PAPER PRESENTED TO CULTURES OF LEARNING CONFERENCE, UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL, APRIL 2001.

Cultures of learning and the learning of cultures

David James University of the West of England, BristolMartin Bloomer University of Exeter

Introduction

Whilst many would agree with Bruner’s insistence that ‘learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting, and always dependent upon the utilization of cultural resources’ (Bruner, 1996, p.4), the concept of culture nevertheless has several broad distinctive meanings (Williams, 1976), each with educational significance. This makes the term culture both attractive and difficult to use in understanding educational activity.

In this paper, we identify a range of understandings and uses of the concept as revealed in contemporary research and scholarship, giving particular attention to an approach derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and some areas of affinity this has with recent sociocultural work. We then turn our attention to a new ESRC-funded research project, Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education, and consider the requirements and opportunities presented by that project for theorising a concept of culture. We ponder the notion of ‘authentic learning sites’ and consider what it might contribute to conceptualising the temporal, spacial, psychological and social parameters of learning and the notion of learning culture. Finally, we present a number of questions which we consider are worth addressing at this early stage in the project and prior to our attempts to operationalise a concept of culture in our own fieldwork.

Notions of culture in the study of learning

Despite objections from at least as far back as Dewey (1901), it is only recently that criticisms of western psychology for its individualistic orientation (Rogoff, 1990) and for its treatment of mental functioning as existing, ‘in a cultural, institutional and historical vacuum’ (Wertsch, 1991, p 2) have been made to tell. Since the 1980s, the essentialistic functionalism and static models underpinning cognitive psychology have been subject to increasing critical scrutiny, principally because they emphasise learning as a determined, individualistic cognitive process and have had little regard for context. The old orthodoxies in which learners were treated as disconnected knowledge-processing agents have now largely given way to ones in which learners have moved centre stage as active knowledge-makers or constructors who bring to their learning a wide range of social and cultural experiences.

Such a movement is noticeable in constructivism which rests upon the premise that, ‘knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject’ (von Glasersfeld, 1989, p 182). Cognitive constructivism focuses on the development of the cognitive schemes which make knowledge construction possible and draws significantly from Piaget’s (1950) theory of intellectual development. It is concerned

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with the ‘progressive adaptation of individual’s cognitive schemes to the physical environment’ (Driver, et al., 1994, p 6). However, like cognitive psychology, it is based upon a highly individualist model of human development and offers only limited opportunities for exploring culture.

Social constructivism has been inspired partly by the work of Vygotsky (1896-1934), although its emphasis upon the social construction of meaning and personal knowledge in a symbolic world suggests it draws also upon the basic organising ideas of phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. In so far as social constructivism is built upon an understanding of social, as distinct from individual, constructions of knowledge, it affords some scope for theorising cultural dimensions of learning. However, it maintains in practice a conceptual dichotomy between individual activity and social processes and fails to make explicit their dialectical interdependence (John-Steiner and Mahn, 1996). Moreover, much of its research has been conducted within the confines of formally designated educational programmes and institutions. For these reasons, the capacity of social constructivism to relate questions of learning to wider cultural concerns must be considered limited.

Vygotsky’s work on cultural-historical activity theory, emphasising as it does the cultural context of individual meaning-making, has contributed significantly to the recent rise of interest in culture. Activity theory, developed initially by Vygotsky (1978), Leont’ev and Luria, claims that all activity is socially mediated and that consciousness is located not in the head but in practice (Nardi, 1996). Moreover,

context is constituted through the enactment of an activity involving people and artifacts … (which) carry with them a particular culture and history and are persistent structures that stretch across activities through time and space (Rodriguez, 1998, p 2).

The aim of activity theory is thus to deepen understanding of the dialectical relations binding the individual and the social, cultural and historical (Bannon and Bødker, 1991). Prominent here is the work of Engeström (1987, 1990) on activity systems and expansive learning and Cole (1988, 1996a, 1996b) on cultural diversity and cultural psychology. Cole, for instance, argues against ‘simplified notions of context as cause’ (1996a, p 139), citing the works of Giddens on structuration, Bourdieu on habitus, and Engeström on activity systems. He makes distinct claims upon the opportunities which culture affords for transcending dualisms of structure and agency, and for pursuing temporal and lateral connectivity1 :

(Culture) provides me with a unit of analysis that has natural linkages to the macro pole of society and its institutions and the micro level of individual thoughts and actions. … Central is the need to study culturally mediated behavior developmentally to reveal the dynamic interactions uniting different parts of the overall life system. Equally important is the need to conduct research at several developmental/historical (genetic) levels in order to analyze the ways in which they intertwine and fuse in human life over time (Cole, 1996a, pp 143 and 145).

