Learning Cultures in Further Education
Phil Hodkinson, Graham Anderson, Helen Colley, Jenny Davies, Kim Diment, Tony Scaife, Mike Tedder, Madeline Wahlberg & Eunice Wheeler
NOT FOR QUOTATION OR CITATION
British Research Association Annual Conference
UMIST 16th – 18th September 2004
Introduction
This paper has two purposes. Firstly, within the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education Project (TLC), it is a provisional and exploratory pointer towards the major task of analysis we must conduct over the remaining nine months of project life. Thus, what is presented here is provisional work in progress, and it is for this reason that we will not make this paper generally available, and we ask those attending the BERA seminar not to cite or quote it. Secondly, within the context of this seminar, the paper illuminates some of the advantages and difficulties of taking a cultural perspective on learning that goes beyond individual site case studies.
The TLC is a major project investigating the nature of learning cultures in FE, and their potential transformation. It is part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ERSC) Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). The project is a partnership between four universities and four FE colleges. In each college, four distinctive ‘learning sites’ have been tracked for almost three years. A list of these sites, and much more detail about the rationale and working of the project can be found in Hodkinson and James (2003). The main tutor in each site was an active participant in the research. Each university-college partnership employed both a part-time academic researcher, and a part-time seconded college-based researcher, to share the bulk of the work. In addition, there was a questionnaire survey, with its own director and part-time academic researcher. This gives a core team of 14 researchers, and a total team of 30, when the participating tutors are included. Data on each site comes from repeated interviews with the tutor and a sample of students, repeated observations of the site and tutor in action, repeated questionnaire sweeps sampling as close to 100% of the students as was possible, and research diaries kept by the participating tutors (some more comprehensively than others). Some managers were also interviewed. We have written elsewhere about the ways this complex partnership has worked (James, 2004). The result of all this activity is a huge volume of data on each site.
Adopting a cultural perspective on learning requires analysis of this data at three levels. The first, the level of the individual learner and individual tutor, lies outside the scope of this paper. The second, and easiest for the TLC to address, is the individual site. It is here that the complex relational aspects of learning can be most easily understood. Work is well advanced at this level, and two examples will be presented later in this symposium. The third level is to examine what can be said about the sites as a collectivity – about the cultural nature of learning in FE as a whole, as revealed through our cases. This level of analysis is more problematic – partly because of the construction of the TLC project around site case studies, but also because of the problems in relating a more macro analysis with localised and intimate learning processes. It is this third task which is addressed in this paper, in an exploratory manner. First, we need to say a few words about the relationship between this level and that of the individual site.
We argued in the previous paper (Hodkinson et al., 2004) that a blending of aspects of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) work with that of Bourdieu is a useful way of understanding learning as culture. From this perspective, each of our sample learning sites is part of a much larger field of learning in English FE. If follows that, whether we are looking at only one site or at the sites as a collectivity, it is necessary to locate them in the broader structures, dispositions and actions which make up that field. This links the two levels of analysis (site and whole sample), as the sites are all part of the same FE field, and each can add to the understanding of the others. However, their positions in that field are different, and most sites are also located in other overlapping fields. For example, sites vary in their relations to the field(s) of employment. For those where links are close, we have argued elsewhere that the values and practices in the particular employment field concerned, its vocational habitus, strongly influence what is possible and acceptable as learning in that site (Colley et al, 2003). To take another example, two of our sites focus directly on young people identified as being students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. These sites cannot be understood without investigating the social position of such people, and the historical accumulation of policy and practice approaches to them – including practical issues such as statementing and funding, as well as more value-laden debates around the merits of inclusive education , which has a different history and evolution in FE, as opposed to schools. These issues are not irrelevant to other sites, being part of a more general pattern of status differences and social and educational inequalities. Nevertheless, what is sometimes termed ‘Special Education’ has been socially constructed as a separate field of educational and employment activity in the UK, which is of central concern only for these two sites out of our 17. This perspective on relations of and between sites in overlapping fields reveals a central concern of this paper. To what extent can we say meaningful things about the culture of learning across all 17 sites, and to what extent must we be content with examining each separately?
