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This article was downloaded by: [Gebze Yuksek Teknoloji Enstitïsu ]On: 20 December 2014, At: 05:18Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Learning Cultures in Further EducationPhil Hodkinson a , Graham Anderson b , Helen Colley c , JennyDavies d , Kim Diment e , Tony Scaife a , Mike Tedder d , MadeleineWahlberg b & Eunice Wheeler ea University of Leeds , UKb University of Warwick , UKc Manchester Metropolitan University , UKd University of Exeter , UKe University of West of England , Bristol, UKPublished online: 09 Nov 2007.
To cite this article: Phil Hodkinson , Graham Anderson , Helen Colley , Jenny Davies , Kim Diment ,Tony Scaife , Mike Tedder , Madeleine Wahlberg & Eunice Wheeler (2007) Learning Cultures inFurther Education, Educational Review, 59:4, 399-413, DOI: 10.1080/00131910701619290
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Learning Cultures in Further Education
Phil Hodkinson*a, Graham Andersonb, Helen Colleyc,Jenny Daviesd, Kim Dimente, Tony Scaifea, Mike Tedderd,Madeleine Wahlbergb and Eunice Wheelere
aUniversity of Leeds, UK; bUniversity of Warwick, UK; cManchester Metropolitan
University, UK; dUniversity of Exeter, UK; eUniversity of West of England, Bristol, UK
This paper examines the nature of learning cultures in English Further Education (FE), as
revealed in the Transforming Learning Cultures in FE (TLC) research project. In it, we describe
four characteristics of a generic FE learning culture: the significance of learning cultures in every
site; the significance of the tutor in influencing site learning cultures; the often negative impact of
policy and management approaches; and the ever-present issue of course status. We go on to
different types of learning cultures within FE related to the degrees of synergy and conflict between
the multiple influences on learning in those sites. In general, sites with greater synergy have more
effective learning, pointing to valuable new ways to further improve learning. However, such
synergy is sometimes difficult to achieve, and brings further problems in its train. It is important to
separate out judgments about learning effectiveness, from equally important ones about learning
value. The conceptions of the latter varied from site to site, and were often contested.
Introduction
This paper sets out an overview of the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further
Education (TLC) project findings about the nature of learning cultures in English
Further Education (FE). In order to do this, it has been necessary to reference off
much of the empirical and conceptual detail, to retain a clear focus and manageable
length. The TLC set out to investigate learning within English FE from a broadly
cultural perspective. Our starting assumption was that all of the following influenced
learning in the sector:
N the positions, dispositions and actions of the students;
N the positions, dispositions and actions of the tutors;
N the location and resources of the learning site which are not neutral, but enable
some approaches and attitudes, and constrain or prevent others;
*Corresponding author: School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT,
UK. Email: [email protected]
Educational Review
Vol. 59, No. 4, November 2007, pp. 399–413
ISSN 0013-1911 (print)/ISSN 1465-3397 (online)/07/040399-15
# 2007 Educational Review
DOI: 10.1080/00131910701619290
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N the syllabus or course specification, the assessment and qualification specifica-
tions;
N the time tutors and students spend together, their inter-relationships, and the
range of other learning sites students are engaged with;
N issues of college management and procedures, together with funding and
inspection body procedures and regulations, and government policy;
N wider vocational and academic cultures, of which any learning site is part;
N wider social and cultural values and practices, for example around issues of social
class, gender and ethnicity, the nature of employment opportunities, social and
family life, and the perceived status of FE as a sector.
We were interested in identifying whether or not this assumption was correct and,
assuming it was, understanding the inter-relationships between these factors. At the
start, we used the term ‘learning culture’ very loosely to express this purpose. We
collected data (repeated observations, interviews, questionnaires, and tutors logs) in
17 different sites of learning in four different FE colleges (see James and Biesta
(2007) for a fuller account of the project, and Postlethwaite, in this issue, for a fuller
account of the project methodology). We chose these 17 sites to be different from
each other, through a complex process of negotiation with the four colleges we were
working with. We could never represent the huge variety of learning in FE with such
a small sample, but nevertheless wanted to capture the extent of variations. The sites
sampled are listed in Table 1.