Other work in the field draws from social anthropology and incorporates elements of phenomenology as well as Vygotsky’s (1981) work on psychological development and the social construction of the mind (Leont'ev, 1981). Much of this work is referred to as

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‘sociocultural theory’ and distinguished partly by the importance it attaches to social interaction, community and culture, and inter-relationships between learner, activity and context. ‘Explanations of developmental coupling between persons and activities lie within broader patterns of sociocultural change and their embodiment in activity’ (Beach, 1995, p 302). Sociocultural processes and individual functioning are relational, existing ‘in a dynamic, irreducible tension rather than a static notion of social determination’ (Penuel and Wertsch, 1995, p 84). Learning, in this view, is to be understood not as acquisition but as activity contributing to change and enrichment of the individual (Renshaw, 1992).

However, as Bereiter (1994) notes, the neo-Vygotskyists ‘are not the first to have studied learning in its cultural milieu. Educational anthropology has done this from its beginning’ (p 21). Bereiter claims that the distinctive contribution of recent work is its illumination of learning and cognition outside formally prescribed learning situations. Driven by a conception of learning as participation, and distinguished by an absence of instructional metaphors, this work has released opportunities for theorising learning as a social practice in a range of cultural settings. It has captured some of the complexities of learning in ways not permitted by other approaches through such notions as ‘situated cognition’ (Brown et al., 1989), ‘cognitive apprenticeship’ (Collins et al., 1989; Rogoff, 1990) and ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991). These have been employed to represent individual-context relationships and learning processes. However, while research is frequently focused on communities of practice, such anthropology, or situativity theory, takes little account of the complex relational and continually changing patterns of a wide range of cultural experiences as may be relevant in particular cases.

Activity theory and sociocultural theory appear to give ample recognition to cultural dimensions of learning. However, a number of concerns should be registered. First, despite strong claims about dialectic relationships of individual and context, theorists frequently fail to consider the concrete social organisation of activity. ‘In the field of cultural psychology it is exceedingly rare to find a concrete discussion of culture … It is even less usual to find cultural psychologists connecting … features of a social system in a meaningful way to psychological phenomena’ (Ratner, 1996, p 2). Second, while there has been, following Scribner (1984), significant work focused upon learning in the workplace and other naturalistic settings, much research in the field centres upon classroom- or other institution-based interactions between teachers and learners. This latter work ‘obscures the broader cultural and political concerns that are central to the perspective’ (Renshaw, 1992, p 1). Third, the primary concerns of many theorists in the field are with the development of mind and higher psychological functions, giving rise to an ‘imbalance’ in the individual-culture dialectic. This one-sidedness, or mentalist tendency, has been noted by a number of critics including Ratner (op cit.). Packer (1993), for instance, has criticised sociocultural theory’s use of the concept of ‘internalization’, claiming that it promotes a dualism between the internal and the external: ‘the processes and mechanisms being examined keep creeping back inside the head’ (John-Steiner and Mahn, 1996, p 197).

There is evidently a wide range of interpretations and applications of activity theory and, while a regard for the cultural-historical dynamics of sociocultural processes and for the individual-context dialectic is evident in some works, others display a marked mentalist tendency or a failure to relate the complexities of learning to their wider cultural contexts. Similarly, educational anthropology, or situativity theory, claims

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learning to be a culturally situated phenomenon. However, not only do studies frequently portray learners as somewhat passive, guided by ‘experts’ or ‘masters’ with little regard for their active construction of knowledge (Hughes and Greenhough, 1998), they take little account of the complex relational and continually changing patterns of cultural experience.

While many such theoretical approaches may be criticised for understating the significance of culture, the anthropological works of such figures as Geertz, Schneider and Sahlins have been criticised for their heavy reliance upon cultural explanations to the exclusion of other possibilities. At the end of his comprehensive tour of the anthropological uses of culture, Adam Kuper argues that whilst these works do constitute a “success story”, the various “critical experiments in cultural determinism … fail when they overreach themselves and presume that culture rules, and that other factors can be excluded from the study of cultural processes and social behaviour” (Kuper, 1999, p. 246). Extending an argument from the cognitive anthropologist D’Andrade, Kuper wants us to consider the “pieces” of culture and their “relations to other things”, rather than expecting cultural explanations to be sufficient.

