EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH
IN
EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE:
THE PROMISE OF THE
TRANSFORMING LEARNING CULTURES IN
FURTHER EDUCATION (TLC) PROJECT
by
Martin Bloomer, University of Exeter
and
David James, University of the West of England
Paper presented at the 5th Annual Conference
of the Learning and Skills Development Agency
5th - 7th December 2001
Robinson College, Cambridge
Correspondence:
Professor Martin Bloomer, Dr David James,
University of Exeter School of Education, Faculty of Education,
Heavitree Road, University of the West of England, Bristol,
Exeter, Frenchay Campus,
DEVON, EX1 2LU. BRISTOL, BS16 1QY.
Tel.: 01392-264848 Tel.: 0117-344-4215
Fax.: 01392-264950 e-mail:
e-mail:
TLC PROJECT WEBSITE: www.ex.ac.uk/education/tlc
EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH IN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE
Introduction
The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), notably through its Teaching and Learning Research Programme, has laid strong claims to the benefits of research which leads to an enhancement of research capability. What it has not done is to make explicit what those benefits might be or how they might be achieved.
The authors, with three others[1], are the directors of the ESRC-funded project, Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC project). Among the aims of that project is the development of a lasting capacity among practitioners for enquiry into FE practice. To achieve this, the project team will first have to formulate a clear understanding of what educational practice is and, second, a view of the place of research in the support of that practice.
This paper briefly describes the TLC project and then addresses three specific issues. Firstly, it distinguishes notions of educational practice, ranging from those embedded in the dominant rationalist discourses of the day, emphasising standards-raising, retention and efficient curriculum ‘delivery’, to those which claim that practice is an accomplishment by all who engage in it and that ‘thinking teachers’ and ‘thinking students’ have some part to play in the making, rather than simply the taking of curriculum. Secondly, it examines opportunities afforded by different approaches to researching educational practice. Thirdly, it returns to the central question concerning relationships between educational research, educational practice and professional, as distinct from technical, development.
The paper argues that educational interests are best served by research in rather than simply on educational practice. Research in practice, properly construed and accomplished, offers practitioners a means of developing understandings of their practices and it is such understandings which are central to processes of achievement, enhancement and change in educational practice.
Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education
The 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 focused upon learning with particular regard to the cultural experiences of the learners and teachers concerned. One of the innovative features of the project is that it is based upon a partnership between FE and HE which enables FE staff not only to participate in and help shape research into their own practice, but to develop research expertise of their own. The project is unique in having secured research council funding for such an operation and is the first major funded research project of its type in the sector.
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 project seeks to achieve its aims through a partnership between ten staff from four universities and twenty staff from four FE colleges.[2] Within each of the colleges, four specific ‘sites’ of learning have been chosen to reflect as wide a range of learning situations and circumstances as possible. At the time of writing, the selection includes learners engaged in programmes of community education, work-based training, engineering for the unemployed, basic skills education, and support for young mothers’ re-engagement with FE. Some programmes are located in FE colleges while others are based more in the community or workplace. Less than half of the learners are 16-19 year-olds attending full-time A-level or vocational courses. Many are part-timers, aged 14 to 99+, attending workshops, learning centres or conventional classes.
But ‘learning site’ is not simply another term for ‘group’, ‘class, or ‘course.’ We use learning site to allow us to think and work outside the temporal, spacial, institutional and psychological boundaries and structures which dominate in popular discourse and thinking about learning. We wish to move beyond the notion that institutions, prescribed curricula, subjects and timetables are the sole, or essential means, of locating where, when, what and how learning takes place. Such prescriptions may have an important bearing on learning but they do not describe it. Sites of learning, in practice, are never contained within the boundaries of formally prescribed learning opportunities. Regardless of where it might be stimulated, learning relates to (impacts upon, continues in and is affected by) family life, peer and personal relationships, recreation, private contemplation, sleep, accidents, work, career and other aspirations and a wide range of cultural experiences.