As the research progressed, not only were our starting assumptions about the
significance of all the factors confirmed, but we were also surprised by just how
different the learning cultures across our sites were. The large variation in learning
provision in FE is well known (Huddleston & Unwin, 2002). Despite this, the
Table 1. The sample sites
Administration, business and technology NVQ levels 2/3
Administration & IT (14–16 year olds)
Advanced Vocational Certificate in Education Travel and Tourism
BTEC National Diploma in Health Studies
CACHE Diploma, nursery nursing
Course for school leavers with learning difficulties
English for speakers of other languages (roll on, roll off)
Entry Level Drama
GNVQ Intermediate Business Studies
Basic IT skills by distance learning
IT by distance learning (modular & flexible)
Mature students support, in learning centre
National Certificate in Electronics and Telecommunications (2 years; day release)
One year course in parenting, for young mothers
Photography (BTEC levels+City & Guilds; 2 years full or part time)
Psychology AS level
Modern languages AS level
400 P. Hodkinson et al.
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received wisdom in the sector, reinforced by official teaching standards and
inspection criteria, is that good teaching has universal characteristics, which apply in
all situations. By implication learning also has strong universal characteristics—
otherwise, claims to standardize teaching would make little sense. Although many of
the TLC team were sceptical about these official criteria, we were still taken by
surprise when we discovered just how different learning and teaching were in our 17
sites. Each site was unique, in central rather than trivial ways.
As we attempted to explain and understand these differences, so our thinking
about the nature of learning cultures was refined and sharpened. This work is
presented in Hodkinson, Biesta and James, in this issue. In essence, we used
Bourdieu’s concept of field, understood as ‘field of force’, to explain the complex
workings of a learning culture. However, as is explained in that paper, a learning
culture does not have precise boundaries, and the field of force operates at all scales
of investigation, from the individual learner, to macro issues of social structure and
globalization. Furthermore, all places where people live and interact has a learning
culture, which is the practices through which people learn in that place. These social
practices include but are not limited to micro-politics (Ball, 1987) as well as macro-
politics, at a national and European Union level.
A very important consequence of this finding is that to improve learning, learning
cultures need to be enhanced. This can be done through teacher/tutor intervention,
which is the almost universal approach to improvement in academic literature, in
UK policy, and in FE college practice. However, other aspects of any learning
culture can facilitate or undermine such tutor interventions (James and Wahlberg, in
this issue). An understanding of a learning culture is necessary to make clearer what
can be achieved and what cannot, and also helps identify other changes to the
learning culture that could be beneficial, which lie outside a tutor’s influence.
Because learning cultures operate at a variety of scales, and because FE is
managed largely as a separate sector in the UK,1 it was important to know
the common characteristics of the learning culture for FE as a whole. However, the
research showed clearly that when attempting to improve learning in FE, the
specifics of the learning culture in any site (course, classroom, workshop, distance
learning centre, etc.) are of fundamental importance. The complexity and
relationality of those learning cultures (Hodkinson, Biesta and James, in this issue)
means that interventions at national policy or even specific college management
level, will affect the learning cultures in different sites very differently. However, our
analysis also revealed significant differences in the types of relationships that
comprised the fields of force in these learning cultures. This provided a valuable
means of classifying types of learning culture, which in turn provides a new but
potentially valuable way of identifying the limits of possible change in any learning
site, and identifying ways in which the learning in such a site can be further
enhanced. In what follows, we first describe the common factors in the learning
culture of the FE sector, and then present the details of our typology of site learning
cultures.2 The paper finishes with a brief conclusion about the significance of this
analysis.
Learning Cultures in FE 401
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Commonalities in the FE learning culture
Despite the risk of tautology, perhaps the most significant point to make about the
FE learning culture is that every site within it has its own distinctive and often very
different features. Also, informal learning is ubiquitously important, whilst often
remaining out of view as attention focuses on more explicit, formalized attributes of
learning (Hodkinson & Colley, 2005).
