Download Cultures of Learning or Learning of Cultures

PAPER PRESENTED TO CULTURES OF LEARNING CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY
OF BRISTOL, APRIL 2001.
Cultures of learning and the learning of cultures
David James University of the West of England, Bristol
Martin Bloomer University of Exeter
Introduction
Whilst many would agree with Bruner’s insistence that ‘learning and thinking are
always situated in a cultural setting, and always dependent upon the utilization of
cultural resources’ (Bruner, 1996, p.4), the concept of culture nevertheless has several
broad distinctive meanings (Williams, 1976), each with educational significance. This
makes the term culture both attractive and difficult to use in understanding educational
activity.
In this paper, we identify a range of understandings and uses of the concept as
revealed in contemporary research and scholarship, giving particular attention to an
approach derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and some areas of affinity this has
with recent sociocultural work. We then turn our attention to a new ESRC-funded
research project, Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education, and consider
the requirements and opportunities presented by that project for theorising a concept
of culture. We ponder the notion of ‘authentic learning sites’ and consider what it might
contribute to conceptualising the temporal, spacial, psychological and social
parameters of learning and the notion of learning culture. Finally, we present a
number of questions which we consider are worth addressing at this early stage in the
project and prior to our attempts to operationalise a concept of culture in our own
fieldwork.
Notions of culture in the study of learning
Despite objections from at least as far back as Dewey (1901), it is only recently that
criticisms of western psychology for its individualistic orientation (Rogoff, 1990) and for
its treatment of mental functioning as existing, ‘in a cultural, institutional and historical
vacuum’ (Wertsch, 1991, p 2) have been made to tell. Since the 1980s, the
essentialistic functionalism and static models underpinning cognitive psychology have
been subject to increasing critical scrutiny, principally because they emphasise
learning as a determined, individualistic cognitive process and have had little regard for
context. The old orthodoxies in which learners were treated as disconnected
knowledge-processing agents have now largely given way to ones in which learners
have moved centre stage as active knowledge-makers or constructors who bring to
their learning a wide range of social and cultural experiences.
Such a movement is noticeable in constructivism which rests upon the premise that,
‘knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject’ (von
Glasersfeld, 1989, p 182). Cognitive constructivism focuses on the development of the
cognitive schemes which make knowledge construction possible and draws
significantly from Piaget’s (1950) theory of intellectual development. It is concerned
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with the ‘progressive adaptation of individual’s cognitive schemes to the physical
environment’ (Driver, et al., 1994, p 6). However, like cognitive psychology, it is based
upon a highly individualist model of human development and offers only limited
opportunities for exploring culture.
Social constructivism has been inspired partly by the work of Vygotsky (1896-1934),
although its emphasis upon the social construction of meaning and personal
knowledge in a symbolic world suggests it draws also upon the basic organising ideas
of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. In so far as social constructivism is
built upon an understanding of social, as distinct from individual, constructions of
knowledge, it affords some scope for theorising cultural dimensions of learning.
However, it maintains in practice a conceptual dichotomy between individual activity
and social processes and fails to make explicit their dialectical interdependence (JohnSteiner and Mahn, 1996). Moreover, much of its research has been conducted within
the confines of formally designated educational programmes and institutions. For
these reasons, the capacity of social constructivism to relate questions of learning to
wider cultural concerns must be considered limited.
Vygotsky’s work on cultural-historical activity theory, emphasising as it does the
cultural context of individual meaning-making, has contributed significantly to the
recent rise of interest in culture. Activity theory, developed initially by Vygotsky (1978),
Leont’ev and Luria, claims that all activity is socially mediated and that consciousness
is located not in the head but in practice (Nardi, 1996). Moreover,
context is constituted through the enactment of an activity involving people
and artifacts … (which) carry with them a particular culture and history and
are persistent structures that stretch across activities through time and
space (Rodriguez, 1998, p 2).
