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Contexts, cultures, learning:contemporary understandingsNick Peim a & Phil Hodkinson ba School of Education , University of Birmingham , UKb School of Continuing Education , University of Leeds , UKPublished online: 09 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Nick Peim & Phil Hodkinson (2007) Contexts, cultures, learning: contemporaryunderstandings, Educational Review, 59:4, 387-397, DOI: 10.1080/00131910701619282

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Contexts, cultures, learning:

contemporary understandings

Nick Peim*a and Phil Hodkinsonb

aSchool of Education, University of Birmingham, UK; bSchool of Continuing Education,

University of Leeds, UK

This paper addresses the general significance of the collection. It briefly and broadly traces the

relation of the project’s theoretical concerns to its purposes and its positioned nature. These

concerns and this positioning are connected with tendencies in contemporary thought in social

science theory and in research philosophy. The project’s contribution to an understanding of a

specific context of education is explored, as well as the contribution to researching any context of

education. Research relations are examined in relation to the project’s theoretical grounding while

specific contributions are identified for the particular significance of their contribution to the field

of education studies.

Culture—‘a complicated word’

According to Raymond Williams ‘Culture is one of the two or three most

complicated words in the English language’ (Williams, 1983, p. 76). The papers in

this special issue address culture in relation to the concept of learning within one

specific context of education: Further Education (FE). Of course, this is a complex

task, given the complexity of the idea of culture, the complexity of the concept of

learning and the complexity of the ‘world’ of practice.

The work here was triggered by a specific project—a Teaching and Learning

Research Programme (TLRP), in fact—that set out to address the contemporary

domain of FE. As such, the project demanded collective agreement about purposes,

about method and about the theoretical framework. These papers then have the

advantage of coming together from a common sense of purpose and a commonly

devised perspective. They each tackle the domain of FE addressing issues of culture

and learning from their own specific point of interest; but they share a commonly

defined orientation. In addition, the project was founded in a shared faith—not

without questions and uncertainties—about the relations between research, the

knowledge produced by research and the condition of the context of practice. In

*Corresponding author: School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston,

Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. Email: N.A.Peim@bham.ac.uk

Educational Review

Vol. 59, No. 4, November 2007, pp. 387–397

ISSN 0013-1911 (print)/ISSN 1465-3397 (online)/07/040387-11

# 2007 Educational Review

DOI: 10.1080/00131910701619282

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other words, and without the presumption of certainty, the project and the papers

gathered here in its name express a concern not only to describe but to account for

possibilities of action.

We can identify three broad aspects of the project’s overall modality: (i) research i.e.

seeking to produce new ways of understanding; (ii) attachment to the domain being

researched; and (iii) a practice orientated commitment to the ethic of improvement.

This three-fold structure opens another dimension of complexity. As the papers

indicate, any fundamental commitments to the development of a practice must always

be understood in terms of their relations with the conditions of existence of that world

of practice. This raises significant theoretical issues that are evident in the project’s

initial formulations and in the elaborations that follow in the papers.

The papers here collectively share a contemporary feel that derives only partly

from the fact that the empirical work was recent. Drawing on contemporary ideas,

they engage with the research process in a carefully elaborated style that indicates

awareness of current social science research thinking. The papers are all also

predicated on a strong sense of how local cultures and local practices that may

occupy one domain or one institution key in with the wider culture, the wider

context that enframes their being and that may, critically, delimit their possibilities.

Culture then, as represented by these papers, needs to be understood as operating at

different levels, dynamically. It is probably fair to claim that in dealing with complex

questions of culture, these papers exemplify ways of thinking about the

contemporary relations between micro and macro structures within education. It

is also fair to claim that in addressing learning particularly—given the significance of

learning in contemporary culture—important aspects of contemporary world are

being explored (Bernstein, 1995).