The next commonly significant element in the FE learning culture was the
universal significance of the tutor. In all sites, they were pivotal in mediating the
various forces in the field, and always had a significant influence on the learning and
on the students. The nature of that influence was partly 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 the tutor
had established it. In such cases, there was often an initial period of enthusiasm,
backed up by a commitment and work involvement that far exceeded anything
specified in formal job descriptions. This state of affairs often changed. Sometimes
the tutor him/herself changes, or conditions and pressures can change the nature of
the site, undermining the tutor’s commitment to it. Sometimes what began as one
tutor’s idea changed as someone else took over.
Most tutors 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 many forces in the site culture, and influenced the
detailed practices of that culture in ways that fitted with their personal sense of
good practice. Others found themselves in situations that they disliked or found
alienating. This could be disempowering, as tutors felt prevented from doing what
they believed to be right. Furthermore, changes in the professional positions and
identities of tutors could influence their dispositions and practices. A 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 a specific site could
also change. A site that seemed of central importance at the early stages of this
progression may have become much more marginal later. Changes like this were
sometimes gradual, but could be more dramatic and even traumatic. Some tutors
were moved away from sites where they wanted to work by management. One
tutor resigned from her job because a combination of job-restructuring and college
reorganization put her into a context where she felt she could not continue as a
tutor. For 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 many examples of
underground working, where tutors were doing things that they were not supposed
to do, but which were central to the successes in those sites (James & Diment,
402 P. Hodkinson et al.
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2003). Many prioritized students’ needs, often working against the system to
maximize student achievement. Learning in FE depended upon the tutors, in ways
that often make unreasonable demands, are rarely recognized and supported in the
system, and often are seriously undermined.
This links with another major part of the FE learning culture, which influences all
sites—national and college policy, funding and practice. At the time of the fieldwork,
many of those impacts were damaging learning. The root of the problem lay in two
pressures. The first was inadequate financial resourcing and funding that can fluctuate
wildly from year to year. FE college provision is more poorly funded than provision in
schools or higher education, and there was constant pressure to increase income and
reduce costs. The second pressure came from a deep technicism that was central to
policy and management approaches. (This second problem is widespread in English
education, see Walsh (2006).) Teaching was seen as a matter of developing better
techniques and applying them. Learning supposedly entailed 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 external inspection criteria (see Coffield et al. (2005) for a fuller
discussion of these issues, in relation to the role of the Learning and Skills Council, the
quango tasked by the government with managing FE).
Across all sites, 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 reorganization crisis came along. (All four of our partner colleges went
through at least one major reorganization during the 3-year fieldwork period.) In
other sites, particular changes introduced within this overall management logic
became unbearable for the tutor concerned. When we look at all 17 sites over the 3
years of the fieldwork, it is hard to identify major policy or managerial initiatives
which contributed to the improvement of learning in any site. However, we can
document several examples of such initiatives that made successful learning less
likely. Tutors protected their students from these pressures as far as they could, and
this was a major factor in overwork and stress.
The final major element in the learning culture of FE was the issue of status. FE
deals predominantly with the lower levels of the English social class system, and
emphasizes provision for those who are seen by others or who see themselves as having
failed at learning. The highest status courses in our sample, the two academic AS
courses, did include some middle-class students, but mainly lower middle class.
However, within this limiting parameter, our sites demonstrated the universal impact
of complex hierarchies of status, by student intake, course level and content, and tutor
identity. This issue of status was most explicit in the vocational courses. Here there
were commonly voiced concerns by tutors about the relative status of one vocational
course as compared to another, and, for the ‘higher’ ones, the relative status with
‘academic’ subjects. This replicated the perennially on-going national debate about
vocational curriculum status in the UK, often hidden beneath concerns for standards
Learning Cultures in FE 403
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(see, for example, Finegold et al., 1990, DfES, 2004). In addition to tutor concerns,
these issues played out in relation to admissions criteria and procedures. In contrast,
some students saw their vocational courses as of higher status than their prior
expectations and the experiences of their friends and family members.