The aim of activity theory is thus to deepen understanding of the dialectical relations
binding the individual and the social, cultural and historical (Bannon and Bødker,
1991). Prominent here is the work of Engeström (1987, 1990) on activity systems and
expansive learning and Cole (1988, 1996a, 1996b) on cultural diversity and cultural
psychology. Cole, for instance, argues against ‘simplified notions of context as cause’
(1996a, p 139), citing the works of Giddens on structuration, Bourdieu on habitus, and
Engeström on activity systems. He makes distinct claims upon the opportunities which
culture affords for transcending dualisms of structure and agency, and for pursuing
temporal and lateral connectivity1 :
(Culture) provides me with a unit of analysis that has natural linkages to the
macro pole of society and its institutions and the micro level of individual
thoughts and actions. … Central is the need to study culturally mediated
behavior developmentally to reveal the dynamic interactions uniting different
parts of the overall life system. Equally important is the need to conduct
research at several developmental/historical (genetic) levels in order to
analyze the ways in which they intertwine and fuse in human life over time
(Cole, 1996a, pp 143 and 145).
Other work in the field draws from social anthropology and incorporates elements of
phenomenology as well as Vygotsky’s (1981) work on psychological development and
the social construction of the mind (Leont'ev, 1981). Much of this work is referred to as
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‘sociocultural theory’ and distinguished partly by the importance it attaches to social
interaction, community and culture, and inter-relationships between learner, activity
and context. ‘Explanations of developmental coupling between persons and activities
lie within broader patterns of sociocultural change and their embodiment in activity’
(Beach, 1995, p 302). Sociocultural processes and individual functioning are
relational, existing ‘in a dynamic, irreducible tension rather than a static notion of social
determination’ (Penuel and Wertsch, 1995, p 84). Learning, in this view, is to be
understood not as acquisition but as activity contributing to change and enrichment of
the individual (Renshaw, 1992).
However, as Bereiter (1994) notes, the neo-Vygotskyists ‘are not the first to have
studied learning in its cultural milieu. Educational anthropology has done this from its
beginning’ (p 21). Bereiter claims that the distinctive contribution of recent work is its
illumination of learning and cognition outside formally prescribed learning situations.
Driven by a conception of learning as participation, and distinguished by an absence of
instructional metaphors, this work has released opportunities for theorising learning as
a social practice in a range of cultural settings. It has captured some of the
complexities of learning in ways not permitted by other approaches through such
notions as ‘situated cognition’ (Brown et al., 1989), ‘cognitive apprenticeship’ (Collins
et al., 1989; Rogoff, 1990) and ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger,
1991). These have been employed to represent individual-context relationships and
learning processes. However, while research is frequently focused on communities of
practice, such anthropology, or situativity theory, takes little account of the complex
relational and continually changing patterns of a wide range of cultural experiences as
may be relevant in particular cases.
Activity theory and sociocultural theory appear to give ample recognition to cultural
dimensions of learning. However, a number of concerns should be registered. First,
despite strong claims about dialectic relationships of individual and context, theorists
frequently fail to consider the concrete social organisation of activity. ‘In the field of
cultural psychology it is exceedingly rare to find a concrete discussion of culture … It
is even less usual to find cultural psychologists connecting … features of a social
system in a meaningful way to psychological phenomena’ (Ratner, 1996, p 2).
Second, while there has been, following Scribner (1984), significant work focused upon
learning in the workplace and other naturalistic settings, much research in the field
centres upon classroom- or other institution-based interactions between teachers and
learners. This latter work ‘obscures the broader cultural and political concerns that are
central to the perspective’ (Renshaw, 1992, p 1). Third, the primary concerns of many
theorists in the field are with the development of mind and higher psychological
functions, giving rise to an ‘imbalance’ in the individual-culture dialectic. This onesidedness, or mentalist tendency, has been noted by a number of critics including
Ratner (op cit.). Packer (1993), for instance, has criticised sociocultural theory’s use of
the concept of ‘internalization’, claiming that it promotes a dualism between the internal
and the external: ‘the processes and mechanisms being examined keep creeping back
inside the head’ (John-Steiner and Mahn, 1996, p 197).