In standard research approaches, there are two preferred answers to this question. The first is the identification of common issues and perspectives that apply to all sites. That is, to generalise about the cultures of learning in FE, using the diversity of the sites in our sample as justification for the claims. The second standard research approach is to classify the sites in a typology. The argument then is that though there may be few things that we can claim about all 17, we can be much more confident about the identification of a small number of different types of site, ideally linked by an over-arching conceptual and/or empirical rationale. We could then make confident statements about each particular type of learning culture, and establish the deeper underlying reasons for the similarities and differences between them. This paper reports on a preliminary attempt to explore both approaches. In doing this, we faced two methodological problems. The first was that each case study was becoming increasingly detailed, as round after round of interview, observation, questionnaire and diary data was added. How could we cut through this detail, to make a comparative analysis of sites possible? The second was that there were too many possible organising variables around which to structure the analysis, and no way to be sure which were the ones most likely to lead to success.
To deal with this dilemma, we constructed an instrument for the analysis of learning cultures, which is attached in appendix I. This instrument drew out some key dimensions of a cultural view of learning from a selection of relevant literatures on learning. This heuristic device proved to be valuable, but problematic. There were long and sometimes heated debates in the core team about the merits and appropriateness of much of it. The result was a compromise, valued more by some than by others. Each local team then set out to produce short 8 – 10 page analyses of each of their local sites, using this instrument. The results, though insightful and illuminating, were far from the standardised products we had naively hoped for. They varied in length (4 pages to 20 pages) in focus, and in the ways that the parts of the instrument were understood and interpreted. This variability helped determine the form that the next stage of analysis took. It meant that there was no point in developing some further level of apparently standard technical analysis – the meta-data from the 17 sites were too different in form and content. Also, it was important not to simply reproduce the same headings that had been used in the instrument. To do so would be to reify their significance, and to impose the structure of the instrument on the eventual results. It was better to take a more holistic approach. This entailed immersion in the 17 accounts, searching for issues, patterns, commonalities and differences, following what Moustakas (1990) termed ‘heuristic research’. This immersion would ideally have been done by a small team, working closely together. Logistics have prevented this, and what follows is predominantly Hodkinson’s work. The next stage will be to further examine and test out the issues identified here across the whole research team , including going back, where necessary, to the more detailed data and evidence from which each site analysis has been constructed. In doing that next stage, other issues not listed here will almost certainly arise, and some of the ones that follow may either be radically modified or omitted (either as inadequately supported, or lacking enough significance for substantial development).
Issues that Impact upon the Whole Sample
Despite huge differences between the sites, there are some issues that cut across all of them. Perhaps the most significant is that taking what we have termed a cultural perspective on learning is itself important in each site. In each site, learning is indeed relational, entailing the interactions between students, tutor(s), curriculum and assessment, location, national and college policies, management approaches and practices, and wider social, economic and political considerations. Furthermore, what some writers term the informal learning processes of learning (see Colley et al., 2003, for a review of this literature) are significant in all sites, whilst sometimes remaining largely out of view, as attention normally focuses on more explicit, formalised dimensions of learning. The nature of these complex relationships varies from site to site, and it is this that largely explains the major differences between them. The scale of difference is amplified by two key distinctions between learning in an FE college and learning in a school. Firstly, colleges are much bigger and more diverse than any school. The range of ‘subjects’ taught is much wider, the student population is more diverse, and so is the workforce of tutors, Secondly, students identified more strongly with the site where they were studying, rather than with the college as an entity. If anything, there was greater awareness of being in FE generally (as opposed to school or work), than being in a particular FE college.
Just as the detail of learning culture varies from site to site in fundamentally important ways, so when we examine other issues that apply to all sites, the nature and impact of those issues is felt in different sites in different ways. One example of that is the role of the tutor. Our analysis strongly supports the view that the tutor is of central significance in influencing the learning in all sites. The nature of that influence is strongly dependant upon the dispositions and professional identity of that tutor, in relation to the context and practices of the site(s) where they work. In several sites, a single tutor was a major instigator of the practices found. Sometimes, the site only existed because a particular tutor had established it. In such cases, there was often an initial period of enthusiasm, backed up by a commitment and work involvement that exceeded anything laid down in formal job descriptions. However, this synergy between tutor dispositions and site practices is sometimes fragile. We can document examples where the tutor changes (see below), and also where conditions and pressures external to the tutor change the nature of the site, undermining the tutor’s commitment to it. In other circumstances, the tutor construction of a site takes place in a more widely supportive setting, so that what began as one tutor’s idea, simply changes a bit as someone else takes over.