The second group of courses where status was an obvious concern are those at the
bottom of the hierarchy—for example the two special needs courses, a course
supporting mothers, and English for speakers of another language (ESOL) course,
etc. For such courses, the very low status could work in contrasting ways. It often
rendered them insecure, subject more than other courses to the enthusiasms of a
particular tutor, of college management, or of policy (the latter because some of
them are explicitly developed to meet a latest policy initiative, which may itself be
short-lived). However, some of these low status courses seemed partly immune to
some current managerial pressures. They lay below the gaze of senior management,
and inspectors seemed to de-emphasize some of their apparently universal criteria
for good teaching. There was often a convenient compromise over achievement and
outcomes, using local certificates, or qualifications that are below level 1. (Level 1 is
the lowest level of nationally approved qualifications in the UK.) This protected
state was more likely if the site helped the college demonstrate that it was meeting a
major policy target, and if funding was adequate. In all such sites in our sample,
students were highly appreciative of tutor support and relations and many talked of
increasing confidence as a result of participating, but for many, educational
progression and/or progression to the labour market remained problematic.
For the two high status academic courses in our sample, status was significant
largely by not being explicitly mentioned. The status related pressures here focussed
on difficult external assessments, which had to be completed in a very short time.
Also, given the status of FE and the pattern of student recruitment, progression was
more likely to post-1992 universities than to more prestigious institutions (Ball et al.,
2000).
In all sites status was intimately wrapped up in issues of identity for tutors and
students. This was not just a matter of social class. In some low status sites minority
ethnic groupings were significant, and many sites were strongly gendered. These
issues of identity and of individual student and tutor disposition lie beyond the scope
of this paper, but remain crucial in understanding and explaining the learning of
students in our sites. From this perspective, ‘status’ is an indicator of deeper issues of
social inequality.
When we combine these FE-wide factors, our analysis, shows that there is ‘an FE
learning culture’, and that its effects are significant. However, the impact of this FE
learning culture is different from one site to another. We focus on ways to make
sense of site differences next.
Types of learning culture
As is explained more fully in Hodkinson, Biesta and James (this issue), by focussing
our research on each site, and by exploring complex inter-relationships in the
404 P. Hodkinson et al.
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learning cultures, we were following a long tradition of studies of learning which
have adopted what Sfard (1998) terms a participation metaphor of learning. Such
studies, she argues, see learning as a process of participation, for example in
communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) or activity systems (Engestrom,
2001). The origin of such studies lies predominantly outside educational settings, in
workplaces and in everyday life. One very early seminal contribution to this sort of
thinking was by Brown et al. (1989). They set out the differences between what they
termed authentic everyday learning and learning in school. Authentic learning
occurred when concepts, contexts and activities were mutually supportive—in
synergy. School learning, they argued, was less effective because the concepts being
taught were at odds with the context (a school) and with the activities—student
tasks, rather than everyday practice. This point about synergy should not be
misunderstood. Brown et al. (1989) are not claiming that somehow, everyday life is
without conflict. They were claiming, in ways relevant to what follows, that what
they term authenticity enhances learning.
As we compared the 17 site learning cultures within the TLC project, the issue of
synergy and conflict figured largely. We disagree with Brown et al.’s use of the term
‘authentic’, which suggests that school or college learning is somehow ‘unauthentic’
and therefore always second best. Our research showed some very effective learning in
many of our college sites. Also, when set against the range of factors we were
considering, the scope of Brown et al.’s (1989) concept of authenticity was too
narrowly drawn. Instead, we use the terms convergence, divergence, synergy and
conflict to understand the workings of learning cultures. Convergence occurs when
the forces between different factors are pushing or pulling in broadly the same
direction. Synergy is a stronger term used when that convergence results in strongly
reinforcing forces acting largely together, and is roughly analogous to what Brown et al.
(1989) meant by ‘authentic’. Divergence is the opposite of convergence, and can
result in tensions between forces, or conflicts between them, when different forces
‘pull’ the learning culture in contrasting ways. We next describe briefly three types of
learning culture found within the sites in the project: sites predominated by
convergence and synergy, sites predominated by divergence and conflict, and sites
where there were more even mixtures of both. It is important to remember that these
are relative descriptions. Every learning culture in the study has some convergence and
some divergence, some synergy and some conflict. There were conflicts in every site.
