Change lives otherwise: placial praxis, leading-with and educational change beyond reform

Change in schools is too often imagined as reform: linear, managerial, and deliverable. With this paper I remake change as an ethical praxis of relation. Drawing on Freire’s praxis, hooks’ liberatory pedagogy, and feminist materialist thought, I position change as something made with place, bodies, materials, and moments of rupture and pause. Grounded in practice-based action research with teachers as co-researchers, and analysed diffractively, I develop a relational account of educational change. Through action research, placemaking, care, and leading-with, I trace how change becomes noticeable, negotiated, and carried within educational life. Rather than treating impact as an outcome of reform, I understand it as a living and unfinished practice that emerges within relation, material intervention, and collective responsibility. I resist extractive models of “what works,” remaking professional practice as relational, situated, and embodied. I extend critical pedagogy by showing how practice research can generate a relational language of otherwise, offering possibilities for educators seeking to reclaim transformation from reform logics. What becomes possible is change carried through the ordinary pedagogical practices by which educational life is continually remade.