This symposium is exploring how research and theoretical recourses reveal structures that constrain, enable or force changes in educational practices. In an uncertain time, when for example democratic values are at stake in Europe, schools democratic fulfilling, and the professionals’ possibilities to explore and change their practices are fundamental. In a number of different empirical studies, across different educational settings, from preschool to higher education in Sweden, we address two fundamental questions: What is happening in this educational practice? How can we understand it? The theory of practice architectures (Kemmis & Grootenboer, 2008; Kemmis et.al, 2014) was applied to explore the educational practices and the conditions that enabled and constrained them in their sites. Practice is here understood open and changeable and are activities hanging together in time and space (Schatzki, 2002). According to the theory, practices are shaped and hold in place by three kinds of overlapping arrangements: Cultural-discursive arrangements such as how discourses and languages affect what is possible to sayin and about practice (e.g., deficit discourses, critical discourses, discipline-specific discourses, languages). Material-economic arrangements, how material, technological, financial, organisational, and other resources affect what it is possible to doin practice (e.g., buildings, schedules, workload calculators, funding). Social-political arrangements are arrangements that affect the ways in which it is possible for people to relateto others (and things and places) in practice (e.g., organisational rules, mandates, solidarities, hierarchies). In this symposium, we would like to first: present the theory and discuss it as a methodological, theoretical and analytical resource for professionals in educational settings (Nicolini, 2012), and second: discuss some of the results from the empirical cases, which highlight how practices in different ways can be understood from the lens of the theory of practice architectures e.g. how practices are hold in place from cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. How these arrangements enable and constrain practices at the site. And finally, the studies will show how the theory gives an understanding on how to be able to change practices, often in dialogue with teachers/leaders. References 890 Nicolini, D. (2012). Practice Theory, Work and Organization. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Kemmis, S., & Grootenboer, P. (2008). Situating praxis in practice: Practice architectures and the cultural, social and material conditions for practice. In S. Kemmis & T. J. Smith (Eds.), Enabling praxis: Challenges for education (pp. 37–62). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P. & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing Practices, Changing Education. Springer Verlag, Singapore. Schatzki, T.R. (2002). The site of the social: a philosophical account of the constitution of social life and change.University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.