Cultures of convergence and synergy
In the TLC sites where convergence and synergy was strongest, learning was
generally very successful. For example, in the nursery-nursing site much of the
learning culture was synergistic, geared towards learning to become a nursery nurse.
Similarly, in the below level 1 drama course, there was a strong convergence of
dispositions, attitudes and pressures, towards what can be described as learning and
enjoying being in a play, but also learning and enjoying being in a second family. In
the site providing beginner information technology (IT) skills by distance learning,
Learning Cultures in FE 405
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there was a strong synergy also. This time, there was a complex blend of simple
structured curriculum and learning tasks, complex and technical systems of record-
keeping, assignment logging, etc., tutors who were at the end of a phone or email
constantly within office hours, a tutorial approach that primarily used the phone and
emails to develop caring relationships with individual students, and students
themselves who were (very) part-time, did not want to come in to college, and did
not want this course to impinge too much on their lives.
In these and other broadly synergistic sites, we identified much successful
learning. But often there was a price. In the nursery-nursing course, linked in as it
was to the vocational habitus of the child care profession, issues of female gender
stereo-tying, emotional labour, low status and poor pay were enshrined and
unchallenged (Colley et al., 2003). Only in the area of equality of opportunity related
to ethnicity, did a combination of tutor commitment and government legislation
facilitate any sort of critical challenge to the status quo. In drama, the price was the
further isolation of the students from the rest of the college and the local community,
and the reinforcement of their dependency. In the beginner IT distance-learning
course there was limited student investment and little therefore to lose. However, the
cost to the tutors was high. Because they had to be at the end of a phone and a
computer for the full working day, five days a week, they were cut off from all other
types of teaching, from teacher training, and from the chance to enhance their status
from technician to qualified teacher.
In some synergistic sites, that very synergy was constructed at a cost to some
students, through subtle processes of exclusion, to remove some sources of
divergence or possible tension. In nursery nursing, some students were forced to
leave, because they were deemed to be unsuitable for the profession. Others were
cooled out, as not really fitting in. The drama group’s success was built upon
separating out these students defined as having special educational needs from the
rest of the student body.
Synergy within a learning culture can be fragile. In AS French, for example, there
was a strong synergy of dispositions between tutor and students, the FE location, the
pedagogical approaches adopted, and the performance nature of speaking a foreign
language. In the first year of our research, the main divergent tendencies came from
the pressure to get through a difficult academic syllabus in just over two terms, and a
wide variation in prior French ability in the students, which caused the tutor to
partially move away from teaching entirely in the target language. In the second year
a combination of circumstances resulted in a halving of the student contact time,
and in the tutor deciding to resign. The nursery-nursing course faces potential
problems in the future. This 2-year course had been allowed by the college to
measure its retention rates, upon which funding partly depended, from October in
year two. After fieldwork finished, retention would be measured from October in
year one. This could have a significant negative impact on the course performance
against a vital funding and inspection measure, as many students drop out or are
cooled out during the first year, whilst those who make it through into year two are
likely to stay until the end.
406 P. Hodkinson et al.
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Cultures of division and conflict
The claim that divergence and challenge promote learning also has a long pedigree.
The argument here is that learning entails change, and that people are more likely to
learn, to change, when faced by a new situation, problem or difficulty. This can be
illustrated in many workplaces, where the continual repetition of the same routine
job provides little opportunity for learning. Thus, Engestrom (2001) sees learning in
work as driven primarily by conflicts within and between activity systems, thus
causing participants to relearn their roles.
However, in some of our sites, conflicts and tensions seem to be much more
problematic, and not of the type of constructive challenge that Engestrom describes.
