Transforming Learning Cultures in FE

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Transforming elarning cultures in further education

Phil Hodkinson a; David James b
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Lifelong Learning Institute, University of Leeds, United Kingdom b University of the West of England, Bristol,
United Kingdom
Online Publication Date: 01 December 2003
To cite this Article Hodkinson, Phil and James, David(2003)'Transforming elarning cultures in further education',Journal of Vocational
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Journal of Vocational Education and Training, Volume 55, Number 4, 2003
INTRODUCTION
Transforming Learning Cultures

in Further Education
PHIL HODKINSON
Lifelong Learning Institute, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
DAVID JAMES
University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom
Downloaded By: [University of Wolverhampton] At: 15:57 4 November 2009
ABSTRACT This article describes and explains the origin and approach of a
major research project investigating learning in further education (FE). The
Transforming Learning Cultures in FE project (TLC) is part of the Economic
and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme
(TLRP). The project is a partnership between four universities and four FE
colleges. It takes a broadly social and relational view of learning, and
explores the complex interrelationships between a wide range of factors, in
16 very varied ‘learning sites’. The article also introduces the other
contributions to this Special Issue, and contextualises them in relation to
the TLC project as a whole.
Introduction
At the invitation of the Journal editors, this special issue focuses on the
interim findings from one major research project, entitled ‘Transforming
Learning Cultures in Further Education’ (TLC). The project was
announced in September 2000 as part of the second phase of a large
programme of research managed by the Economic and Social Research
Council (ESRC) called the Teaching and Learning Research Programme
(TLRP). In essence, the project is a 4-year longitudinal study that takes a
cultural approach to learning. Its core aims are to:
• deepen understanding of the complexities of learning;
• identify, implement and evaluate strategies for the improvement of
learning opportunities;
389
Phil Hodkinson & David James
• set in place an enhanced and lasting capacity among practitioners for

enquiry into FE practice.
This opening article explains the context, rationale and methodology of
the project, and introduces the other articles that follow. It also presents
an admittedly insider perspective on why one project might warrant this
much attention. In a nutshell, this is because it is the biggest research
project ever targeted at English Further Education (FE), a significantly
underresearched sector. It is also part of a very large and politically
significant (ESRC) research programme, the Teaching and Learning
Research Programme (TLRP). It is unusual, if not unique, in combining 16
detailed qualitative case studies with extensive questionnaire surveys,
and a funded research partnership between higher education academics
and researchers, and FE practitioners as researchers. All of this is taking
place over a 3-year data collection period, giving a real time longitudinal
dimension. Finally, the core research team is 14 strong, giving diverse
insights and theoretical/practical foci. Though two of us have written this
article, the TLC project is co-directed by five people – Biesta (since
September 2003), Gleeson, Hodkinson, James and Postlethwaite. It is also
important to acknowledge that the late Martin Bloomer was the original
principal applicant, and was central to the project design and early
execution, before his untimely death in 2002.
In this article, we first set the context for the research, in relation to
the FE sector and the politically influenced research environment, which
was central to the TLRP’s birth and impacted upon its driving principles.
We then explain the underlying approach of the project, before
describing our methods in more detail. Next, we share some of the
advantages that this approach has brought, but also some of the
problems we have faced. We finish by outlining, in general terms, some of
the more substantial and substantiated provisional findings, whilst
introducing the articles that follow.
The Context of the Research