Kuper mentions both Foucault and Bourdieu as theorists who insist on “relations with other things” (such as power, or institutions) in this connection. But what notion of culture is to be found in Bourdieu’s writing, and what sorts of relations does it give us cause to attend to, especially if we wish to study something as diverse as learning?

Bourdieu and culture

Bourdieu’s notion of culture grows from a critical position in relation to the anthropological

heritage (Bourdieu, 1977). It refuses to come down on the side of either subjectivist or objectivist readings:

There is a continual dialectic between objectivity and subjectivity. Social agents are incorporated bodies who possess, indeed, are possessed by structural, generative schemes which operate by orienting social practice. This, in a nutshell, is Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Practice, the dynamic of which is probably better captured by the word praxis, is a cognitive operation; it is structured and tends to reproduce structures of which it is a product. We are, of course, not simply repeating actions endlessly. Evolution and change in practice do occur. However, it comes about, not so much through the replication of action but its reproduction. Reproduction implies both variation and limitation in what is and is not possible in the behaviour, thought and physical action of people (Grenfell and James, 1998, p 12).

A range of conceptual tools are on offer to help us investigate the social world within this theory of practice, which also claims to be a theory-as-method. They include habitus and field: the former, a durable but transposable set of dispositions, representing the physical and mental embodiment of the social but at the same time offering choices, played out in what Bourdieu terms strategy; the latter, a structured system of social relations at micro and macro level, rather like a field of forces in which positions are defined relationally, that is, in relation to each other. Usually there are particular and discernable forms of capital at stake in a field, commonly economic, social or cultural or

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some combination of these. Conceptual tools such as these provide the researcher with a “way of thinking and a manner of asking questions” (Mahar et al, 1990, p.3) and promise to help them avoid constructing reified ‘types’ and ‘categories’ in the way that much social science does (talking of “the adult learner”, “the mature student” or “the disaffected learner” and the like). Bourdieu's approach holds out the possibility of producing descriptions, explanations and understandings of complex social practices without reducing them to either mentalistic or social variables. It also counsels against the tendency to obscure social practices by seeing them only as manifestations of a particular theory or model (e.g., rational choice theory): to do so is, in Bourdieu's terms, to confuse “the model of reality with the reality of the model”. The approach is furthermore characterised by a radical notion of reflexivity, wherein the background and interests of the investigator, and in particular their relation to the object of study, are of primary concern.

Bourdieu insists that he has absolutely no wish to be part of abstract “theoretical” discussions that are detached from the world of practice (see for example Bourdieu, 1989, p 50). He argues that his approach is a theory-as-method, and only makes sense in relation to empirical matters. It may be helpful at this point to describe an example of the sort of analysis that emerges when some part of the social world is examined via this approach. Let us mention one that is not our own.

In a recent article entitled Bourdieu, social suffering and working class life, Simon Charlesworth provides a very good illustration of what can be done to illuminate what some might describe from its outward signs as “the culture of poverty”. Charlesworth’s account is based on interpretations of a series of direct quotations from some of the poorest people in Rotherham in the UK. What comes across very clearly is the mutual accommodation of habitus and field (though Charlesworth uses Merleau-Ponty’s closely related notion of primacy of perception to emphasise the notion of a “horizon” (cf. horizons for action in Hodkinson et al, 1996).

Having suggested that an economic and social “levelling” has occurred (which we take to mean in the sense that a bomb might be said to “level” a building), accompanied for these people by a profound sense of vulnerability and insecurity, Charlesworth continues:

A peculiar effect of domination is that many of the most dispossessed seem unaware of the extent to which their life is circumscribed by such conditions. Conditions of dispropriation mean that people do not have access to the resources; the instruments through which their understanding might begin to constitute a concrete sense of the limits of life and, paradoxically, the more fully the limits of life enforce themselves, the more powerfully people inscribe a sense of this life as the only life possible…there can be little incentive, (there could be no interest) in developing other forms of consciousness beyond those of the ‘mindless’ everyday coping skills through which it makes sense to live such conditions. To begin to develop forms of consciousness that make the world consciously problematic, something to be thought about; to move away from the efficiency of habits attuned to life in this world would be to invite a slide from semi-conscious frustration to absurdity and transform ordinary unhappiness into misery. Living life in the context of minimal expectations, the only strategy that

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makes practical sense is to maintain an ignorance of anything better, to kill one’s hopes (Charlesworth, 2000, p 54).

