Download Cultures of Learning or Learning of Cultures

Cultures and Learning in Further Education
Martin Bloomer University of Exeter
David James University of the West of England, Bristol
Paper presented to the British Educational Research Association Annual
Conference, University of Leeds, 13-15 September 2001
Contacts:
Dr David James
Reader, Faculty of Education
University of the West of England, Bristol
Frenchay Campus
Coldharbour Lane
BRISTOL BS16 1QY
UK
Tel. 44 (0)117 344 4215
Fax 44 (0)117 344 4150 or 344 4110
Email [email protected]
Professor Martin Bloomer
University of Exeter School of Education
Heavitree Road
Exeter EX1 2LU
UK
Tel. 44 (0)1392 264848
Email [email protected]
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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 the recent sociocultural work of James Wertsch. 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, spatial, 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 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 (John-Steiner 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.
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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 ‘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.
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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 one-sidedness, 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 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,
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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 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, is 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 (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
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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 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 spatially
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 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, 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
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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 are many 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 pointing to a small number of examples of what
we mean by ‘potential affinity’.
The first is that Wertsch argues for developing explanations that cross, link or disrupt disciplinary
boundaries, and draws on the work of other theorists who do this (see Eg Wertsch, 1998, p.5). This is
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 over-privileging 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 enigmatic 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 action. As for 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 sense here is of knowing yet acting and reacting as if we
did not.
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.
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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 fouryear 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 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’ A-level 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.
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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 mind 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 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 interrelationships 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.
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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:
1. 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;
2. 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;
3. by progressive refinement of the questionnaire, to enable relationships between intervention,
practice, culture and learning to be more readily discerned.
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 a way of talking about who that person is and
where in society they are positioned, and about 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.
10
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 Bourdieu-inspired and a sociocultural 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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