion from another direction, namely, by arguing that all
practices are practices by which knowledge can be acquired. There are not some prac-
tices by which knowledge is not acquired, and other practices by which knowledge is
acquired. We do regard some school or educational practices particularly as learning
practices,7 of course, because we see them principally from the perspective that we
hope that a learner will learn through them in the context of some site of teaching,
or education, or training. We might nevertheless accept, however, that activities like
a teacher’s pedagogical practices, or teaching practices, or educational practices, are
practices.8
Kemmis et al. (2014, for example, p. 62) think that there may be ‘learning practices’
(practices whose project or purpose is to learn how to go on in some other practice,
 STUDIES IN CONTINUING EDUCATION 287

for example in a school setting) which are distinct from ‘substantive practices’ which are
the practices to be learned in such a setting. But they also say:
Learning is also an initiation into other practices in which the ‘learning’ may be inseparable
from the practising of the practice being learned. (p. 56)

and

… in our view, learning is always and only a process of being stirred into practices, even
when a learner is learning alone or from participation with others in shared activities.
We learn not only knowledge, embodied in our minds, bodies and feelings, but how to inter-
act with others and the world; our learning is not only epistemologically secured (as cogni-
tive knowledge) but also interactionally secured in sayings, doings and relatings that take
place amid the cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements
that pertain in the settings we inhabit. Our learning is always bigger than us; it always pos-
itions and orients us in a shared, three-dimensional – semantic, material, and social – world.
(pp. 59–60)

The acquisition of knowledge is not something peculiar to alleged ‘learning practices’

alone, however. People cannot help but acquire knowledge in all of their practices, every-
where, every day, even if it is learning only what is around the next corner, or how to steer
a safe course among the toys strewn across the floor.
Schatzki (2017, 29) avers that ‘learning is intimately tied to the augmentation of oper-
ability’. In support of this notion, he cites Lave (1993) and Hager (2012):
Lave (1993, p. 17) for example, writes that for learning to be situated is for knowledgeability
– meaning the flexible process of engagement with the world (1993, p. 13) – to be “routinely
in a state of change rather than stasis, in the medium of socially, culturally, and historically
ongoing systems of activity, involving people who are related in multiple and heterogeneous
ways … ” She thereby equates learning with the development of flexible engagement. More
directly, Hager (2012, p. 30) writes that “ … learning should be regarded as a growing
capacity to act in flexible, constructive, and innovative ways suited to the demands of
ever-changing circumstances.” Augmentation of this capacity, or of Lave’s knowledgeability,
is learning. (Schatzki 2017, p. 29)

I agree that learning is the augmentation of knowledgeability or ‘operability’, but I think

that Lave and Hager are also pointing to something important that Schatzki misses when
he defines learning as the acquisition of knowledge or ‘epistemic wherewithal’. I read
Lave (1993) and Hager (2012) as arguing that ‘practising always involves learning’,
and as acknowledging that learning is the obverse face of practising.9
Lave (2019, 85) locates learning squarely in practices:
… learning is an aspect of changing participation in changing ‘communities of practice’
everywhere. Wherever people engage for substantial periods of time, day by day, in doing
things in which their ongoing activities are interdependent, learning is part of their changing
participation in changing practices.

Later (Lave, 2019, 95; emphases in original), referring to her earlier work with Packer
(Lave and Packer 2008), Lave discusses learning in the context of ‘crafting identities in
practice’:
The question of subject-world relations that we explored was what would happen if we took
the collective social nature of our existence so seriously that we put it first. From that
288 S. KEMMIS

perspective crafting identities in practice becomes the fundamental project subjects engage
in – it is a social process. Becoming more knowledgeably skilled is an aspect of participation
in social practice. By such reasoning, who you are becoming shapes crucially and fundamen-
tally what you ‘know’. ‘What you know’ may be better thought of as doing rather than
having something – ‘knowing’ rather than acquiring or accumulating knowledge or infor-
mation. ‘Knowing’ is a relation among communities of practice, participation in practice,
and the generation of identities as part of becoming part of ongoing practice.