This argument, amply supported by data, is not to be read as yet another form of cultural determinism. The people Charlesworth interviewed all have and make choices, all make decisions, all function as agents. The point is that they do so from a habitus, i.e. within a sense of reality or a sense of limits, which for the most part is not experienced as “constraint”; and that these limits are socially located and reproduced, not least (though not only) by their own actions. Evidence of the dynamic nature of this mutual adjustment of habitus and field may be seen a further example of Charlesworth’s data. A man who had lost his job a short time earlier described how hard it was to cope initially, but how after a while “yer brain starts to work differently”, quite separately from any self-willed response. We may be tempted to describe this as nothing more than a lowering of expectations, though if we do we are forcing the issue back into the realm of the individual and their personality. In fact much more is being suggested here: a re-adjustment that is experienced as automatic and which cannot be adequately characterised as either conscious or unconscious (perhaps it is both), and the reproduction of a category and the sets of possibilities that accompany particular positions in a field of (un-)employment. Bourdieu’s term for this is “the subjective expectation of objective probability”, or ontological complicity. One of the authors investigated similar adjustments in a very different setting (i.e., a group of mature students in higher education), with people whose access to material and other resources puts them worlds apart from Charlesworth’s interviewees. These people experienced dramatic positive and negative shifts in their sense of self-worth which appeared to be related to (but seemed completely out of proportion with) shifts in the distribution of the capital at stake in that particular field, namely grades on assessed work (see James, 2000).

There are three points we would like to take from the brief presentation of these examples. Firstly, we would advocate great caution is necessary in the way that we interpret even quite established concepts (such as the distinction between conscious and unconscious, or “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” motivation, or concepts like “internalisation”). These concepts, and their paradigmatic illustrations, may be useful, but they are to be appreciated in relation to the scientific communities and interests that produced them and are not to be granted an automatic authority. The related idea that we are adding to a body of knowledge about learning in some simple cumulative sense is clearly problematic.

Secondly, we suggest that a study of learning must focus not simply upon temporally or spacially prescribed learning sites categorised in terms of institutions, curricula, subjects and timetables (e.g., college; Advanced GNVQ; engineering; Thursdays, 3.00-4.30pm), and which dominate in the popular discourse, but upon authentic learning sites. Authentic learning sites include, potentially, much of what is recognised in formally prescribed learning opportunities, but they also include much that is not prescribed such as home, peer group and personal relations, accidents, career and other aspirations, and even sleep. They are endowed with meaning – the meanings, sometimes idiosyncratic and sometimes shared, that individuals bring to their learning and that they construct and re-construct in the course of their learning. They are ‘elastic’ and vary not only from individual to individual, but even in an individual case, from moment to moment. Moreover, they are situated within wider social, cultural,

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economic, political and moral networks and have to be understood in terms of such situativity. The authentic learning site, so described, is the learning culture.

Thirdly, we would suggest that research and scholarship must recognise learning not simply as occurring within a cultural context but as a cultural practice. It must take as its focus the practices of people in their authentic learning sites and avoid the alchemy that so readily turns students and teachers into instances of a category, into a species, or alternatively has them as the mere carriers of cultures or cognitive operations. The habituses of both learners and teachers will be important to an understanding of learning sites and activities and of what happens (or does not happen) within them.

Finally, it is worth noting that there seem to us to be a number of points of potential affinity between a general approach informed by Bourdieu, and some recent sociocultural thinking. In his recent work James Wertsch (1996, 1998) presents arguments about both the need for a refined sociocultural approach and what might constitute its primary concerns. Whilst there is not the space here for a detailed or comprehensive treatment of this general point, it is nevertheless worth mentioning a small number of examples of what we mean by “potential affinity”.