We have space for two examples. In General National Vocational Qualification
(GNVQ) business studies, there were strong divergences (Wahlberg & Gleeson,
2003). The tutors did not really value the curriculum or the course, and would have
preferred to teach something else to these students. They saw the students as not
especially able and not very hardworking. The students, however, though coming
from diverse backgrounds, generally shared the view that this was a high status
course that they had done well to get on, and one that they thought would lead
directly to a good job. This, in turn conflicted with the structural positioning and
content of the course. Though labelled ‘vocational’, the course had no employer or
employment links. There was no work experience, and no vocational habitus for the
course to fit in to. Instead, the course focused on the constantly changing syllabus
and assessment, and the tutors doubted the possibility of progressing from this
course to a ‘good job’. Significant effort was devoted to pushing the students into
behaving as if they were at work. This caused frictions, for example about (not)
wearing baseball caps. All this reinforced the sense that the students were college
students, not workers. This tension between being a student and being a worker
could be seen in the contrasting demands of informalized, student-centred learning;
a more technicist approach to learning, achieved through rigid adherence to an
assessment grid; and the need to instil formal working practices, to simulate real
employment. There was some successful learning in this site, and many students
achieved the final qualification. However, conflicts inherent in this site generally
acted as barriers to that learning.
In AS Psychology there were two opposite pressures. The first came from the
academic nature of the course, and the dispositions of the tutor as psychology expert,
deeply committed to giving all students access to proper psychology, rather than a
watered down version. This was reinforced by rigorous academic assessments, and
the very short time available to get through the syllabus: less than 1 year, with only
one 3-hour session per week. The second combination of pressures related to the
student intake. The class began with 29 part-time students, from incredibly diverse
backgrounds and with equally diverse dispositions. The numbers were large because
psychology was popular and because there were no formal entry requirements. This
related to the long-standing FE mission to give all students a second chance, because
many able mature students lacked formal qualifications, and because of the tutor’s
personal commitment to giving everyone a chance to do psychology, labelling none
Learning Cultures in FE 407
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as less able. There was much successful learning in this site. The tutor’s approach
suited the more able students, many of whom thrived and grew, in the face of the
intellectual challenge. However, the effect was to unintentionally exclude many
weaker students, who could cope neither with the pace of work, nor with the tutor’s
uncompromising stance towards academic rigour. The small amount of contact time
and the fact that the tutor was arguably over-committed and over-worked,
compounded the problem. The tensions within this learning culture were significant,
and impeded the learning of psychology of many students.
In sites where tensions, divergences and conflicts were pre-eminent in the learning
culture, the main impact on learning seemed to be negative. The tensions were
dysfunctional for the site as a whole, though not necessarily so for all learners, all
tutors or all learning. Consequently, one obvious way in which learning could be
improved is to increase convergence over divergence in a learning culture. The
problem is that enhancing convergence is often very difficult to achieve, and almost
always requires major changes that lie outside the direct control of the tutor. The AS
Psychology tutor could do nothing about the rigorous course content and
assessment, or the one session per week contact time. He could have instituted a
more restrictive entry requirement. However, this would have resulted in fewer
students, risking making the course uneconomic. In addition, such a change would
have meant a significant switch in his professional identity—his belief that everyone
had the right to try psychology. Even if such tutor identity changes are judged to be
desirable, their achievement is far from certain, for teacher beliefs are often deeply
lodged and difficult to change. Put differently, there will always be practical limits on
the degree to which synergy can be increased, and increasing the synergy of any
learning culture almost always requires actions by others, as well as the tutor.
Mixing convergence and divergence
In some of our sites, convergent and divergent factors were more equally distributed.
One example was a site engaged in National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) work-
based assessment (James & Diment, 2003). The key divergent pressures within this
site can be seen in two contrasting coalitions of position. On the one hand, there
were pressures to focus on assessment only. This was the official view of the site, as
expressed in the tutor’s job description. She was paid to travel around workplaces,
visiting trainees on the NVQ programme. Her job was to assess their learning against
the specified NVQ criteria, including verifying any assessments done by the
employer. This approach was reinforced by the technical assumptions about learning
and assessment that are deeply embedded in the NVQ approach; by the deeply held
belief that learning should take place in work, not college; and by employers’
concerns that assessment was too complex and time-consuming, thus reinforcing the
view that this was best done by someone else—the college tutor. On the other hand,
the counter-veiling position focussed on learning. The tutor found herself under
pressure to provide learning support directly. Students wanted help and she was the
person they met. Employers wanted their trainees to succeed, but there were major
408 P. Hodkinson et al.
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gaps in the opportunities and learning support that they provided. The tutor
provided support herself and negotiated with employers to make possible the
achievement of missing assessed outcomes. Without her interventions, significant
learning outcomes would not have been achieved, which would have prevented some
students from gaining the qualification and undermined the college performance
against retention and achievement statistics that were linked to future funding.