While learning ‘positions and orients’ us in the world (Kemmis et al. 2014, 60), the world
we share with others also animates us, it prompts us in many and various ways; it
prompts or obliges us to act. We enter this dance in intersubjective space. Our learning
is a constant adaptation of our practising,10 a constant adaptation of our capacities for
interacting in and with others and the world. Our learning is evident, not just in our
knowledge (how to X, that Y, and the familiarity of Z), but also in the happening of
our saying and doing and relating to others and the world in the intersubjective space
we inhabit with other people, with other species in the community of life on the
planet, and with other things in the Cosmos. No less than in the knowledge we
acquire, our learning is evident in our practices11: how we practise living in the world.
So, the question now becomes ‘What is learning other than and in addition to the
acquisition of knowledge?’ And I think practice theory has a good deal to say about
that, in terms of what is secured in interactions between people and the world;
between practices and the arrangements that make them possible. Answering this ques-
tion can show us what practice theories have to say about learning that is different from,
and in addition to, the ‘standard’ view that learning is the acquisition of knowledge. And
this is to venture further than Schatzki did when he said, tantalisingly, that ‘learning, like
life itself, transpires in the plenum of practices’ (2017, 41). Now we must look for learning
in ‘the plenum of practices’.

What practice theory offers a definition of learning: a view of learning as the

ontological transformation of practices
Kemmis and Edwards-Groves (2018, 120; see also Kemmis et al. 2014, 58), assert that
‘what we learn arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to its use in prac-
tice’. One way to re-describe this claim might be to say that knowledge comes from prac-
tice, and that the point of having knowledge won, in one way or another, from experience
is that this knowledge shapes the knower’s future practice: her future life lived in
practices.
To see learning as arising from, representing, recalling, anticipating, and returning to
its use in practices is to see learning as situated, as do Lave (2019), Lave and Wenger
(1991), Lave and Packer (2008). To my mind, seeing learning as ‘situated’ is to say some-
thing more than that it happens at some place, or in some ‘context’. It is to say that learn-
ing happens as part of the happening of the site in which it happens.12 As Schatzki (2010)
might say, learning is part of the activity timespace that unfolds in a site. Seeing learning
as situated also recognises that learning transforms not just the mind or brain of the ones
who learn, but also their bodies and being. Lave and Packer capture this beautifully when
they describe learning as a process of ‘ontological transformation’ (2008, 44). This felici-
tous description draws us back from privileging the epistemic in a definition of learning
 STUDIES IN CONTINUING EDUCATION 289