Of particular interest in the field of education—impelled as so much of it is by an

ethic of ‘improvement’—is the concern to elaborate in what ways the conditions

within learning contexts may be actively reconfigured by participants. It is certainly

the case that in these papers and in the project as a whole that they speak for,

participation has been a key concept. Inevitably, issues arising from the exploration

of participation—issues concerning how the concept gets configured and realized in

contexts of practice under the strictures of material and political conditions—are

addressed in these papers. As such they offer a kind of collective commentary on the

conflicts that run through professional practices, institutional and governmental

structures. These conflicts touch on fundamental political and ethical questions for

education, questions that are also always, as these papers demonstrate quite clearly,

practical (Masschelein & Quaghebeur, 2005).

Engaging with culture—orientations to knowledge

At a quite fundamental level the project ‘Transforming Learning Cultures in FE’

(TLC) engages with a series of questions concerning how we can know any context

of education. What modes of knowledge and understanding are available? What

forms of research design are appropriate for gaining information about context and

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learning cultures? How do learning cultures engage with the institutional contexts

and the wider culture they inhabit? These are questions of general significance for

educational thought, questions that demand of education, as a field of study, that it

engage with a range of intersecting disciplines.

For some time now, and perhaps increasingly, knowledge within education has

been impelled to address complexities of culture. Language, the distribution and

deployment of spaces, the symbolic message systems of the built environment,

hierarchies of knowledge, social hierarchies and the relations they give rise to—all

have been explored as significant features of educational settings. Education itself

conceived of as a field of practice, a project, a dimension of the social landscape in

general—has been confronted with these vital elements of its own conditions of

existence. This confrontation has not always been comfortable, nor has it simplified

understanding of practice and its effects, its impacts on its wider cultural contexts

and on the individuals who variously participate. Understandings of learning culture,

then—and this is the case with the papers here—carry with them implications taken

from the development of understandings of culture that belong to the modern

period.

Contemporary interest in culture can be traced back to large movements in

western thought in modernity. In philosophy the ‘cultural turn’ can be traced back to

Nietzsche’s nineteenth century enunciation of the death of God, translated in the

twentieth century into Lyotard’s assertion of the end of ‘grand narratives’ (1985).

Implicit suspicions about the metaphysics of humanism, with its potentially

dangerous implicit universal tendencies, impelled a concern to develop more

anthropological modes of thought: eventually giving rise to cultural studies. Any

study that engages with the dimension of culture, then, must inevitably address,

implicitly or explicitly, the interplay between the larger context ‘the world’, and the

local context of practice. One of the predicates of this collection, in fact, is that any

understanding of the sector in general—‘of FE as a whole’ (perhaps a more strange

expression than might at first appear)—must be balanced against a concern for the

specifically local, for the immediate: and must acknowledge that the tension between

these two ways of knowing is irreducible, just as the relation is inextricable.

The collection operates through a commitment to a research method that has

critical implications for understanding the ontological status and nature of the world

of FE. The concept of ‘world’ implicit in this collection is one that can be traced

back to Hegel’s rethinking of the Kantian recognition of the significance of ‘the

understanding’ in how we might know our world. On this view ‘the world’ cannot be

seen as something separate from those who inhabit it—as a detached, or discrete,

object of contemplation. Nor can the world be seen as an inert presence above and

beyond the forms of understanding, the ways of being and knowing that those who

inhabit it exhibit. On this view the world is always the world for someone, for some

group—for some culture within some specific form of practice. Conversely, the

world in the larger sense is always multi-dimensional. To put it in Heideggerian

terms, human being is ‘being there’—‘dasein’: human being is predicated on

specificity, locality of place and time (1928). On the one hand, ‘dasein’ is ‘thrown’,