There is evidently a wide range of interpretations and applications of activity theory
and, while a regard for the cultural-historical dynamics of sociocultural processes and
for the individual-context dialectic is evident in some works, others display a marked
mentalist tendency or a failure to relate the complexities of learning to their wider
cultural contexts. Similarly, educational anthropology, or situativity theory, claims
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learning to be a culturally situated phenomenon. However, not only do studies
frequently portray learners as somewhat passive, guided by ‘experts’ or ‘masters’ with
little regard for their active construction of knowledge (Hughes and Greenhough,
1998), they take little account of the complex relational and continually changing
patterns of cultural experience.
While many such theoretical approaches may be criticised for understating the
significance of culture, the anthropological works of such figures as Geertz, Schneider
and Sahlins have been criticised for their heavy reliance upon cultural explanations to
the exclusion of other possibilities. At the end of his comprehensive tour of the
anthropological uses of culture, Adam Kuper argues that whilst these works do
constitute a “success story”, the various “critical experiments in cultural determinism …
fail when they overreach themselves and presume that culture rules, and that other
factors can be excluded from the study of cultural processes and social behaviour”
(Kuper, 1999, p. 246). Extending an argument from the cognitive anthropologist
D’Andrade, Kuper wants us to consider the “pieces” of culture and their “relations to
other things”, rather than expecting cultural explanations to be sufficient.
Kuper mentions both Foucault and Bourdieu as theorists who insist on “relations with
other things” (such as power, or institutions) in this connection. But what notion of
culture is to be found in Bourdieu’s writing, and what sorts of relations does it give us
cause to attend to, especially if we wish to study something as diverse as learning?
Bourdieu and culture
Bourdieu’s notion of culture grows from a critical position in relation to the
anthropological
heritage (Bourdieu, 1977). It refuses to come down on the side of either subjectivist or
objectivist readings:
There is a continual dialectic between objectivity and subjectivity. Social
agents are incorporated bodies who possess, indeed, are possessed by
structural, generative schemes which operate by orienting social practice.
This, in a nutshell, is Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Practice, the dynamic of
which is probably better captured by the word praxis, is a cognitive
operation; it is structured and tends to reproduce structures of which it is a
product. We are, of course, not simply repeating actions endlessly.
Evolution and change in practice do occur. However, it comes about, not so
much through the replication of action but its reproduction. Reproduction
implies both variation and limitation in what is and is not possible in the
behaviour, thought and physical action of people (Grenfell and James,
1998, p 12).
A range of conceptual tools are on offer to help us investigate the social world within this
theory of practice, which also claims to be a theory-as-method. They include habitus
and field: the former, a durable but transposable set of dispositions, representing the
physical and mental embodiment of the social but at the same time offering choices,
played out in what Bourdieu terms strategy; the latter, a structured system of social
relations at micro and macro level, rather like a field of forces in which positions are
defined relationally, that is, in relation to each other. Usually there are particular and
discernable forms of capital at stake in a field, commonly economic, social or cultural or
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some combination of these. Conceptual tools such as these provide the researcher with
a “way of thinking and a manner of asking questions” (Mahar et al, 1990, p.3) and
promise to help them avoid constructing reified ‘types’ and ‘categories’ in the way that
much social science does (talking of “the adult learner”, “the mature student” or “the
disaffected learner” and the like). Bourdieu's approach holds out the possibility of
producing descriptions, explanations and understandings of complex social practices
without reducing them to either mentalistic or social variables. It also counsels against
the tendency to obscure social practices by seeing them only as manifestations of a
particular theory or model (e.g., rational choice theory): to do so is, in Bourdieu's terms,
to confuse “the model of reality with the reality of the model”. The approach is
furthermore characterised by a radical notion of reflexivity, wherein the background and
interests of the investigator, and in particular their relation to the object of study, are of
primary concern.