that sees it primarily or principally as the acquisition of knowledge and, instead, has us
see learning in human action-in-history: in practice.
Saying that ‘what we learn arises from, represents, recalls, anticipates, and returns to
its use in practice’ (Kemmis and Edwards-Groves 2018, 120), refuses the dualistic separ-
ation of knowledge from action. It invokes the embeddedness of knowledge in language
games and forms of life (Wittgenstein 1958, §241, 88e), and in the practices that give rise
to knowings and sayings. It invokes the embodied-ness of knowledge in practices and the
doings of the bodies that enact them. It invokes the webs of relatings – friendship, love,
solidarity, power – that are galvanised in our relatings and our moods, feelings, and
emotions as we practice, and as we relate to the web of others involved in and affected
by our practices. In doing so, it invokes the intersubjective space – or, in Schatzki’s
(2010) conceptualisation, the activity timespace – in which practice occurs.
If we take this view, then it seems to me that we cannot accept Schatzki’s (2017, 41)
conclusion that we can accept the ‘standard’ definition of learning as the acquisition of
knowledge. On the contrary, it seems to me that we might now understand learning
as coming to participate differently in practices, conceding that, while learning may
include the acquisition of knowledge, it is also more than that. More generally, we
might say, learning is a process of coming to practise differently.
Following Lave and her colleagues (Lave 2019; Lave and Packer 2008; Lave and
Wenger 1991), we might also now conclude that practising always involves learning in
the sense that we are generally ready to be open-eyed and open-minded about
whether we need to vary our practices13 in new situations, with the consequence that
sometimes our practices adapt and evolve and even emerge as new species of practices
for new or different circumstances. In this sense, practising generally involves learning.
We might nevertheless conclude that, in educational settings for example, learning is
itself sometimes regarded as a practice.14 In such cases, however, learning is still a prac-
tice of coming to participate, or participate differently, in other substantive practices.15
So: while we might concede that Schatzki is right that learning involves the acquisition
of knowledge, we might nevertheless also have to say that learning is always happening in
intersubjective space and/or the timespace of human activity, and it is happening in, and
in relation to, other practices. And practice theory has something to say about what
happens when and where learning is going on.
Lave (2019, 129–130) is emphatic about how social practice theory extends our under-
standing of learning as it happens in everyday life:
… social practice theory does not couple a social account of ongoing everyday life with a
concept of learning as mental exercise. Rather, everyday life and learning are conceived
as historically, dialectically, constitutive of each other. Everyday life and learning both
make and are made in the medium of participants’ partial participation in ongoing, chan-
ging social practice … .

In this account, learning is not movement away from the everyday, but persons in their
relations with each other moving into and through their social lives conceived as social, rela-
tional, historical processes. Knowledge, or rather knowing, is subsumed with many other
things in the everyday production of ongoing practice. Salient questions about learning
with respect to everyday life (and vice versa) focus on the ubiquitous, heterogeneous, chan-
ging relations of participation in everyday life. It is through such relations that practices,
participants, and ways of participating change – learning in/as practice.
290 S. KEMMIS

I agree with Lave that practice theory should not accept the ‘standard’ view that learning
is the acquisition of knowledge, although learning may include that. Practice theory also
throws light on how learning happens and that it happens in sites, as part of the happening
of those sites. When Lave and Packer (2008) describe learning as a process of ontological
transformation,16 it is the ontological transformation not only of the learner, but also of
the site, and the community of practice, in which learning happens.
Discussing learning as revealed in a number of ethnographies of apprenticeship, Lave
(2019, 61) writes:
The complex practices described in these ethnographies belie characterizations of appren-
ticeship as simple mechanical reproduction of craft production processes. They raise ques-
tions about the social constitution of persons and practices in historical and political-
economic terms for which social practice theory offers analytic resources.

She argues that practice theory overturns the ‘standard’ view of learning as the acqui-
sition of knowledge. At the very least, it substantially complements that view, and
perhaps remedies the defects of the ‘standard’ view, by offering theoretical resources to
show how knowledge arises from, and evolves in, particular cultural, material, and
social settings. Practice theory helps show how participants and their practices are
shaped by the always-already, historical given-ness of the arrangements found in these
settings. Practice theory shows (a) how both practices and learning are always entangled
with the concrete particularity of these arrangements, and (b) through transformation of
the arrangements that constitute the conditions of possibility for practices, learning can
transform both practices and the practice architectures that make them possible.
On this view, then, learning is more than just the acquisition of knowledge.17 Being
situated in social life, materiality and history, learning is what happens when practices
are reproduced with variation or transformed (along with their associated communities
of practice) or when new practices are produced from precursor practices.