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as the TLC project always recognizes. The circumstances of its world are contingent,

always being there before its own arrival. On the other hand, ‘dasein’—or being

within that world for its ‘subjects’—is predicated on belonging: ‘my world’ calls forth

commitment, responsibility, concern. Being within any particular horizon involves

attachment, what Heidegger identifies in general terms as ‘care’; this is not an added

quality or position that we may chose to cultivate or to adopt: it is fundamental to

our specificity. In terms of the education professional, belonging frequently takes the

form of a desire for transformation, a desire that is perhaps little theorized but that

can be understood in terms of attachment, identity and the Heideggerian concept of

‘care’. That desire is implicitly, at least, operative in the formation of the TLC

project and in the practices and identities of those who are engaged as active within it

as practitioners, as researchers and often as both.1

Belonging and desire connect with the question of context, or ‘world’. Clearly,

then, the world of FE is not a simple object. These articles are consequently

predicated on an understanding of the world of FE not as an external object but as a

‘world’ of practice within which it is possible to be positioned differently. It is also

evident—and this is where Hegel’s critique of Kant is implicit—that being positioned

implies acting upon and in some way constituting the world of practice: even where

that world might be subject to powerful forces that might seek to structure it in one

particular form, even where material conditions might seriously delimit possibilities

for expansion and development, and even where the nature of the world and its

purposes might be subject to contest from differently positioned inhabitants.

Belonging to the world of practice is one thread that binds the present collection

together.

The discourse of culture: contemporary understandings

The emphasis given the idea of culture carries with it some important considerations

and insights. Addressing culture within any educational context necessarily has a

doubleness about it. There is the culture that prevails within—within a sector, within

an institution, within a department, within a teaching space; but there is also the

cultural context in a wider sense to take into consideration, and the way that any

local, specific practice is, one way or another, an expression of the culture at large.

The necessary, but complicated relation between culture within any specific context

and culture outside has been explored extensively in cultural studies. These papers

frequently indicate just how a common location or area of concern—the FE sector—

radiates towards a concern for aspects of contemporary education in general:

concerns such as professional identity, the material consequences of resourcing,

curriculum structures, institutional hierarchies, ideas and available modes of

understanding. While it is clearly and demonstrably possible to speak of the culture

of FE, the present offerings indicate also a necessary concern with the intricate

relations between the specific domain of FE and the various ways it is intersected by

other cultural lines of force. Hence this collection offers significant research into

contemporary FE, but also reveals important facets of contemporary education in its

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wider context. A dialectical relation is implicit here in the movement between

concern for local and concern for general significances.

This relation between the local and the general accords with the emergence of a

specific domain of knowledge concerned with culture. A number of significant

strands can be identified that inform this emergence, including: rethinking of

classical Marxism, especially in Althusser where the relations between material base

and superstructure were rethought; the emergence of post-structuralism—particu-

larly Lacan, Derrida and Foucault—that reformulated understandings about

language, meaning and identity; the discourse of post-modernity that increasingly

saw the field of culture as one of hybridity and contest; and the shift from classical

anthropology to an ethnographic orientation. This represented a huge change in

understanding how cultural practices, specific locations and arenas might be

understood. Classic anthropology, exemplified in Levi-Strauss’s approach in The

Savage Mind, had identified ‘bricolage’ as the mode of being specific to the primitive

mind. Increasingly, movements within cultural studies saw the principle of bricolage

as more generally at work in culture (1962). This broad shift in understanding

problematized any strict division between anthropologists and the object of their

study. Bricolage was found to be the principle at work in all cultural practices

(Harland, 1987). This demanded recognition of contingency—reference to the

ready-to-hand bits and pieces of historically specific existence—and of the active

work of construction of social actors within practices.

In recent times, attempts to define the state of the world at large are frequently

couched in terms of culture (Castells, 1996; Apadurai, 1996). Culture came to be an

elusive but necessary object and a condition of knowledge, hence it had to be

understood through a complex array of dimensions. The larger idea of culture may

refer to a number of dimensions of being: the way of life, the belief systems and

practices of a people; but the same term, culture, is used to refer to institutions—and

even to smaller units of social space within institutions.