Bourdieu insists that he has absolutely no wish to be part of abstract “theoretical”
discussions that are detached from the world of practice (see for example Bourdieu,
1989, p 50). He argues that his approach is a theory-as-method, and only makes sense
in relation to empirical matters. It may be helpful at this point to describe an example of
the sort of analysis that emerges when some part of the social world is examined via
this approach. Let us mention one that is not our own.
In a recent article entitled Bourdieu, social suffering and working class life, Simon
Charlesworth provides a very good illustration of what can be done to illuminate what
some might describe from its outward signs as “the culture of poverty”. Charlesworth’s
account is based on interpretations of a series of direct quotations from some of the
poorest people in Rotherham in the UK. What comes across very clearly is the mutual
accommodation of habitus and field (though Charlesworth uses Merleau-Ponty’s closely
related notion of primacy of perception to emphasise the notion of a “horizon” (cf.
horizons for action in Hodkinson et al, 1996).
Having suggested that an economic and social “levelling” has occurred (which we take
to mean in the sense that a bomb might be said to “level” a building), accompanied for
these people by a profound sense of vulnerability and insecurity, Charlesworth
continues:
A peculiar effect of domination is that many of the most dispossessed seem
unaware of the extent to which their life is circumscribed by such conditions.
Conditions of dispropriation mean that people do not have access to the
resources; the instruments through which their understanding might begin to
constitute a concrete sense of the limits of life and, paradoxically, the more
fully the limits of life enforce themselves, the more powerfully people
inscribe a sense of this life as the only life possible…there can be little
incentive, (there could be no interest) in developing other forms of
consciousness beyond those of the ‘mindless’ everyday coping skills
through which it makes sense to live such conditions. To begin to develop
forms of consciousness that make the world consciously problematic,
something to be thought about; to move away from the efficiency of habits
attuned to life in this world would be to invite a slide from semi-conscious
frustration to absurdity and transform ordinary unhappiness into misery.
Living life in the context of minimal expectations, the only strategy that
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makes practical sense is to maintain an ignorance of anything better, to kill
one’s hopes (Charlesworth, 2000, p 54).
This argument, amply supported by data, is not to be read as yet another form of
cultural determinism. The people Charlesworth interviewed all have and make
choices, all make decisions, all function as agents. The point is that they do so from a
habitus, i.e. within a sense of reality or a sense of limits, which for the most part is not
experienced as “constraint”; and that these limits are socially located and reproduced,
not least (though not only) by their own actions. Evidence of the dynamic nature of this
mutual adjustment of habitus and field may be seen a further example of
Charlesworth’s data. A man who had lost his job a short time earlier described how
hard it was to cope initially, but how after a while “yer brain starts to work differently”,
quite separately from any self-willed response. We may be tempted to describe this as
nothing more than a lowering of expectations, though if we do we are forcing the issue
back into the realm of the individual and their personality. In fact much more is being
suggested here: a re-adjustment that is experienced as automatic and which cannot be
adequately characterised as either conscious or unconscious (perhaps it is both), and
the reproduction of a category and the sets of possibilities that accompany particular
positions in a field of (un-)employment. Bourdieu’s term for this is “the subjective
expectation of objective probability”, or ontological complicity. One of the authors
investigated similar adjustments in a very different setting (i.e., a group of mature
students in higher education), with people whose access to material and other
resources puts them worlds apart from Charlesworth’s interviewees. These people
experienced dramatic positive and negative shifts in their sense of self-worth which
appeared to be related to (but seemed completely out of proportion with) shifts in the
distribution of the capital at stake in that particular field, namely grades on assessed
work (see James, 2000).
