Download An analysis of proposals for the renewal of Swedish higher education

Paul Armstong
Investigating cultures of learning in higher
education: from ‘culture of poverty’ to ‘cultures of
learning’
Paul Armstrong
University of Leeds, United Kingdom
Paper presented at the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July 2006,
Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds
Introduction
This paper provides a methodological discussion to inform an ongoing project that is
currently be undertaken by the author, seeking to investigate the existence and
nature of cultures of learning within higher education. The debate itself is far from
new, but seeks to go beyond the focus on continuing disciplinary cultures within adult
and higher education. Questions about the distinctiveness of subject disciplines
have been an interest of education research, set in the context of the barriers to
effective engagement in multi-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary perspectives. The
paper briefly reviews the areas of debate, but wishes to go beyond that debate by
reflecting on methodological issues as to how to investigate these cultures of learning
if they do indeed exist. To this end, it is suggested that we turn to anthropological
methods, and the issues that this discipline has generated over many decades. In
particular, the paper proposes to re-examine the anthropological research of Oscar
Lewis, and suggests that his methodology has much to offer contemporary
educational research interested in situating the analysis in terms of its cultural
significance, but that it needs extending to recognise the value of semiotics in doing
observational research.
Debates on cultural significance
In recent years, there has been a debate about the existence of a ‘cultural turn’ in
academic theory and research. The situating and contextualising influences on
learning are by now well understood, whether in HE institutions, in community
settings or in the workplace, or through informal learning through, say, popular
culture. Neither is the possibility that higher education has different cultures of
learning is new. Indeed, the scientist turned novelist C P Snow (1959) published a
paper arguing that there were two cultures of learning in HE, sciences and the arts.
He had been pondering this cultural difference for over twenty years before he
published his paper. Now, 25 years after his death it is timely to reconsider the
debate, particularly as Tony Becher (with Paul Trowler) (2001) has revised his book
on Academic Tribes and Territories, originally published in 1989. He begins his book
by admitting in the Preface of the first edition to being irritated by C P Snow’s
polemic, seeing it as ‘superficial and conceptually flawed’. In defending Snow’s
legacy it has been said that his two major contributions have been titles of
publications: The Corridors of Power (a novel) and The Two Cultures, but little more
than that. The Two Cultures was a representation of the rift between scientists and
literary intellectuals, which Snow regretted (seeing himself as both). On the other
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hand, as a scientist, he wanted to know what the evidence was for the justification of
those claiming to be ‘intellectuals’ and questioned their right to be dismissive of
scientific writings. F R Leavis, literary critic, was particularly harsh on Snow,
especially in an article entitled ‘The Two Cultures? The Significance of C P Snow’,
which was published in The Spectator in 1962 (reprinted in 1972). He could not
understand why Snow received so much attention following the publication of The
Two Cultures. As far as Leavis was concerned, Snow’s enhanced public standing
was a ‘preposterous and menacing absurdity’, describing his work with phrases such
as ‘embarrassingly vulgar’ without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it
matters’. Snow wrote in ‘complete ignorance’ particularly of history and literature
whose ‘incapacity as a novelist is total …. He can’t be said to know what a novel is’.
The Spectator published over 30 letters attacking Leavis for his criticism of Snow.
Snow’s views on ‘culture in decline’ were similar to those expressed by Richard
Hoggart (1957) in The Uses of Literacy published around the same time.
When The Two Cultures was reprinted by Canto Books in 1964 it included some
additional material by Snow which showed that he had taken notice of the criticisms
made, and included ‘A Second Look’ and some afterthoughts. This presented a
more optimistic view, suggesting that there was emerging a ‘third culture’ which
would close the communications gap between literary intellectuals and scientists.
The question was who were the intellectuals and the scientists writing for? In a third
culture, both would be writing for an educated, intelligent public readership. It was to
be some time before scientific ideas would be communicated effectively to an
educated but non-scientific audience. Now, many scientific ideas are to be found
discussed in the popular press, on the radio and television. Science fiction has
become a popular genre in comics, books, television, film and computer games.