Most tutors, however, did not have the luxury of site creation. Rather, they found themselves working in a site that either pre-existed their involvement, or was created by a complex set of relations and practices which they may or may not have contributed to. In these situations, some tutors found themselves closely in tune with other aspects of the site culture, and influence the detailed practices of that culture in ways that fitted with their personal sense of good practice. However, others found themselves in situations that they deeply disliked or experienced as alienating. This latter situation could be disempowering, so that tutors felt forced to practice in certain ways, prevented from doing what they deeply believed to be right. Furthermore, as research also shows for schoolteachers, there can be changes in professional identity over tutors’ careers that strongly influence their practices. One group of older engineering tutors appear simply to be waiting for retirement. A significant, younger, sub-group in our sample shared the same upwardly mobile career path, moving from external subject expert, through to expert teacher of that subject, and then on to a middle management role with responsibility for a group of courses. As their professional identity changed, their approach to teaching in the sample site could also change. A site that seemed of central importance at the early stages of this progression may have become much more marginal at a later stage. Changes like this were sometimes gradual and often almost imperceptible without hindsight, but could be much more dramatic and even traumatic. Some tutors were moved by management away from sites where they wanted to work. One tutor resigned from her job because a combination of job-restructuring and college reorganisation, triggered by a change in senior management approach and a major college financial crisis, put her into a context where she felt she could not continue as a tutor. For those tutors who felt empowered enough to make a difference, working way beyond formal contractual obligations was common. We found evidence of emotional labour, where tutors absorbed the burdens of their students and tried to solve problems for them (Colley et al., 2003). We found several examples of underground working, where tutors were doing lots of things that they were not supposed to do, but which were central to the parallel ‘underground learning’ (James and Diment, 2003) successes in those sites. We found many who, within the parameters of their own dispositions, placed students needs first, often working against the system to maximise student achievement. Learning in FE depends upon the tutors, in ways that often make unreasonable demands, are rarely recognised and supported in the system, and often are seriously undermined. Tutor professionalism and identity are vital components of learning practices and success, and need nurturing. FE tutors badly lack their own version of TLC (tender loving care).
This leads directly to another universal influence in all sites – the impact of national and college policy, funding and practice. At one level, this should be potentially reassuring to both managers and policy makers – they can and do make a huge difference. The problem is that, at the current time, many of those differences are damaging learning. The root of the problem lies in two pressures. The first is inadequate financial resourcing and funding that can fluctuate wildly from year to year. It is well known that FE college provision is more poorly funded than either post-16 aged provision in schools or higher education. Salaries are relatively low, and despite this major saving compared to other sectors, there is constant pressure to increase income and reduce costs. The second pressure comes from a deep technicism that is central to almost all policy and management approaches. Teaching is seen as a matter of developing better techniques and applying them. Learning is supposed to be a matter of identifying each student’s learning needs, meeting them within the resource constraints of a large group, and measuring success by a combination of retention rates, formal assessment achievement, and OFSTED/ALI inspection criteria.
Across all of our sites, the tutors struggled to work within this straitjacket. We found none for whom there was no pressure and none who found this regime entirely conducive to good teaching and learning. The compromises were of varying severity and impact. In some sites there was a greater degree of insulation, even when the almost inevitable reorganisation crisis came along. In others, particular changes introduced within this management logic became literally unbearable. The AS French tutor resigned, due to these sorts of pressure, which included the halving of her class contact time in order to make the group financially viable. When we look at all 17 sites over the three years of the project, it is hard to identify major policy or managerial initiatives which have contributed to the improvement of learning in any site. However, we can document numerous examples of such initiatives that have made successful learning less likely. Tutors protect their students from these pressures as far as they can, and this is a major factor in the overwork and stress than many of them display.