Perhaps most significantly, the tutor herself believed in supporting students, and saw
this underground part of her job as important and emotionally rewarding.
The nature of the tutor herself, and of the mechanics of this site, permitted the
construction of significant coherence out of these underlying divergences. This is
because the two contrasting approaches to the job are not mutually exclusive. The
tutor did both. The result was more completed assessments, because of the learning
support she gave. Everyone was happy, but the cost was the additional underground
working that the tutor put in. The nature of this constructed balance between forces
made it inherently unstable. It was unrecognized within the official systems and
procedures of the college, and dependent upon one tutor (or a similarly altruistic and
able replacement) continuing to work in this way. This convergence was lost when,
because of funding pressures, the college decided to do most of the assessment
through a computer programme, thus reducing personal work visits. The tutor’s
successes were recognized by the college, but not the reasons for them. She was
asked to take responsibility for managing the new system, further reducing her ability
to support students directly.
A second site where convergence and divergence both worked strongly was
electrical engineering. One issue was the relationship between college learning and
employment practice. Both tutors and students felt that the links were poor or
inadequate, but their reasons differed. Students felt that college equipment was out
of date, and that what they were taught was of little direct use. The real learning was
on the job—attending this day release programme was simply a necessary chore.
Most tutors saw the course as a dumbing down of proper engineering skills. They
frequently talked of the decline of the profession. In this, they held employers and
curriculum designers equally to blame. The result was an unhealthy synergy of
cynicism towards the learning in the site. Another source of convergence and
divergence lay in the nature of those involved. This was an almost entirely male and
masculine site, but there was a division between the youth of the students and the
older age of most of the tutors, who were nearing retirement. One younger tutor was
unhappy working in this site, feeling there was no way to change deeply entrenched
practices. Finally, there was a clear divergence between what tutors wanted out of
the site—proper engineers, and what the students and their employers wanted,
which was the qualification, but with minimum effort (the students) and minimum
interference with working practices (the employers). The result was that the course
and qualification took on the nature of a workplace rite of passage: something that
young men had to endure, in order to become fully paid up members of the
workforce. This compromise kept both employers and college satisfied. The former
got qualified workers. The latter got satisfactory retention and achievement rates.
Learning Cultures in FE 409
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The result was neither a healthy synergy of factors that reinforced learning, nor a
deep divergence or conflict that impeded it.
Ecclestone (2002) shows a similar combination of what we would term divergence
and conflict. She describes GNVQ sites where tutors and students reached a shared
position where course work was treated minimally, rather than students striving to
do their best. At first sight, here is an example where synergy seems to reduce the
effectiveness of learning. However, such an interpretation overlooks a major source
of remaining conflict, between what the students were prepared to do, and what the
curriculum and national policy require and the tutors at least originally wanted—that
is, highest possible grades for all students. We would suggest that it was this
mismatch that reduced the effectiveness of learning, as tutors had to compromise in
order to sustain positive student relations.
It is clear from our findings that not all conflicts result in challenges that are
valuable for learning. What is needed is a balance between variety of experience and
challenge with routinized practices and safety. This balance can only be established
site by site, and often demands resources, either to expand the learning through
visits etc., or to provide enough safe routine for students who are over-stretched.
Within any site, what provides a creative challenge for some students may be
overtaxing for others.
Synergy, divergence, conflict and the improvement of learning
Some college learning cultures are more effective in facilitating learning than others,
and in general terms, learning is more effective when many forces work in synergy
together. However, if a learning culture is characterized by deep divisions, tensions
and conflicts, this tends to be dysfunctional, and effective learning is less likely.
However, all learning cultures have strengths and weaknesses and synergy itself
brings significant problems, for example, of potential student exclusion, or the loss
of a critical edge in vocational courses.