A more constructive debate about cultures in the higher academy has been
stimulated by Becher’s response to Snow in Academic Tribes and Territories. The
major influence on Becher’s thinking was the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, and it
was the application of anthropological concepts to an understanding of the academy
that led him to conclude that those working in different disciplines could be
understood as belonging to different ‘tribes’, each having distinctively different
cultures and ways of knowing. The book is an intellectual enquiry based on empirical
research that has been interpreted as showing the existence of distinctive cultures.
The investigation focused on how academic communities organise and deliver their
teaching and research, looking for commonalities and differences. There is also
recognition that in the same way that there is a ‘hidden curriculum’, there are
academic cultures outside the classroom and indeed outside the institution, as those
with a disciplinary cultural identity ‘talk shop’ in social as well as academic contexts.
Having an academic career reflects a set of values and commitments. One key
variable is the question of identity – do academics sees themselves as chemists,
historians, geographers, or researchers within the discipline, or teachers of subjects?
Another key variable is territory, which suggested tight boundaries around disciplines.
I have explored the idea of cultural space, both as a physical entity and a metaphor
in a recent paper (Armstrong, 2006).
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The most recent reincarnation of the debate has been referred to as the ‘cultural
turn’. The ‘cultural turn’, in at least its most recent manifestation, is often traced back
to the 1960s, and in particular to the ideas and work of E. P. Thompson (Suny, 2002)
and Raymond Williams (Brantlinger, 2002), both of whom not only worked in what we
now call lifelong learning, but have written from within, and about, that teaching
experience. What they both represent, each from a different disciplinary perspective,
are examples of those academics who recognised that history and literature had
cultural dimensions that needed to be taken into account in their analyses. For
example, Thompson’s (1963) study of labour history is now taken to be a major
contribution to the development of cultural studies, whilst Williams’s Culture and
Society (1958) focused more specifically on the socially constructed notion of culture
and its influence on the broader society. Both were, of course, British Marxists, and
this is relevant for recognising their need not only to acculturate history, but also to
historicise culture. Their work represents most clearly that the ‘cultural turn’ was not
simply a shift in their ways of seeing and knowing towards the cultural, but the
recognition that the grand narratives of their day were over-simplified, if not overdeterministic, in their analyses of the economic bases of society.
Revisiting anthropology
If one discipline ought to have recognised the significance of culture it has to be
anthropology. In my research on learning through popular culture, I have recognised
the need to understand the cultural context in a way that has the capacity to engage
with and communicate complexity, and in making sense of that, I have been drawn to
anthropological literature and ideas. Along with the many other ‘turns’, there has also
been perceived to be an ‘anthropological turn’. However, this probably preceded
many of the other ‘’turns’ in that it was seen as being responsible for the
establishment of the British Cultural Studies movement since Williams and Hoggart
were writing in the 1950s (Esty, 2004). However, it could be argued that there has
been a ‘re-turn’ to anthropology in more recent years, if only because anthropology
itself has been transformed, in recognising, and being critical of, its colonial legacies,
in rejecting its patronage through cultural imperialism and notions of western white
supremacy by the so-called ‘developed world’ over the ‘under-developed’ (Marcus,
1999).
Whilst this is evident in the realms of literature and art, the new turn to anthropology
has yet to substantially find its way into the study of education and adult learning. A
search through the British Education Index’s EducatiOn-Line, which includes all the
past SCUTREA Conference papers, suggest that anthropological perspectives on
teaching and learning have been largely neglected. In the 1970s, there were
ethnographies of the classroom (particularly in schools), but little on higher education
and, more specifically, the education of adults. Yet, coincidentally, at the most recent
AERC Conference, Plumb (2006) explored the work of Donald, Tomasello, Mithen
and Ingold as recent contributions on human learning informed by different, but
recent, anthropological perspectives. Whilst the first two came from a neo-cognitivist
approach, both recognise the significance of language, and Mithen broadens the
focus on communication to include music, and its links to mind and body. As such,
Plumb’s interest in anthropology has emerged from the work of Jean Lave. His other
anthropologist, Ingold, also links with Lave, having a particularly interest in the
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situating of cognition in thinking about learning. In also drawing from Habermas and
Heidegger, Ingold goes beyond thinking into doing. Moreover, he does so by
understanding that the two are not dichotomous, but integral to all activity. Moving
from the container metaphor of learning, Ingold borrows from Heidegger the
metaphor of dwelling and building: we are both one and at the same time dwellers
and builders for ‘to build is itself already to dwell … only if we are capable of dwelling
, only then can we build’. The renewed focus on language and metaphor in
anthropology takes us deep into the relationship between humans (dwellers) and
their social and cultural contexts which are constructed by themselves (builders).