Conclusion
In these last sections of this paper, I have referred repeatedly to how learning happens in
practices. I have referred in passing to ‘learning practices’ as the kinds of exercises under-
taken in schools and other educational settings when teachers hope students will learn
some other (substantive) practice. But this use of the term ‘learning practices’ is in my
view rather trivial. I have not, elsewhere in this paper, described learning as itself a prac-
tice. A practice theory view of learning, I have argued, can give accounts of how learning
happens by showing how it occurs when some practice or other is going through a
process of ontological transformation. But I also conclude that a practice theory view
of learning need not assert that learning itself is a practice.
Coming to this conclusion was, for me, a bit of a shock. I started my professional life as
an educational psychologist, and my passion was studying learning. In one way or
another, I seem to have been studying learning all my life.
I now conclude that a practice theory perspective on learning sees it as more than ‘the
acquisition of knowledge’ insofar as a practice theory perspective can also offer accounts
of the ontological transformations of people and practices that occur when people learn.
People do not participate in a ‘practice of learning’ to produce those ontological
 STUDIES IN CONTINUING EDUCATION 291

transformations in the practices they learn or learn to practise differently, however; the
practices we see are only the practices that are undergoing transformation. These are the
‘substantive practices’ that Kemmis et al. (2014) distinguish from the ‘learning practices’
that are the rituals, routines and exercises, or classroom games18 that teachers organise to
create conditions in which, they hope, students will learn. As I have said, I regard this use
of the term ‘learning practices’ as relatively trivial and think it should not be read to imply
that learning is itself a practice distinct from other practices.
I began this paper disputing Schatzki’s view that practice theory can accept the ‘stan-
dard’ view that learning is the acquisition of knowledge. I have argued that a practice
theory perspective allows us to give accounts of learning that show how it occurs in
the ontological transformation of people and practices. And I have come to the con-
clusion that learning itself is not a practice. Having arrived at this point, however, I
find myself suddenly closer to Schatzki’s view than I had expected when I began. Schatzki
wrote to me to say that he regarded learning as what happened when at t1 a person
doesn’t know a thing and at t2 they do know it: ‘learning’ is the name we give this
change of state. I would now expand on that formulation to say that learning has
occurred when at t1 a person can’t do some practice and at t2 they can, or, more generally,
when at t1 a person enacts a practice in one way and at t2 they enact that practice differ-
ently. In such a case, we can say that they have ‘learned’. But to say that people have
learned is not, in my view, to say that they have participated in a practice of learning,
it is merely to say that they have changed from one state to another, that their practice
has undergone a transformation. Practice theory allows us to give accounts of such trans-
formations, to show not only that knowledge is acquired in this process, but also how the
transformation of practices happens, and what else in the site – like practitioners’ iden-
tities and subjectivities,19 and communities of practice, and the sites themselves – might
be transformed by the learning that has taken place.

Notes
1. December 9–11, University of Technology Sydney.
2. I am very grateful to Ted for his comments on earlier versions of this paper. Some saved me
from egregious errors; others helped me to clarify and sharpen the differences between our
views.
3. My own view is that know-how (practical knowledge) is the primary form of knowledge,
and that people learn (a) how to go on in particular practices (know-how), (b) how to go
on in language games about particular topics (knowing that), and (c) how to go on in orient-
ing themselves in particular situations (knowledge borne of acquaintance or familiarity).
4. My dialectical view is based on cultural Marxist theorists like Althusser (1971) and Gramsci
(1971), and Larrain’s (1979) view of ideology as practice. Lave (2019) also takes a dialectical,
cultural, and historical view in her account of practices, learning, and everyday life.
5. In commenting on the manuscript of my (2019) book A Practice Sensibility, Schatzki (pers.
comm., April 29, 2019) shared some hesitations about the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ as a
key notion in the theory of practice architectures. He believes that the history of twentieth
century philosophy cautions against making the concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ central to a
theory of practice on the grounds that it yields misleading formulations about what
seems literally implied by the term, namely, that it implies ‘between subject(ivitie)s’.
Instead of ‘intersubjective space’, he thinks it would be more accurate to call the space in
which people act, interact, and carry on practices a ‘common world’ or ‘Common Space’
or ‘Public Space’. He thinks this is more compatible with a Wittgensteinian view of practices.
292 S. KEMMIS