There are three points we would like to take from the brief presentation of these
examples. Firstly, we would advocate great caution is necessary in the way that we
interpret even quite established concepts (such as the distinction between conscious
and unconscious, or “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” motivation, or concepts like
“internalisation”). These concepts, and their paradigmatic illustrations, may be useful,
but they are to be appreciated in relation to the scientific communities and interests
that produced them and are not to be granted an automatic authority. The related idea
that we are adding to a body of knowledge about learning in some simple cumulative
sense is clearly problematic.
Secondly, we suggest that a study of learning must focus not simply upon temporally
or spacially prescribed learning sites categorised in terms of institutions, curricula,
subjects and timetables (e.g., college; Advanced GNVQ; engineering; Thursdays,
3.00-4.30pm), and which dominate in the popular discourse, but upon authentic
learning sites. Authentic learning sites include, potentially, much of what is recognised
in formally prescribed learning opportunities, but they also include much that is not
prescribed such as home, peer group and personal relations, accidents, career and
other aspirations, and even sleep. They are endowed with meaning – the meanings,
sometimes idiosyncratic and sometimes shared, that individuals bring to their learning
and that they construct and re-construct in the course of their learning. They are
‘elastic’ and vary not only from individual to individual, but even in an individual case,
from moment to moment. Moreover, they are situated within wider social, cultural,
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economic, political and moral networks and have to be understood in terms of such
situativity. The authentic learning site, so described, is the learning culture.
Thirdly, we would suggest that research and scholarship must recognise learning not
simply as occurring within a cultural context but as a cultural practice. It must take as
its focus the practices of people in their authentic learning sites and avoid the alchemy
that so readily turns students and teachers into instances of a category, into a species,
or alternatively has them as the mere carriers of cultures or cognitive operations. The
habituses of both learners and teachers will be important to an understanding of
learning sites and activities and of what happens (or does not happen) within them.
Finally, it is worth noting that there seem to us to be a number of points of potential
affinity between a general approach informed by Bourdieu, and some recent
sociocultural thinking. In his recent work James Wertsch (1996, 1998) presents
arguments about both the need for a refined sociocultural approach and what might
constitute its primary concerns. Whilst there is not the space here for a detailed or
comprehensive treatment of this general point, it is nevertheless worth mentioning a
small number of examples of what we mean by “potential affinity”.
The first is that Wertsch argues that there is a pressing need to develop explanations
that cross, link or disrupt disciplinary boundaries, and draws on the work of other
theorists who do this (e.g. Wertsch, 1998, p. 5). This is also characteristic of
Bourdieu's approach. Secondly, and citing Norbert Elias amongst others, Wertsch
reminds us of the need for an end to counterproductive oscillations between overprivileging either the individual or society in our accounts of social action: we have to
find ways to “live in the middle … of several different analytic perspectives” (Wertsch,
1998, p 16). Mediated action should be the focus, and this is irreducible to either pole
of the dichotomy. Though he arrives having taken quite a different route, Bourdieu’s
social theory presents us with a similar lesson. Thirdly, Wertsch draws on both Dewey
and Kenneth Burke to argue that the theorist should offer a method rather than a set of
representations of reality: in other words, he argues for a theory-as-method. To this
end he presents Burke's pentad of generating principles around action (Act, Scene,
Agent, Agency and Purpose) and the accompanying argument that all need
addressing without any being overemphasised. Furthermore, Burke recognised that
we cannot be all-knowing, and that
…there must remain something essentially engimatic about the problem of
motives, and that this underlying enigma will manifest itself in inevitable
ambiguities and inconsistencies among the terms for motives. Accordingly, what
we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the
strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise (Burke, 1969, p xviii,
quoted in Wertsch, 1998, p 15).