Dwelling and building with Oscar Lewis
One of the areas that adult learning research has either directly or indirectly
gained from the anthropology is through ethnography and life history research.
As I have outlined elsewhere, the rich tradition of qualitative research originated
in anthropology, and in particular from its application to modern societies.
Through his painstaking and intensive observational and life history studies,
Lewis not only captured the lives of from non-literate peoples, to peasants to
urban dwellers, but provided insight into processes of social change and the
significance of cultures, particularly in his realisation that there were cultures of
poverty, as lived experience for those who dwelt therein. At the same time his
detailed narratives also revealed how those people’s lives were not merely
determined by their lack of access to material resources and power. This is not
to say that social and cultural structural inequalities were not important, but by
in-depth study of people living their lives in context, he understood the
significance of human agency and choice. In the introduction to The Children of
Sanchez, Lewis (1961, xiii) says
Certainly the lives of the poor are not dull. The stories in this volume reveal a world
of violence and death, of suffering and deprivation, of infidelity and broken homes, of
delinquency, corruption, and police brutality, and the cruelty of the poor to the poor.
The stories also reveal an intensity of feeling and human warmth, a strong sense of
individuality, a capacity for gaiety, a hope for a better life, a desire for understanding
and love, a readiness to share the little they possess, and the courage to carry on in
the face of many unresolved problems.’
It was this work which drew attention to what anthropologists called the ‘puzzle of
ethnographic disagreement’ (Heider, 1988), because Lewis was doing his research in
communities already study by Robert Redfield a generation earlier, and his findings
contradicted those of Redfield, drawing attention to the apparent subjectivity of
ethnography, which has kept methodologists engaged for several decades. The
idea that there is ethnographic disagreement is first of all seen as a methodological
‘problem’, set in a discourse of the possibilities of ‘right’, ‘truth’, ‘fact’. Fortunately we
have moved beyond simplistic and positivist positions, and have taken seriously the
implications of hermeneutics in research. As an anthropologist, Lewis not only found
out the cultures of the people he studied, but also gained insight into our own ways of
reflecting on culture, and how we make meanings through data collection, analysis
and in the different ways we share and disseminate our findings. Most of Lewis’s
substantial research has taken the form of storytelling. The narratives are
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reconstructed from his data collection and through the different lenses he used to
make sense of the data. Like his other books, Lewis has written his research up in
the form of a novel, using the voices of the families he chose to study, and their
differing accounts of a shared reality.
But this does not mean the idea of a culture of poverty is a mere social and cultural
construction. He says
The culture of poverty … does not include primitive peoples whose backwardness is
the result of their isolation and undeveloped technology and whose society for the
most part is not class stratified. Such peoples have a relatively integrated, satisfying
, and self-sufficient culture. Nor is the culture synonymous with the working-class,
the proletariat, or the peasantry, all three of which vary a good deal in economic
status throughout the world. (Lewis, 1961, xxv)
Rather, the culture of poverty comes into being in a variety of social, cultural
and historical contexts, often characterised by transition when one economic
system is breaking down, or as processes such as urbanisation,
industrialisation, or other technological changes are taking place. Now, whilst
he had in mind large shifts, such as feudalism to capitalism, through industrial
revolutions, such cultural changes can be impacted by a multitude of other
temporal and spatial influences. What is implicit in Lewis’s data collection and
analysis is how the people he was studying made meanings, and how he,
having collected the data and interpreted it in a meaningful way, for himself, for
those who took part in the research, and for those that shared the culture of
poverty.