The first is that Wertsch argues that there is a pressing need to develop explanations that cross, link or disrupt disciplinary boundaries, and draws on the work of other theorists who do this (e.g. Wertsch, 1998, p. 5). This is also characteristic of Bourdieu's approach. Secondly, and citing Norbert Elias amongst others, Wertsch reminds us of the need for an end to counterproductive oscillations between over-privileging either the individual or society in our accounts of social action: we have to find ways to “live in the middle … of several different analytic perspectives” (Wertsch, 1998, p 16). Mediated action should be the focus, and this is irreducible to either pole of the dichotomy. Though he arrives having taken quite a different route, Bourdieu’s social theory presents us with a similar lesson. Thirdly, Wertsch draws on both Dewey and Kenneth Burke to argue that the theorist should offer a method rather than a set of representations of reality: in other words, he argues for a theory-as-method. To this end he presents Burke's pentad of generating principles around action (Act, Scene, Agent, Agency and Purpose) and the accompanying argument that all need addressing without any being overemphasised. Furthermore, Burke recognised that we cannot be all-knowing, and that

…there must remain something essentially engimatic about the problem of motives, and that this underlying enigma will manifest itself in inevitable ambiguities and inconsistencies among the terms for motives. Accordingly, what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise (Burke, 1969, p xviii, quoted in Wertsch, 1998, p 15).

Fourthly, Wertsch is interested in exploring the interplay of “constraint” and “affordance” of action by the available cultural tools, and linked to this the way in which people do not for the most part experience constraints as constraints. He suggests that there is an “illusion of perspective” around cultural tools in a time and a place, such that they seem “timeless and natural” (Wertsch, 1998, p. 45). For Bourdieu, both habitus and strategy are at issue in social practices, the one referring to an embodied social location (position) which gives a sense of reality and limits (disposition), the other referring to the myriad choices we all have all the time for choosing a course of

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action. As for an illusion of perspective, Bourdieu’s notion of meconnaisance (misrecognition) refers to a similar, though sociologically framed point, in that (for example) differences between educational institutions, courses or qualifications are for the most part ignored in terms of the social (class) differentiation that they reproduce. This is not quite as straightforward an idea as “illusion”, though has parallels with the illusion we enjoy when watching a conjurer sawing a person in half: Bourdieu’s term implies a sense of “knowing whilst acting and reacting as if we did not know”.

It is our view that an approach to the study of learning that is informed by Bourdieu’s theory-as-method can give appropriate attention to culture and that it will allow us to arrive at new understandings of learning in authentic sites. We would also suggest that such an approach has some interesting and potentially fruitful affinities with some sociocultural work.

Transforming learning cultures in further education

The Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (FE) or TLC project was announced in September 2000 as part of the ESRC-funded Teaching and Learning Research Programme. It is a four-year longitudinal study which is expressly focused upon learning in authentic settings sites with particular regard to the cultural experiences of the learners concerned. The aims of the project are threefold:

(i) to deepen understanding of the complexities of learning;

(ii) to identify, implement and evaluate strategies for the improvement of learning opportunities; and

(iii) to set in place an enhanced and lasting capacity among practitioners for enquiry into FE practice.

The research will entail an intensive examination of educational practice, learning and learning cultures. It will be based upon a partnership between four universities and four FE-sector colleges from the North, Midlands and South of England. It will entail close collaboration between FE- and university-based researchers and FE teachers, students and managers and will be integrated with existing communities of practice. Because of this, it is expected that it will impact strongly upon the practices of those involved.

A key aspect of the authenticity of learning sites to be addressed is the complexity of relationships between teachers, teaching, learners, learning, learning situations and the widest contexts of learning. In the TLC project, we attach importance to the term, ‘culture’, to indicate these complex relationships and we aim to discover, within a variety of settings, what a culture of learning is.

The project design is based upon a ‘nested case study’ approach, since it is in cases that the full complexity of the inter-relationships of the FE learning field can be most readily identified. The cases will be chosen at two levels of scale. At the first level, four case study FE colleges have been selected and the design of the project negotiated with their key staff. The colleges are of different types, serving different catchment areas, in different parts of England. Each college is a field in its own right, and there are some common institutional positions, relations and procedures. A

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comparison between the four, supplemented by the investigation of the national historical, social, economic and political contexts of FE, will give a clear understanding of the ways in which the national FE field impacts upon the practices of tutors and students in the college cases.