Fourthly, Wertsch is interested in exploring the interplay of “constraint” and
“affordance” of action by the available cultural tools, and linked to this the way in which
people do not for the most part experience constraints as constraints. He suggests
that there is an “illusion of perspective” around cultural tools in a time and a place,
such that they seem “timeless and natural” (Wertsch, 1998, p. 45). For Bourdieu, both
habitus and strategy are at issue in social practices, the one referring to an embodied
social location (position) which gives a sense of reality and limits (disposition), the
other referring to the myriad choices we all have all the time for choosing a course of
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action. As for an illusion of perspective, Bourdieu’s notion of meconnaisance
(misrecognition) refers to a similar, though sociologically framed point, in that (for
example) differences between educational institutions, courses or qualifications are for
the most part ignored in terms of the social (class) differentiation that they reproduce.
This is not quite as straightforward an idea as “illusion”, though has parallels with the
illusion we enjoy when watching a conjurer sawing a person in half: Bourdieu’s term
implies a sense of “knowing whilst acting and reacting as if we did not know”.
It is our view that an approach to the study of learning that is informed by Bourdieu’s
theory-as-method can give appropriate attention to culture and that it will allow us to
arrive at new understandings of learning in authentic sites. We would also suggest
that such an approach has some interesting and potentially fruitful affinities with some
sociocultural work.
Transforming learning cultures in further education
The Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (FE) or TLC project was
announced in September 2000 as part of the ESRC-funded Teaching and Learning
Research Programme. It is a four-year longitudinal study which is expressly focused
upon learning in authentic settings sites with particular regard to the cultural
experiences of the learners concerned. The aims of the project are threefold:
(i)
to deepen understanding of the complexities of learning;
(ii)
to identify, implement and evaluate strategies for the improvement of learning
opportunities; and
(iii)
to set in place an enhanced and lasting capacity among practitioners for
enquiry into FE practice.
The research will entail an intensive examination of educational practice, learning and
learning cultures. It will be based upon a partnership between four universities and
four FE-sector colleges from the North, Midlands and South of England. It will entail
close collaboration between FE- and university-based researchers and FE teachers,
students and managers and will be integrated with existing communities of practice.
Because of this, it is expected that it will impact strongly upon the practices of those
involved.
A key aspect of the authenticity of learning sites to be addressed is the complexity of
relationships between teachers, teaching, learners, learning, learning situations and
the widest contexts of learning. In the TLC project, we attach importance to the term,
‘culture’, to indicate these complex relationships and we aim to discover, within a
variety of settings, what a culture of learning is.
The project design is based upon a ‘nested case study’ approach, since it is in cases
that the full complexity of the inter-relationships of the FE learning field can be most
readily identified. The cases will be chosen at two levels of scale. At the first level,
four case study FE colleges have been selected and the design of the project
negotiated with their key staff. The colleges are of different types, serving different
catchment areas, in different parts of England. Each college is a field in its own right,
and there are some common institutional positions, relations and procedures. A
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comparison between the four, supplemented by the investigation of the national
historical, social, economic and political contexts of FE, will give a clear understanding
of the ways in which the national FE field impacts upon the practices of tutors and
students in the college cases.
At the second level, within each college, four learning sites have been chosen,
providing 16 across the whole project. They have been selected to cover the widest a
range of learning situations, circumstances and learners possible. Variables
considered in their selection have been: mode of attendance on college course, level
of ability/qualification, academic and vocational subjects, locations (such as
classrooms, workshops, outreach, workplace, distance learning, e-learning), student
populations (considering class, gender, age and ethnicity) and tutor backgrounds
(including gender, age, ethnicity, experience). In addition to the more ‘mainstream’ Alevel and vocational course students, the sites include adult returners to learning in the
form of Access students, 14-16 year-old vocational studies pupils, those on
occupationally-specific day-release programmes (working for first or second level NVQ
qualifications or Higher National Diplomas), students on a ‘young mothers’ programme,
and distance learners studying independently or on ‘outreach’ community education
programmes. Each will be studied in relation to its college context, within the wider
national situation already referred to.