Toward critical semiosis
In the final part of the paper, I want to relate this discussion of Lewis’s very valuable
anthropology to my own research project which is studying cultures of learning in
higher education. Having had experience of integrating ethnographic and life history
research, I have been reflecting on how I made sense of the data I observed and
heard. In looking at my observation notes, I have included objects that I have called
‘flip chart’, ‘whiteboard’, ‘tables’, ‘desks’, ‘chairs’. In taking notes from the
conversations taking place, I have organised them as a process, from ‘the beginning
of the class’ to the ‘end of the class’. I have noted that when the person I have called
the ‘tutor’ speaks of what will be done ‘in next week’s class’, the other people in the
‘room’ I have called a ‘classroom’ begin to put away a range of objects – pens, paper,
books – and put on their coats. The ‘end of the class’ has been signalled by the tutor
talk, combined with an awareness of ‘the time’. None of this is mysterious or
surprising; it is routine. It is part of the established routines of learning in higher
education; there are shared assumptions about what is to happen; there is an
accepted social order in place. As with ethnomethodology, there is much in the way
of taking an anthropological approach that makes the routine visible, focusing as it
does on people’s ways of doing things, including making meanings.
In doing observational research then, the researcher is interpreting or decoding
symbols and signs, and as such behind observation research there is an implicit
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semiotic analysis. Mostly ethnographers are interested in the observations rather
than in the meta-research of phenomenological analysis of making meanings.
Semiotics, whether traced back to Saussure or Charles Sanders Peirce, is an integral
part of a structural approach to the study of social order, and of course has strong
links to structuralism, and structural anthropology as established by Levi-Strauss.
The significance of a structural approach is that the interpretation of signs, symbols
and icons is patterned, and governed by rules set down in a particular social
structure. Communication through signs, including language, is not haphazard, and
to a large extent is orderly and predictable, as meanings are shared, collective
sentiments, based on either what they have in common, or how they differ.
Given this set of cultural procedures by which meaning is shared, then the
researcher of culture can utilise semiotics to undertake a deeper structural analysis
of its social and cultural contexts, including its norms – its common ways of doing, its
shared ways of knowing, underpinned by sets of shared values. Although semiotics
has largely been used as a methodology for understanding communication, and
focused on the media, its value for analysing social and cultural contexts and
processes has come to be realised through social semiotics. This departure has
placed great emphasis on agency as every person engages in ‘learning how to
mean’; they are active participants in the construction of systems of meaning, rather
than passive recipients of sets of inherited grammatical rules. As such social
semiotics is not pure theory, but is a form of social enquiry, a research methodology
appropriate for getting at latent, connotative meanings, which are never fixed, but are
constantly open to reinterpretation and the construction of new meanings. Semiotic
analysis helps the researcher ‘read the signs’ – a key process in doing observation,
and making meanings.
My approach is in agreement with Caldas-Coulthard and van Leeuwenn (2003, 3):
The ‘social’ in ‘critical social semiotics’ indicates that we are not interested in
semiotics for its own sake. We relate semiotic theory to key sociological
themes … and apply semiotic analysis to areas such as education … The
‘critical’ in ‘critical social semiotics’ … indicates that social semiotics takes part
in the enterprise of critical discourse analysis. It does not stop at description,
but analyses multimodal texts as playing a vital role in the production,
reproduction and transformation of the social practices that constitute the
society in which we live.
References
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learning?’ in M. Hagen and E. Goff (eds) The many faces of adult education.
Proceedings of the 47th Annual Adult Education Research Conference, MinneapolisSt. Paul, Mn. pp. 13-18
Becher, T (1989) Academic Tribes and Territories, Buckingham, Open University
Press/SRHE
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Becher, T and Trowler, P (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry
and The Culture of Disciplines, Buckingham, Open University Press/SRHE, 2nd. Ed.
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