At the second level, within each college, four learning sites have been chosen, providing 16 across the whole project. They have been selected to cover the widest a range of learning situations, circumstances and learners possible. Variables considered in their selection have been: mode of attendance on college course, level of ability/qualification, academic and vocational subjects, locations (such as classrooms, workshops, outreach, workplace, distance learning, e-learning), student populations (considering class, gender, age and ethnicity) and tutor backgrounds (including gender, age, ethnicity, experience). In addition to the more ‘mainstream’ A-level and vocational course students, the sites include adult returners to learning in the form of Access students, 14-16 year-old vocational studies pupils, those on occupationally-specific day-release programmes (working for first or second level NVQ qualifications or Higher National Diplomas), students on a ‘young mothers’ programme, and distance learners studying independently or on ‘outreach’ community education programmes. Each will be studied in relation to its college context, within the wider national situation already referred to.

The notion learning culture is broader and more ‘elastic’ and complex than that of learning site alone. We intend to use the term, learning culture, to include the time and space within which learning occurs and, also, those persons or material conditions whose presence impinges upon learning whether they are the subject of formal prescription or not. It thus includes conventional class meetings of recognised student groups and their tutors, but it may also include work experience, private study, recreation, family life, personal relationships and other cultural experiences. But, as we have already said, learning cultures consist of shared and contested meanings whose perpetual evolution lies at the very heart of learning processes.

By building the TLC project around a notion of learning culture, we hope to be able to move beyond that popular conception of learning as an activity that is bounded by teaching, educational institutions and learning prescriptions, to one which recognises that learning invariably transcends such boundaries. We have alluded already to the ‘lateral connectivity’ of learning, namely that it relates to phenomena whose physical existence lies well outside formally prescribed learning environments and may include parents, friends, community, personal aspirations and opportunity structures, identity, vocational intentions, personal relationships and a host of other considerations. We have also mentioned its ‘temporal connectivity’: how one set of learning experiences connect with others that precede or follow it (Bloomer, in press). Both of these notions will need to be borne firmly in mid if we are to exploit the full potential of our concepts of authentic learning site and learning culture. Moreover, as recent research in neuroscience reminds us, learning is not necessarily a conscious activity and occurs even during sleep (Maquet et al, 2000).

Our work with each of the 16 learning sites will focus on a particular class or group of learners and their interactions with each other and with their participating tutor. The tutor will be a partner in the research process, and will keep a detailed field diary of her/his relevant activities and observations for the duration of the research. Six students from each site will be selected for detailed study. They will be chosen to

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represent the range of students normally encountered in that particular site, paying careful attention to gender, social class, ethnicity, age (in a mixed age group) and prior educational attainments. They will be volunteers, prepared to share in the activity of the project. Tutors and the selected students will all be interviewed twice a year for three years or for the duration of their engagement in the case study group. In addition, students will be interviewed on one further occasion, several weeks after they have left. We anticipate an interview sample of between 12 and 24 students for each site and an overall sample for the project of approximately 240. This cohort approach will allow longitudinal change in learning and in dispositions to learning to be mapped. The interviews will be semi-structured, balancing commonality across the project with opportunities to investigate the particular interests and circumstances of the subjects. Interviews will explore dispositions to learning and will include respondents’ accounts of recent learning experiences, their views of what constitutes effective or desirable learning, and their future hopes and intentions. They will also encourage respondents to make reference to their lives beyond their college programmes, enabling learning and learning cultures to be examined in relation to a wide range of human experiences.

Interviews will be supplemented by observations of learning and teaching. These will follow a common schedule, but with flexibility to fit divergent situations, and will be carried out twice a term for three years. The prime focus of these observations will be the learning activities undertaken, and the inter-relationships among students and between students and tutor. Observations will incorporate informal discussions with tutors and students, and participation in activities where appropriate. Though notes will be made during the observed sessions, key data recording will be carried out immediately after the observation is completed. Observations and interviews will be methodologically linked. Insights gathered from observations, as they concern individual cases, will be used in the planning of subsequent interviews with those individuals. At the same time, interviews will be used to alert observers to issues that they might take into account in later observations.

The project will also include an annual questionnaire survey of all students located in the 16 learning sites. Half of the questionnaire sample will figure in the interview sample and half will not, thus enabling comparisons between those two sub-groups to be made. The questionnaire will be developed and piloted during the six-month preparation phase of the project and has three linked purposes:

(i) to indicate changes in students’ dispositions that may occur over time, enabling those changes to be examined in the light of changes in tutors’ and others’

practices;

(ii) to allow the smaller sample of interviewed students to be grounded within the population from which they are drawn, enabling quantitative data to illuminate the qualitative material and vice versa;

(iii) by progressive refinement of the questionnaire, to enable relationships between intervention, practice, culture and learning to be more readily discerned.