It follows from this that one often ignored but potentially valuable way of
improving learning in FE is to change the learning cultures, making them more
synergistic and therefore more likely to be effective. This is a different way of
understanding the work of the tutors in the research. They were constantly working
to mediate the learning culture—to construct, reconstruct and preserve synergies
promoting the particular learning culture they desired, and thought beneficial for
their students. This view of teaching and pedagogy as cultural mediation is very
different from the technicist view inherent in the teaching standards for FE at the
time of the research. It also has the value of making explicit that whatever a tutor
does will always interact with other forces in the culture, sometimes with
unpredictable and unintended effects. Indeed, one characteristic that distinguishes
the best teachers from others could well be their often partly tacit understandings of
the existing learning culture, reducing the chances of misjudged actions, which could
be counter-productive.
410 P. Hodkinson et al.
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Thinking about learning cultures in this way also reminds us that many of the
forces that contribute to a learning culture are out of the influence of the tutor. This
means that if colleges, the various quangos managing the FE sector and the
government are serious about improving learning, then they have to look carefully at
what they can do to help make the FE learning culture and the learning cultures
within it more synergistic. They should also be much more conscious than they often
are of those cultural limitations that are very difficult and/or undesirable to change,
but may seriously impede learning and the achievement of desired learning
outcomes. We do not have space in this paper to develop this line of thinking (see
James and Biesta (2007) for more details).
Another thing that follows from this analysis is that much depends upon what
perspective is taken about ‘good’ learning in any site. The drama class was very
successful, if the purpose was to teach students to participate in and enjoy a dramatic
performance, and to develop a sense of self-worth and pride in their physical, mental
and creative achievements over the period of the course (Diment & Scaife, 2004).
However, if the purpose was to increase their independence or to improve their
chances of getting a job and joining in more ‘normal’ adult society, it was probably a
failure. Rather, it reinforced their sense of dependency. AS Psychology was very
successful in helping able students progress in the discipline, and in giving a large
number of students a chance to engage with the discipline. It was also ‘successful’ at
convincing some students that they could not do psychology, reinforcing in some a
sense of educational inadequacy. When analysing learning we need to separate out
judgements of effectiveness from judgements about worth, and give much more
explicit attention to the latter. Within any learning culture there will be dominant
(but often contested) views as to what counts as good learning, which will
themselves influence how judgements about effectiveness are made.
It follows that a better understanding of learning cultures in FE has many practical
benefits, for policy, management and teaching. However, central to such under-
standing is an awareness that learning is complex, and that what works well in one
location or for one group of students, may not work well in another. This should lead
to a greater realization that though tutors are very important in mediating learning
cultures and in promoting successful learning, even the best tutors can only do so
much, and they need space and support in addressing the particular needs of
students in the learning cultures in which they participate. Perhaps above all, the FE
sector, led by the government, needs to move away from a view of learning that is
inherently technicist to a wider consideration of what learning should be seen as
worthwhile and valued, in a very diverse educational sector.
Acknowledgements
The TLC project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council within
its Teaching and Learning Research Programme (Award No. L139251025). The
authors are grateful to the other members of the TLC project team for their
contributions to the development of this article. They are: Gert Biesta, Denis
Learning Cultures in FE 411
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Gleeson, David James, Wendy Maull and Keith Postlethwaite. The authors would
also like to thank two anonymous referees, for their perceptive advice upon an earlier
draft of this paper.
Notes
1. It is not strictly true that FE is a separate sector, as the Learning and Skills Council manages
both FE colleges and a wide range of private training organizations (Coffield et al., 2005).
However, FE is distinctly separate from either schools or universities, and FE colleges have a
long identity tradition, which makes them also significantly different from other parts of the
Learning and Skills sector.
2. This paper is intentionally descriptive, pulling together some of the main empirical findings of
the TLC project. It is not intended to fully integrate this work with the vast range of wider
relevant literature, some of which has been written since our work was completed. Greater
detail about the findings, and some of those wider literature connections, can be found in the
other TLC papers that are cited.
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