He suggests instead a notion of ‘lives interrelatedly unfolding in a common world’.; Schatzki

recognises, however, that the term ‘intersubjective space’ has been central in my writings
with colleagues over more than a dozen years and concedes that it might be acceptable if
my colleagues and I intend that the term be understood in a looser, more encompassing
way to refer to the overlapping realms of semantic space, physical space-time, and social
space. By contrast with Schatzki’s view that the term seems to imply ‘between subjectivities’,
I intend it to refer to a space between subjects.; The space I characterise as ‘intersubjective
space’ is similar to, though not the same as, Schatzki’s ‘timespace of human activity’. In his
2010 book The Timespace of Human Activity, Schatzki draws on Heidegger’s views on being
in space and time. Moreover, Schatzki points out (pers. comm., July, 2019) that he sees time-
spaces as properties of individual lives, although they may interweave with other timespaces.
He defines activity timespace thus:
Activity timespace is a unified non-objective phenomenon: acting toward an end from
what motivates at places and paths anchored in objects. It is also, strictly, a feature of
activities and the lives these activities help make up. … [T]imespaces interweave
partly due to people carrying on the same social practices. … [I]nterwoven timespaces
form an infrastructure that runs through and is essential to social affairs. Previous
accounts of society have overlooked this essential infrastructure. … [I]nterwoven
timespaces … [contribute] to the constitution of social phenomena, including such
phenomena of perennial interest as coordinated actions, social organizations, social
systems, the interrelated spatial and temporal features of societies, and power.
(2010, p. 65)
My view of intersubjective space has been shaped by my long use of Habermas’s (1984,
1987a, 1987b) theory of communicative action, with its critique of ‘the philosophy of the
subject’ and its acute sensitivity to the ways communicative action opens communicative
space (especially in Habermas, 1996; see also 2003, 10–11).
6. In various works, Schatzki follows Wittgenstein in describing practices as composed of
sayings and doings. Kemmis et al. (2014) suggest that, to encompass the dimension of soli-
darity and power that also shapes practices, practices should be understood not only in
terms of sayings, doings, but also the relatings included in them.
7. As I will shortly argue, to speak of ‘learning practices’ in this way is not necessarily to speak
of ‘practices of learning’ or to assert that learning is itself a practice. It troubles me to con-
clude, however, that practising, which is what we frequently do when we want to acquire a
skill, might turn out not to be a practice of learning, although it is evidently a learning prac-
tice. I am grateful to Kirsten Petrie for a perplexing discussion that led me to this rather
unexpected conclusion.
8. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who reminded me that this should be made
explicit.
9. Schatzki (pers. comm., July 2019) says: ‘This sounds like there is one thing with two faces
(learning and practising). What is the one thing – living?’ This is an improvement on the
thought as I have expressed it.
10. Against this view, Schatzki (pers. comm., May 2019) argues that ‘the difference between
learning and adaptation should be respected. It is true that we are constantly adjusting
what we do to different circumstances. But this adjustment in itself is not learning – it is
adaptation’. I concede that there is a difference, especially in connotation, but, to me, learn-
ing and adaptation are grades on a spectrum: the ends of the spectrum might appear
different, but there is a sliding scale between them.
11. Schatzki (pers. comm., July 2019) rightly points out that if our learning is evident in the hap-
pening of our sayings, doings, and relatings, and in our practices, then our knowledge is also
evident in these things. I hope that the argument in the paragraphs to come gives an account
of learning that includes such happenings in addition to the fact that knowledge is acquired
by learning.
 STUDIES IN CONTINUING EDUCATION 293