The notion learning culture is broader and more ‘elastic’ and complex than that of
learning site alone. We intend to use the term, learning culture, to include the time and
space within which learning occurs and, also, those persons or material conditions
whose presence impinges upon learning whether they are the subject of formal
prescription or not. It thus includes conventional class meetings of recognised student
groups and their tutors, but it may also include work experience, private study,
recreation, family life, personal relationships and other cultural experiences. But, as
we have already said, learning cultures consist of shared and contested meanings
whose perpetual evolution lies at the very heart of learning processes.
By building the TLC project around a notion of learning culture, we hope to be able to
move beyond that popular conception of learning as an activity that is bounded by
teaching, educational institutions and learning prescriptions, to one which recognises
that learning invariably transcends such boundaries. We have alluded already to the
‘lateral connectivity’ of learning, namely that it relates to phenomena whose physical
existence lies well outside formally prescribed learning environments and may include
parents, friends, community, personal aspirations and opportunity structures, identity,
vocational intentions, personal relationships and a host of other considerations. We
have also mentioned its ‘temporal connectivity’: how one set of learning experiences
connect with others that precede or follow it (Bloomer, in press). Both of these notions
will need to be borne firmly in mid if we are to exploit the full potential of our concepts
of authentic learning site and learning culture. Moreover, as recent research in
neuroscience reminds us, learning is not necessarily a conscious activity and occurs
even during sleep (Maquet et al, 2000).
Our work with each of the 16 learning sites will focus on a particular class or group of
learners and their interactions with each other and with their participating tutor. The
tutor will be a partner in the research process, and will keep a detailed field diary of
her/his relevant activities and observations for the duration of the research. Six
students from each site will be selected for detailed study. They will be chosen to
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represent the range of students normally encountered in that particular site, paying
careful attention to gender, social class, ethnicity, age (in a mixed age group) and prior
educational attainments. They will be volunteers, prepared to share in the activity of
the project. Tutors and the selected students will all be interviewed twice a year for
three years or for the duration of their engagement in the case study group. In
addition, students will be interviewed on one further occasion, several weeks after they
have left. We anticipate an interview sample of between 12 and 24 students for each
site and an overall sample for the project of approximately 240. This cohort approach
will allow longitudinal change in learning and in dispositions to learning to be mapped.
The interviews will be semi-structured, balancing commonality across the project with
opportunities to investigate the particular interests and circumstances of the subjects.
Interviews will explore dispositions to learning and will include respondents’ accounts
of recent learning experiences, their views of what constitutes effective or desirable
learning, and their future hopes and intentions. They will also encourage respondents
to make reference to their lives beyond their college programmes, enabling learning
and learning cultures to be examined in relation to a wide range of human
experiences.
Interviews will be supplemented by observations of learning and teaching. These will
follow a common schedule, but with flexibility to fit divergent situations, and will be
carried out twice a term for three years. The prime focus of these observations will be
the learning activities undertaken, and the inter-relationships among students and
between students and tutor. Observations will incorporate informal discussions with
tutors and students, and participation in activities where appropriate. Though notes
will be made during the observed sessions, key data recording will be carried out
immediately after the observation is completed. Observations and interviews will be
methodologically linked. Insights gathered from observations, as they concern
individual cases, will be used in the planning of subsequent interviews with those
individuals. At the same time, interviews will be used to alert observers to issues that
they might take into account in later observations.
The project will also include an annual questionnaire survey of all students located in
the 16 learning sites. Half of the questionnaire sample will figure in the interview
sample and half will not, thus enabling comparisons between those two sub-groups to
be made. The questionnaire will be developed and piloted during the six-month
preparation phase of the project and has three linked purposes:
to indicate changes in students’ dispositions that may occur over time,
enabling
those changes to be examined in the light of changes in tutors’ and others’
practices;
(i)
(ii)
to allow the smaller sample of interviewed students to be grounded within the
population from which they are drawn, enabling quantitative data to illuminate
the qualitative material and vice versa;
(iii)
by progressive refinement of the questionnaire, to enable relationships
between
intervention, practice, culture and learning to be more readily discerned.
