The Practice Architectures of Middle Leading

In our last blog we presented the arrangements of practice architectures that enable and constrain a practice. In this post we will go into more detail what this means for a practice and specifically a practice of middle leading. The three arrangements; cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political, can be viewed on different levels surrounding the practice in focus. To illustrate the practice of middle leading, consider a middle leader facilitating her colleagues in a preschool with the aim of raising the quality of the students’ learning and development. How her work is enabled and constrained through the practice architectures can be viewed in the following ways:

Cultural-Discursive arrangements - is about how you talk about the students’ development and learning. The discourses can be strong from a political level and can constrain the conversations among the teachers and middle leader as they might feel they have to use the right words (being politically correct or prescribed). On the other hand the middle leader might see this as enabling the practice in striving for a joint and collective language.

Material-Economic arrangements – has to do with the activity - how and where the middle leader can meet her colleagues to be able to facilitate their dialogues. To enable the practice to happen the middle leader needs time to plan the meeting beforehand and to summarise the meeting afterwards. Both the middle leader and all the teachers taking part in the meeting need time to be present. They all also need a room for their meeting and maybe other facilities (such as computers, documents papers, etc.) to discuss their on-going quality work. To make this possible this has to be discussed with the principal who can make it happen by providing time and recourses for the middle leader and the teachers to meet.

Social-Political arrangements – is about the relatings to human and artefacts. When the middle leader meets a group of teachers, professional relations are enabled among the teachers and the middle-leader through dialogue. Furthermore in the discussion there are relatings to the curriculum and other documents relevant to in the discussions as well as to other things in the site where the meeting takes place.

However in the practice of middle leading these arrangements are bundled together and not separated which we will come back to in the coming post next week.