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There are no precedents for a study of learning in authentic settings in FE that remains empirically grounded and which addresses the cultural complexity of learning. Work of this type requires an enabling theoretical approach that will provide methodological focus without a premature ‘closing down’ of analytical possibilities. To this end, the project will make heuristic use of the concepts and approaches developed in the work of Bourdieu, described above. There are four principal reasons for this choice, as follows.

Firstly, Bourdieu’s theory-as-method offers researchers a relational approach to educational problems that emphasises the mutual interdependence of social constraint and individual volition, or ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. Social practices are understood as having both an objective and a subjective reality at one and the same moment. Complex human relations and activities can be understood via theoretical tools such as habitus and field that enable the ‘unpacking’ of social practices in social spaces. Habitus and field are mutually constituting, a point of considerable practical importance to the way that the actions of tutors, students and others are studied and understood.

Secondly, a Bourdieuian approach necessitates working across discipline boundaries and challenges researchers to think in new ways about familiar variables and the disciplinary location of these variables. An example of this is the challenge the approach presents to the common-sense distinction between conscious and unconscious sources of motivation.

Thirdly, the approach promotes a robust form of reflexivity of sufficient strength for the goals of the project, for example drawing attention to the relative social positionings of researchers and those they study and the implications of this for knowledge generation.

Fourthly, there is evidence that Bourdieu’s ‘theory-as-method’, and in particular the stance it promotes in relation to culture, can bring fresh insight to bear on the understanding of educational issues and settings (Grenfell and James, 1998).

Bourdieu emphasises the relationship between disposition and position (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). A person’s habitus is influenced by who the person is and where in society they are positioned, and by their interactions with others. The project will examine the ways in which students and tutors interact with each other, centring upon the actual learning activities undertaken. But it will also examine wider aspects of interaction, in settings beyond those formally designated for learning. Findings from learning sites will be compared in order to illuminate features that are common across most or all of them, the nature of any differences between them, and the reasons for such similarities and differences.

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Conclusion: some pertinent questions

Our TLC project has been designed with a certain view of culture in mind. It has also been designed on the basis of a number of assumptions about how learning might usefully be theorised. But it has in addition been designed to allow our conceptualisations of culture, learning and educational practice to be further developed and refined. Thus, we expect that the early phases of the project will result in some clarification or modification of our initial ideas and standpoints.

It is therefore important that, throughout, we retain an open mind about theoretical possibilities and opportunities and it is in such a spirit of ‘open-mindedness’ that we present this paper. Thus, we have chosen to conclude with a set of questions around which we hope further discussion will take place.

1. In so far as we have described ‘cultures of learning’ here, how adequate or complete do you consider those descriptions to be?

2. How might our use of the notion of ‘authentic learning site’ be usefully developed, given our interests in gaining access to learning cultures?

3. What scope is there for exploring the apparent synergy between a Bourdieu-inspired and a socio-cultural approach to culture?

4. Are the strategies that we have in mind for the TLC project adequate for the purposes of uncovering and deepening understanding of cultures of learning?

Notes

[1] ‘Connectivity’ concerns, firstly, how activity connects (laterally) with context and with the life experiences of the actors concerned and, secondly, how it connects (temporally) with those experiences and activities which precede or follow it (see Bloomer, in press).

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Beach, K. (1995) ‘Activity as a Mediator of Sociocultural Change and Individual Development: the case of school-work transition in Nepal’ in Mind, Culture and Activity, 2, 4, pp 285-302.

Bereiter, C. (1994) ‘Constructivism, Socioculturalism, and Popper’s World 3’ in Educational Researcher, 23, 7, pp 21-23.

Bloomer, M. (in press) ‘Young Lives, Learning and Transformation: some theoretical considerations’ in Oxford Review of Education.

Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Addresses for Correspondence

David James,Faculty of Education,University of the West of England, Bristol,Redland Campus,Bristol, BS6 6UZ, UKTel: 0117-344 4215e-mail: David.James@uwe.ac.uk

Martin BloomerUniversity of Exeter School of Education,Heavitree Road,Exeter, Devon, EX1 2LU, UK

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Tel: 01392-264848e-mail (until September 2001): martinbloomer@hotmail.com

(from September 2001): J.M.Bloomer@ex.ac.uk

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