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There are no precedents for a study of learning in authentic settings in FE that remains
empirically grounded and which addresses the cultural complexity of learning. Work of
this type requires an enabling theoretical approach that will provide methodological
focus without a premature ‘closing down’ of analytical possibilities. To this end, the
project will make heuristic use of the concepts and approaches developed in the work
of Bourdieu, described above. There are four principal reasons for this choice, as
follows.
Firstly, Bourdieu’s theory-as-method offers researchers a relational approach to
educational problems that emphasises the mutual interdependence of social constraint
and individual volition, or ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. Social practices are understood as
having both an objective and a subjective reality at one and the same moment.
Complex human relations and activities can be understood via theoretical tools such
as habitus and field that enable the ‘unpacking’ of social practices in social spaces.
Habitus and field are mutually constituting, a point of considerable practical importance
to the way that the actions of tutors, students and others are studied and understood.
Secondly, a Bourdieuian approach necessitates working across discipline boundaries
and challenges researchers to think in new ways about familiar variables and the
disciplinary location of these variables. An example of this is the challenge the
approach presents to the common-sense distinction between conscious and
unconscious sources of motivation.
Thirdly, the approach promotes a robust form of reflexivity of sufficient strength for the
goals of the project, for example drawing attention to the relative social positionings of
researchers and those they study and the implications of this for knowledge
generation.
Fourthly, there is evidence that Bourdieu’s ‘theory-as-method’, and in particular the
stance it promotes in relation to culture, can bring fresh insight to bear on the
understanding of educational issues and settings (Grenfell and James, 1998).
Bourdieu emphasises the relationship between disposition and position (Bourdieu and
Passeron, 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). A person’s habitus is influenced by
who the person is and where in society they are positioned, and by their interactions
with others. The project will examine the ways in which students and tutors interact
with each other, centring upon the actual learning activities undertaken. But it will also
examine wider aspects of interaction, in settings beyond those formally designated for
learning. Findings from learning sites will be compared in order to illuminate features
that are common across most or all of them, the nature of any differences between
them, and the reasons for such similarities and differences.
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Conclusion: some pertinent questions
Our TLC project has been designed with a certain view of culture in mind. It has also
been designed on the basis of a number of assumptions about how learning might
usefully be theorised. But it has in addition been designed to allow our
conceptualisations of culture, learning and educational practice to be further developed
and refined. Thus, we expect that the early phases of the project will result in some
clarification or modification of our initial ideas and standpoints.
It is therefore important that, throughout, we retain an open mind about theoretical
possibilities and opportunities and it is in such a spirit of ‘open-mindedness’ that we
present this paper. Thus, we have chosen to conclude with a set of questions around
which we hope further discussion will take place.
1. In so far as we have described ‘cultures of learning’ here, how adequate or
complete do you consider those descriptions to be?
2. How might our use of the notion of ‘authentic learning site’ be usefully developed,
given our interests in gaining access to learning cultures?
3. What scope is there for exploring the apparent synergy between a Bourdieuinspired and a socio-cultural approach to culture?
4. Are the strategies that we have in mind for the TLC project adequate for the
purposes of uncovering and deepening understanding of cultures of learning?
Notes
[1]
‘Connectivity’ concerns, firstly, how activity connects (laterally) with context and
with the life experiences of the actors concerned and, secondly, how it connects
(temporally) with those experiences and activities which precede or follow it (see
Bloomer, in press).
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Addresses for Correspondence
David James,
Faculty of Education,
University of the West of England, Bristol,
Redland Campus,
Bristol, BS6 6UZ, UK
Tel: 0117-344 4215
e-mail: [email protected]
Martin Bloomer
University of Exeter School of Education,
Heavitree Road,
Exeter,
Devon, EX1 2LU, UK
14
Tel: 01392-264848
e-mail (until September 2001): [email protected]
(from September 2001): [email protected]
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