Learning sites are also endowed with meanings – sometimes stable, sometimes contested, sometimes idiosyncratic and sometimes shared – that individuals bring to their learning and that they construct and reconstruct in the course of their learning. Moreover, they are situated within wider social, cultural, economic, political and moral networks and have to be understood in terms of that situativity. Meanings and situativity change, not only between learning sites but from individual to individual and, in the individual case, from moment to moment. It is for these reasons that we have adopted ‘learning cultures’ as our unit of analysis; it is more elastic and provides more readily for complexity than does learning site alone. Learning culture includes the time and space within which learning occurs; it includes the persons or material conditions whose presence impinges upon learning; and it includes the meanings that are continually acted-out and transformed in the course of learning. The fact that learning cultures consist of shared and contested meanings whose perpetual evolution lies at the very heart of learning processes will help ensure that our research treats learning as a dynamic, relational and interactive process (James and Bloomer, 2001).
Our work with each of the 16 learning sites focuses on groups of learners and their interactions with each other and with their tutors. Tutors are partners in the research process, and keep logs of relevant activities and observations for the duration of the research. Tutors and students are interviewed at regular intervals, allowing us to monitor changes in learning cultures and in dispositions to learning. They are asked to give accounts of recent learning experiences, their views of what constitutes effective or desirable learning, and their future hopes and intentions. In particular, they are encouraged 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. Observations of group meetings and a questionnaire survey are also carried out.
Notions of Educational Practice
Practices are not simply prescribed; nor are they stable. They are marked by both continuity and change, and individuals inherit and reproduce elements of them whilst also bringing their own ‘slants’ to bear. ‘A practice exists whenever a more or less settled body of activities is carried on to some distinctive end’ (Golby and Parrott, 1999, p 3). In interpreting such a statement, three questions need to be addressed:
(i) around what values, beliefs and principles has the ‘body of activities’ become
settled;
(ii) what are the means by which the ends will be achieved; and
(iii) what are the ends in question?
In the case of educational practice, it is possible to discern a number of continuities, each bound up with its distinct ideology. For present purposes, we shall confine ourselves to a brief description of just three. The first, liberal humanism, rests upon the assumption that a ‘rounded’ education should expose the learner to the range of ‘forms of thought’ of which the mind is constituted (Hirst, 1965). This tradition is rooted in the practices of secondary and higher education and is clearly discernible in the knowledge-centred curriculum of GCSE and A-level programmes today. The second, progressivism, is nowadays frequently referred to as student-centred to indicate that the what and how of learning are determined by the ‘needs’ of self-motivated learners in the course of their natural development. Progressivism is often traced to the eighteenth century French philosopher, Rousseau, and the basic ideas are evident in much contemporary primary education in the UK and the West. It was progressivism which underpinned the BTEC commitment to ‘learning-by-doing’ and ‘assignment-based learning’ and it is evident in post-16 education today in as much as students are required to exercise discretion over their own learning. The third tradition is the ‘technical rational’, where the emphasis is upon solutions rather than upon the processes by which solutions might be found. This utilitarian view gained prominence in the elementary school of the late-Victorian period where the basic requirement was that learners should be able to read, write, calculate and observe the scriptures. Questioning the philosophical underpinnings of literature or the scriptures was actively discouraged, while there was little attempt to engage the mind with the concept of number. To achieve its ends, the technical rational approach typically breaks complex knowledge down into constituent parts and has the learner learn, rehearse and reproduce knowledge in more-or-less the form it was consumed. Such was the requirement for learning multiplication tables and the Lord’s Prayer: whether or not some deeper understanding fell into place at a later stage was in many cases a matter of chance. Technical rationalism is apparent in post-16 education today in as much as students are enabled or encouraged to amass disaggregated information in preparation for testing. (For further discussion of these points, see Bloomer, 1997 and Hyland, 1994.)
These basic distinctions, or traditions, are helpful in locating different patterns of educational practice. However, practices are also shaped by the values, beliefs and expectations that individual members bring to their situations. These are likely to include beliefs about knowledge and learning, political and moral values relating to the purposes and place of education, work and vocation, and expectations concerning the feasibility of certain educational aspirations. Thus, a particular practical case may be understood as a momentary settlement in the dialectal interplay of forces of structure (in the form of tradition) and agency (in the form of individual values, beliefs and expectations). The ‘body of activities’ which constitutes the practice is never to be taken as uncontentious; it is continually contested.