The present collection addresses matters of culture within the FE sector but also

in the relations of that sector with the wider context of education as a whole. The

citing of Bourdieu as a key figure is highly significant. The relation between ‘habitus’

and ‘field’ that the collection explores exemplifies many of the tendencies identified

earlier in contemporary understandings of culture. The common concern with the

contemporary condition of teaching and learning (a complex object, if ever there was

one) within FE—or any specific sector—involves recognition that matters of ethos

must be seen in relation to its enframing material and ideological conditions. At the

same time, culture in education, perhaps increasingly, can be seen in relation to

governance—and this means constructing understandings that include reference to

government, but also to the governmental dimension of institutions (Foucault,

2007). These papers, in their desire to account for the conditions of existence of

contemporary FE express an interest in such aspects of the governmental enframing

of the sector as a critical but not entirely final factor in its condition. Perhaps the

most sustained emphasis here is given to what might be termed professional culture:

the various ways in which professional educators in FE—as well as academic

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educationists addressing FE—define themselves and their world in relation to

current institutional, governmental and material structures and strictures.

‘Being there’: belonging and responsibility

In the first place, the overarching aim of the project was to explore the nature of

learning within FE, as if learning itself belongs differently to this context, has its own

specific identity. The project saw this process neither as a survey of current practices,

nor as an archive of good practices, but rather as an attempt to define some

characteristic examples in terms of what they might reveal about the contemporary

general state of learning within FE. The focus of this exploratory dimension was in

the first place analytical and was shaped by the theoretical perspective chosen. The

conceptual perspective from Bourdieu, allied with its corresponding approach to

research method, demanded efforts and methods to get ‘under the skin’ of

participants as a way of understanding the nature of the ‘lived experience’ of the

culture of learning within its context (Johnson, 1986). The partnership relations that

were set up—between Higher Education (HE) and FE institutions, or rather

between interested parties in those institutions—enabled the process of exploration

to have a more inward and perhaps intimate basis. The kinds of data produced by

this particular configuration of relations give access to discursive realities as they are

directly expressed.

But the project saw its mission in another way, also: to make proposals for the

improvement of learning. The project was never predicated solely on a need to know

and understand. It also clearly set itself within an ‘ethic’ of improvement. As the

project identified its own identity it is clear that from the start the relation between

knowing and improvement was essential. In this sense the following articles

represent a classic contribution to the discourse of education—within the tradition of

education studies that are aimed, more or less directly, but always in the end,

towards the positive development of the field of practice. In Aristotelian terms, this

concern moves the project into the domain of ‘phronesis’: practical wisdom that may

draw on its closely held partner ‘sophia’ that indicates the ability to think effectively

about how the world is. The concern with practice, of course, implies a particular

ethic—a way of thinking about what is the proper mode of action and being within a

given practical setting or context (MacIntyre, 1981).

As the project set itself the complex task of coming to know the condition of

learning within the FE sector, a number of factors came into play. An important

dimension of this self-imposed task was to understand the condition of learning

within specific FE institutions and to also understand the state of learning across the

FE sector as a whole. Hence the project had to constantly be mindful of the relations

between the specific, local instance and the overarching structure, the general

conditions within which the specific took its particular form. In order to do justice to

this complex relation the project chose to privilege the idea of ‘learning culture’, a

term that would demand complex understandings and that would also enable

thinking to move between the particular and the general. In addition, in order to get

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a more inward view on the specific practices of FE institutions in relation to learning

the project included from the beginning the knowledge and experience of those

working within the field. Engaging such positioned knowledge was an important

phenomenological move: to enhance perspectives and to acknowledge positioned

understanding, again echoing MacIntyre’s notion of a situated knowledge within the

social sciences (1981). The project thus positioned itself as seeking to organize its

research from both outside and from within FE by insisting on the engagement of

professionals within the sector.