12. To say that learning happens in, and as part of, the happening of a place is not to say that it is
‘in harmony’ with that other happening. It might also be to be enjoined in argument with an
interlocutor, to prevent some thing or event from happening, or to resist or reject an order
or an invitation.
13. Apropos my words ‘how we need to vary our practices’, Schatzki (pers. comm., July 2019)
wittily asks ‘Is this a being able to go on or a coming to be able to go on?’ This reprises his
view (pers. comm., May 2019) that we should respect the difference between ‘adaptation’
and ‘learning’ (see footnote 10) (or perhaps as a fresh skewering of my view that we need
not respect the difference). If we adapt, are we merely varying what we already know
(that is, not learning), or are we doing something different and (perhaps marginally) new
and thus coming to (learning) that new way of doing things? This ambiguity leads me to
the view I expressed earlier, that ‘learning’ and ‘adaptation’ are grades on a spectrum.
14. Schatzki (pers. comm., May 2019) takes issue with this view. ‘You write’, he says, ‘that learn-
ing is a practice. I would say, by contrast, that learning takes place as people act and carry on
practices, but that it itself is not a practice.
This raises an interesting point. If learning takes place as people carry on practices,
then they had to get to the point of carrying on practices in order to learn (we
assume that newborns do not carry on practices: they … have to be stirred into
them). How, then, should the process of coming to carry on practices be specified?
You might call it learning and cite this situation as part of an argument against equat-
ing learning with the acquisition of knowledge. I, by contrast, would describe this
process as Wittgenstein did – as training. That is why my [essay] concludes with a
section that discusses training. Training underlies learning.
With respect, I disagree with some of what Schatzki says here: in my view, all of our practices
grow from our grasping and sucking and squirming as newborns, and they continue to
develop and evolve throughout our lives, into the immensely diverse array of practices
that make up the repertoire of our practices as adults. As will become clear, however, I
nevertheless agree with Schatzki’s point early in this quote that learning ‘itself is not a prac-
tice’, except in the sense of the routines, rituals and exercises, or classroom games practised
by teachers, aimed at encouraging learners to learn in educational settings, which might
reasonably be called ‘learning practices’ even if, in reality, there are no such things as ‘prac-
tices of learning’ and only the ontological transformation of other, substantive practices as
we learn to participate in them, or to participate differently in them.
15. In such settings, when we say someone is ‘learning’ we are often referring to a stage in their
coming-to-be-able-to-go-on in practices at which they are not yet confident or convinced
that they actually do know how to go on in them (although, at a later stage, they may confi-
dently assert that they know that they are able-to-go-on in them).
16. Schatzki (pers. comm., July 2019) also rightly points out that ‘not all ontological transform-
ations are learning’ – the amputation of a finger, for example, or migration to a new country
or beginning work in a new workplace (although much might be learned from such onto-
logical transformations).
17. Schatzki (pers. comm., July 2019) nicely summarises our differences by considering whether
or not ‘the happening’ part of practices is needed in a definition of learning, and perhaps that
‘(1) a definition that highlights one aspect of a complex process is inadequate as a definition
and (2) a better definition would capture or refer to the entire process, i.e., “learning is being
stirred into practices”’. He nevertheless thinks ‘there is something special about “epistemic
wherewithal”’ as a feature of learning. He then puts the quandary between our views this
way:
I think we agree that a true description of what is going on that does not use the word
‘learning’ would be something like this: acquisition of knowledge results from being
stirred in to practices. [I agree – SK.] Suppose that we wanted to insert the word
‘learning’ into this description. How do we know what the word should refer to
294 S. KEMMIS

(which words it should substitute for): the acquisition of knowledge or the being
stirred in to practices? I am not sure how to answer this question. Again, it seems
that one is faced with a choice between an important aspect of the process and the
entire process.
My answer to the question is that learning refers not to either element of the description, but
to both: to put it in the terms of that description, preserving Schatzki’s emphasis on the
acquisition of knowledge, we might say that learning refers to the ‘acquisition of knowledge
[that] results from being stirred into practices’.
18. By ‘classroom games’ I mean those classroom exercises enacted by teachers to evoke learn-
ing – they may be a particular species of Wittgenstein’s (1958) language games.
19. For ‘dispositions and subjectivities’ here, read: people’s knowledge, that is, the cognitive
understandings that inform their sayings; the skills and capabilities that form their
doings; and the values, feelings, and emotions that give form to their relatings.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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