The second and third questions raised above, concerning means and ends, can be dealt with fairly straightforwardly. For the purposes of this discussion, we wish to present two ‘ideal types’ (Weber, 1949) of educational practice. (Ideal types are attempts ‘to render subject matter intelligible by revealing its internal rationality’ (Aron, 1967, p 207) rather than grounded categorisations which are perfect representations of empirical reality. ‘The ideal type involves the accentuation of typical courses of conduct … (and) never corresponds to concrete reality but always moves at least one step away from it’ (Coser, 1971, p 223).) The two that we wish to consider here are the ‘technical’ and ‘practical’ ideal types of educational practice.
The technical draws heavily from the ideas already presented under the discussion of technical rationalism. Its ends are technical control of the natural world, the pursuit of which Jurgen Habermas calls the technical interest. The means by which such ends are achieved are those of instrumental action ‘governed by technical rules based upon empirical knowledge’ (Habermas, 1971, p 91). Thus, as Grundy (1987, p 12) succinctly puts it, ‘the technical interest is a fundamental interest in controlling the environment through rule-following action based upon empirically grounded laws.’ Knowledge is therefore deemed unproblematic under this ideal type. Theory is considered either to be irrelevant to practice or to be the foundation of unchallengeable prescriptions for action. In its crudest forms, complex knowledge is stripped of any unifying theory and reduced to manageable proportions, or ‘bite-sized chunks of information’. This enables assessment and monitoring to be tightly structured around highly explicit prescribed criteria. It allows teaching to be reduced to ‘delivery’ and learning to ‘consumption’; ‘good teaching’ and ‘good learning’ become unambiguously ‘efficient delivery’ and ‘efficient consumption’. Problems are therefore the results of inefficiencies and can be corrected only by the tighter application of (universal) rules of procedure. Such are the conditions under which teachers maximise control over learning and policymakers maximise control over teachers. In so far as the duty of teachers is essentially the application of rules, educational practice is a technical activity.
The practical is a little more complex. The ends of practical activity are to be seen in terms of understanding the natural world and, linked to this, the emancipation of the individual from such external constraints as bear upon them. Habermas (1972) presents understanding and emancipation as separate ‘interests’ and this distinction is maintained by many contemporary scholars. However, understanding is a prerequisite of emancipation and, to simplify matters, we have chosen to draw them into one ideal type. Our practical type is therefore a broad category whose ends include, minimally, the deepening of understanding and, potentially, some degree of emancipation. The means of practical activity are those of interpretation (for understanding) and self-reflection (for emancipation). Knowledge is, therefore, highly problematic under this ideal type; practical action is dependent upon human judgement and, in so far as it is emancipatory, some transformation in how the practitioner perceives her/his world. Theory lies at the heart of the practical, but this is not the handed-down theory of others. Theory is applied to practice but it is also constructed out of practice, as in praxis:
(T)hought and action (or theory and practice), are dialectically related. They are to be understood as mutually constitutive, as in a process of interaction which is a continual reconstruction of thought and action in the living historical process which evidences itself in every real social situation (Carr and Kemmis, 1986, p 34, original emphasis).
The practitioner is therefore the interpreter, creator, user, evaluator and re-creator of theory in both tacit-intuitive and formal-explicit forms. That is the dialectic. It is through such interpretive and reflective processes, integral to practice, that practices are achieved, perpetuated and transformed. ‘Practices are changed by changing the ways in which they are understood’ (Carr and Kemmis, 1986, p 91). Practice is not simply something that the practitioner does, it is as much what the practitioner is, for practice is constituent of the identity of the practitioner. Moreover, in as much as practice entails interpretation, reflection and transformation, it cannot be legislated for in terms of strict rules. In fact, it is not only the means which are reviewed and determined in the course of practice but the ends also. Practice is therefore not amenable to description in terms of objectives, benchmarks and outcomes; it is more readily communicated in terms of aims, values and principles. Where educational discourse privileges questions of synthesis, learning and uncertainty over those of analysis, teaching and correctness, it is likely that the practical interest is represented. In so far as the duty of teachers is essentially one of autonomous decision-making, in and on practice, about educational means and ends, they are engaged in a practical activity.