Fundamental to the project’s modus operandi was the conception of research based

in ‘situations of context’ (Halliday, 1978). Any data would necessarily have to arise

from the specific location of the learning under scrutiny: hence the centrality of case

study work to the research design. Case study enabled detailed consideration to be

given to institutional context, defined specifically as ‘site for learning’. Such sites

might well take on quite different forms and modalities. In order to grasp something

of both their specificity and their generality the project sought to explore sites

through multiple methods and multiple perspectives. The project’s theoretical

bearings, again in accord with the identification of Bourdieu as key figure, and with

the definition of essentially indeterminate but highly significant boundary objects,

enable this dialectic of focus, but also suggest a Habermasian spirit of engagement.

This means acknowledging the necessary intransigencies of context but also

expresses a commitment to dissemination into the public sphere implying an

engaged politics of knowledge that expresses a commitment to ‘the unfinished

project of modernity’ (Habermas, 1990).

A design for researching culture

The project constructed a template designed to produce essentially three types of

data that would offer different but interlocking perspectives on the context in

question. In the first place, to gain responses that would tend to cover similar

ground, semi-structured interviews were designed. Six students and the tutor in the

determined sites would be interviewed, the open structure allowing for a range of

perspectives on the learning experience. These data, that would offer discursive

accounts of lived experience, were supplemented by repeated observations of

practice by more than one person. In addition, relevant documentation was collected

and each site was further explored via a repeated questionnaire survey with a much

larger number of people. Fieldwork in each site continued for 3 years, following at

least two cohorts of students thus securing the longitudinal dimension.

The nature of this schema necessitated partnership: each university team

partnering one FE institution. According to the desired division of focus, four sites

within each institution were selected for detailed investigation, giving a total of 16.

The inside factor was further secured by the fact that the project required that, in

each college, a member of staff was seconded for 2 days a week to act as a researcher

within the TLC team. The lead tutor in each site received some paid remission of

teaching to act as what the project termed ‘participating tutors’. That is, they had

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regular meetings with the local research team and contributed to data collection by

observing each other’s sites and by keeping a log book or diary. The lead tutor was

completely responsible for the impact of the research findings on the teaching in

their site, including any decisions whether or not to make innovations during the life

of the project. Innovations were thus monitored through the research process. In

addition, each university team recruited one half-time academic researcher for the

quantitative work. The implications of this research strategy are followed through by

Postlethwaite’s paper that indicates how an amalgam of perspectives—derived from

hybridizing Activity Theory with Bourdieu—enabled the project to bring together

multiple case studies. The local differences in the culture of FE could then be

referred to, provisionally defined and interpreted through the open determination of

‘boundary objects’. Quantitative and qualitative data were thus integrated within an

interpretivist approach informed by the earlier perspectives. This approach to the

multiple case studies, identifying the key boundary objects, enabled the different

teams to collaborate on building a project-wide understanding of learning cultures in

FE: thus averting any risk that the project take the form of a disconnected series of

smaller case studies—vignettes in effect—that just happened to belong to FE.

The determination of similar boundary objects—conceptualized dynamically as

protean and mobile—enabled the project to address both findings and interpreta-

tions across the qualitative/quantitative boundary. What’s more, Postlethwaite’s

account illustrates how the project incorporates the positioned nature of the

researchers into the research process: the ‘habitus’ of the members of the project

team being influential in allowing these boundary objects to come into full play. At

the same time, in Bourdieuian terms, collective understandings of the nature of the

field influenced ongoing research decisions. This reflexive dimension meant that

emerging understandings were always understood to be subject to collective review.

Explorations: findings

The principle of synergy informs Hodkinson et al.’s account of learning culture

within FE, defining critical factors including: the students, tutors as social actors; the

location and resources of the local site—as both enabling and constraining; the

syllabus, its mode of assessment and qualification specification; the temporal

dimension, including relations between tutors and students and their relation with

other learning sites engaging the students; local management of the institution,

distribution of forces; larger governmental strictures including inspection regimes,

funding structures and government policy; wider educational culture in relation to

academic and vocational learning; wider social and cultural conditions and value,

including dimensions of social class, gender and ethnicity, prevailing economic

conditions and their relations with the field of employment—as active forces that

shape FE as a sector.

Recognition of both complexity and variation raises significant issues for attempt

to instigate or to legislate for improvement of learning. The principle of synergy is

highlighted as significant in these terms: it is defined as the convergence of forces

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and contrasted with divergence and conflict. This offers a useful grid for analysis that

might be deployed to define the pedagogical conditions that pertain in any context of

learning and that may complement other existing models.

Theoretical analysis of what is meant by the term ‘learning culture’ is expanded in

Hodkinson, Biesta and James in order to clarify understandings of how learning

cultures work. The concept of participation—as a principle of learning—is explored

here in a way that connects the project with larger pedagogical questions. This relation

offers a significant contribution to theory, demonstrably indicating how accounts of

learning contexts may correspond with the complexities of learning cultures but may

also provide consistent descriptions between different contexts. Implications for

matters of value are powerful here. Clearly, what emerges is that definitive statements

about the general nature of ‘good learning’ must foreclose the realization that what

actually counts as good learning is, at least partly, but necessarily, socially constructed.

There is, as the project demonstrates, a strong local dimension to this negotiated

value: what counts as good learning can vary from site to site, as well as within sites

from different positions. This has major implications for current ‘technologies’ of

learning improvement that focus on technical gains, but often marginalize questions

about learning relations and specificities of identity and locality.

This paper and the preceding offer an example of their own—research—synergy

where the relations between the research modality and the theoretical framework are

both dynamic and mutually informing. There is a strong link with the paper by

Postlethwaite and Maull that deploys data to explore the changing perceptions of

students in the sample sites with regard to aspects of the learning environments they

encountered within the learning cultures in those sites. From this example, it is easy

to see that any attempt to define an effective—or simply ‘good’ pedagogy—must take

into account the perceptions of participants, just as any attempt to understand,

describe or analyse the pedagogical value of any situated practice must acknowledge

this principle. It is equally clear that the temporal dimension is vital here, and that

any attempt to account for the nature of the teaching and learning experience within

a given local context must recognize not only that learning cultures change but also

that perceptions of those cultures change. Recognition of the temporal/historical

dimension has important research implications: but, again, it also has important

implications for contemporary governmental practices including how we understand

the value of inspection regimes and prevailing technologies of improvement.

Participation, then, is a dynamic feature of the process of constructing under-

standings of learning contexts, rather than a static component.

Of course, one highly significant component of any contemporary learning context

is the role of professionalism. Gleeson and James clearly indicate the ways that being

a professional is both configured, experienced and enacted within the culture of

FE—and how professional identity is both a product of and a force within the

culture. In this reciprocity, professionality is influenced by and in turn influences the

cultures in FE. This is not a ‘locked’ relation: as the paper indicates, tutors actively

mediate a wide range of factors that influence their work, being neither in control,

nor passively reacting to those influences.

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James and Wahlberg look at professionality explicitly in terms of possibilities

and limitations of tutor interventions in bringing about positive changes in a

learning culture. While this analysis properly highlights the limitations of tutor

interventions into culture, the classification of interventions provides a useful

template for further analyses, potentially across a range of institutional contexts.

The analysis provides insight into the enframing features of any given institutional

culture. It suggests limitations on such surface discourses of improvement that

seek to externally redirect professional practices. It also indicates how, in

contemporary terms, much professional energy is expended on the resistance of

external (and inorganic) interventions in the name of protecting existing learning

cultures from the collateral damage that may occur as a result of management

practices. Here the tensions between cultures of management and practice caught

up in the material constraints of provision are vividly illustrated—and a framework

for such analysis implied.

This paper brings together a number of features of the project, a necessarily

sobering reminder of the limitations of proposed reforms of practice. The material

conditions of the institution, the established nature of practices, values and

orientations must be configured in relation to a range of contingent factors.

Structural features are seen in relation to a range of contingencies, including

managerial impingements on resourcing and ideological resistances among segments

of the constituencies of practice. This dynamic relation of conditions is, of course,

related to wider socio-economic context. On this complex and mobile view,

professional identity is caught up in the torsions of these relations, rather than a

consistent given. The genesis of the FE tutor, the dominant orientations to meaning

within the institution are similarly theorized as variable: and as related to a number

of factors that are both functions of ‘habitus’, in Bourdieu’s terminology, and that

also characterize ‘field’—local conditions, general conditions, and that relate to

various temporal and material contingencies. It is significant that the collection

includes material garnered from Gallacher’s study examining learning cultures in

community education in Scotland, providing another point of reference. While the

TLC sites were all in England, none of them had focussed explicitly on the

community education dimension. This ‘outsider’ paper offers a subtly different

understanding of learning cultures in FE, as well as indicating the significance of the

dimension of community.

The specific focus on FE, then, allows these papers to negotiate descriptions of a

complex series of factors. The descriptions and analyses of such an array of factors

arise from the research methodology of TLC. The integration of different modalities

of data taking into account different researcher positions, perspectives and

orientations, clarifying key concepts for description of institutional structures and

identities within them.

It is clear that—given the fact that the research design relied heavily on

practitioner participation—Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ are necessa-

rily key concepts in the TLC project, providing a dynamic framework for both the

research methodology and the emerging view of learning cultures.

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The concept of ‘habitus’ names the characteristic dispositions of the social subject

that is deeply ingrained in habits of behaviour, feeling and thought. The engagement

with ‘field’, both current and past, is conceptualized as a structured system of social

relations—in this case, FE’s relationship with society at the micro- and macro-

level—that interconnect agency and structure. These papers indicate how it is that

‘habitus’ cannot be interpreted independently of ‘field’. The dialectical nature of

such relationships allows the project to examine how certain sets of assumptions

prevail in various learning situations, how they inform the practices of tutors,

students, managers, employers and others, and how such practices, in turn,

contribute to the maintenance of particular learning cultures. The effect of this way

of thinking is to suggest a more holistic approach to questions of ‘improvement’,

without losing the driving concern for intervention. The understanding of contexts

and cultures these papers are founded in and promote locates professional agency

within a complex array of factors and forces that still recognizes the element of

belonging and ‘care’.

Note

1. Heidegger is particularly relevant here, as the TLC project foreground the thinking of

Bourdieu in its theoretical orientation. Bourdieu acknowledges the fundamental role of

Heidegger as an influence (1990, p. 5).

References

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis,

University of Minneapolis Press).

Bernstein, B. (1995) Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity (London, Taylor & Francis).

Bourdieu, P. (1990) In other words (Cambridge, Polity Press).

Castells, M. (1996) The rise of the network (Oxford, Blackwell).

Foucault, M. (2007) Security, territory, population (New York, Palgrave).

Habermas, J. (1990) Moral consciousness and communicative action (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press).

Halliday, M. A. K. (1979) Language as social semiotic (London, Edward Arnold).

Harland, R. (1987) Superstructuralism (London, Routledge).

Heideggerian, M. (1962) Being and time (Oxford, Blacwell Publishing).

Johnson, R. (1986) Social text, No. 16 (Winter, 1986–1987), 38–80.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1962) The savage mind (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press).

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The postmodern condition (Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press).

MacIntyre, A. (1981) After virtue (London, Duckworth).

Masschelein, J. & Quaghebeur, K. (2005) Participation for better or worse?, Journal of Philosophy of

Education, 39(1), 51–66.

Williams, R. (1976) Keywords (London, Croom Helm).

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