From its conception, the project recognised that English FE was
chronically underresearched as a sector (Elliott, 1996b; Hughes et al,
1996). Most existing research focused on management and professional
identity, rather than learning (Elliott, 1996a; Ainley & Bailey, 1997;
Gleeson & Shain, 1999; Shain & Gleeson, 1999). Ecclestone (2002) was a
notable exception, but the focus in her work was explicitly on
assessment. Yet, at the same time, FE was in a process of becoming more
visible and significant, in relation to government policy on lifelong
learning, social inclusion and economic regeneration (Department for
Education and Employment [DfEE], 1998, 1999; Department for Education
and Skills [DfES], 2003), and in the lives of vast numbers of young people
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TRANSFORMING LEARNING CULTURES
and adults (Gleeson, 1999). This recent elevation of the profile of FE was
accompanied by the creation of new structures and a redefined sector
(the Learning and Skills Sector, which includes a range of providers in
addition to colleges) and some new research activity in the area of policy
and practice (see, for example, Learning and Skills Development Agency
[LSDA], 2003), but compared to primary, secondary and higher
education, the sector was and continues to be underresearched.
Because of its historical Cinderella-like image, the sheer scale of FE
can be easily overlooked. At the time of our initial fieldwork, there were
2.35 million students enrolled at colleges in the FE sector in England, 1.97
million of whom were within Further Education Funding Council (FEFC)-
funded provision. Of these, 27.2% students were aged under 19; on
average each of these students was studying for 3.49 qualifications, and
78.5% of these were enrolled on full-time, full-year programmes. The
qualifications for which they were studying were mainly vocational (the
General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ; Wahlberg & Gleeson,
this issue), as well as many qualifications focused on specific vocational
areas (Colley et al, this issue). However, a significant number of full-time
students were studying for academic qualifications at two levels. The first
of these being the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE)
normally intended for 16-year-old school leavers, and the second being
the more advanced General Certificate of Education Advanced (A-levels)
and recently introduced half-A levels (AS). A total of 72.8% of students on
state-funded provision, then organised through the Further Education
Funding Council (FEFC), were adults studying, on average, 1.32
qualifications each. Only 9.4% of these adults were enrolled on a full-time,
full-year programme. The qualifications for which they were working were
very varied, with no one qualification standing out as by far the largest
category (Learning and Skills Council [LSC], 2002).
This sector-level diversity of provision is reflected in considerable
college to college variation. Whilst this presented the project with a
difficult set of decisions in terms of the choice of cases, it also presented
an opportunity, because we felt that the inclusion of diversity was likely
to add to empirical and theoretical understanding of learning more
generally (see below). As is explained more fully in the articles that
follow, throughout the time of our research, the FE sector was (and
arguably, still is) impregnated and perhaps dominated by what has been
termed the ‘new managerialism’ (Avis et al, 1996) or the audit culture
(Power, 1997). When, in 1993, colleges were freed from previous Local
Education Authority control, the government established the FEFC
together with a performance-related funding mechanism (Ainley & Bailey,
1997). In essence, all state FE funding depended upon the recruitment,
retention and achievement of individual students. A key focus of the new
mechanism, especially in the early days, was to even out funding across
all colleges, primarily by driving funding levels down, in a search for
391
greater efficiency and ‘value for money’. This was further supported, soon
after, by the imposition of a national inspection service, which laid down
detailed criteria against which FE provision was to be judged. Once the
Labour Party came to power in 1997, this audit trend continued, but with
the added imperative to meet every student’s personal learning needs
and to increase social inclusion through widening participation.
As well as forming part of the context for the study, these factors
have also impinged in a more intimate sense on the operation of the TLC,
as will be briefly described later. They certainly provided a further
justification for the research. There was a need to know how these
processes, ostensibly aimed at improving learning, actually impacted
upon learning and teaching on the ground. Furthermore, lying behind
both the funding and inspection frameworks lurks a set of strong if
implicit assumptions – that good teaching is the prime determinant of
effective learning, and that there are universally applicable standards of
good teaching that can be applied in any situation. These assumptions
are well worth testing out and the TLC research is providing the
opportunity to do that.
The research context for the project was also significant. In the late
1990s, there was what appeared to be a concerted attack on educational
research quality in the United Kingdom. This came from both inside the
educational academic community (Hargreaves, 1996, 1997; Reynolds,
1998; Tooley & Darby, 1998) and from outside (Hillage et al, 1998;
Blunkett, 2000; Oakley, 2000). The main thrust of this attack was that too
much educational research was of low quality, projects were too small
and too diverse, there was little evidence of cumulative findings, and
what there was lacked relevance to practice. In addition, there was not
enough quantitative research, and too much qualitative research lacked
methodological rigour and transparency. Although most of the research
being criticised related to school-based education, the cumulative impact
of these challenges resulted in a significant shift in the climate for all
educational research – towards an unrepentant empiricism, and the
search for decontextualised scientific truths, telling government and
practitioners ‘what works’ (see Hammersley, 1997, 2002; Simons et al,
2003; Hodkinson, 2004; Hodkinson & Smith, in press; for critiques of this
‘new orthodoxy’). The TLRP was at the vanguard of this new climate.
Under government pressure, the Higher Education Funding Council for
England (HEFCE) moved some of its education research budget to the
ESRC, to fund this major new programme. Additional funding came from
various United Kingdom government agencies and departments. The aim
of the programme was to produce high quality educational research that
would directly result in the improvement of teaching and learning.
Projects would be large (the TLC will cost over £800k), many would use
mixed qualitative and quantitative methods, and there would be direct
involvement with ‘users’ at all stages, to help ensure relevance and
392
impact. At least in the early days, programme events celebrated research

that might underpin the ‘evidence-based practice’ similar to that of the
medical world and encouraged a perception that projects had to combine
the scientific robustness of positivism, with the engagement of action
research, all on a very large scale. Because of its scale and political
significance, the TLRP and the projects within it have a very high profile,
a fact that can be a mixed blessing, particularly in the early stages of a
project. A further tension arises because none of the TLC project team
takes an empiricist, let alone positivist stance (Bloomer & James, 2003).
The Theoretical Rationale for the Project

One of the concerns of the TLRP was the need for the study of teaching
and learning in ‘authentic’ ways. For us, a key aspect of this authenticity
is the complexity of relationships between teachers, teaching, learners,
learning, learning situations and the wider contexts of learning. Where
educational research focuses on particular variables and, especially
where these are narrowly defined, there is always a danger of
decontextualising the object of study. Particular aspects are emphasised,
often from within the concerns of one academic discipline, and other
factors may come to be treated as background or even ignored. Our view

is that teaching and learning cannot be decontextualised from broader
social, economic historical and political forces, and that addressing this
complexity directly is the most likely route to understanding that is
useful to policy and practice.
In the TLC, we attached importance to the term, ‘culture’, to indicate
these complex relationships (see James and Diment, in this issue, for a
more detailed explanation). The project aimed to examine, within a
variety of settings, what a culture of learning is, based upon an
acceptance that ‘learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural
setting, and always dependent upon the utilization of cultural resources’
(Bruner, 1996, p 4). We conceptualised learning broadly within a situated
learning frame, which sees learning as located in the interactions between
context, concept and activity (Brown et al, 1989). Learning is an
inseparable part of social practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), closely related
to what might be termed the culture of the place of learning. Significant
weight is given to informal as well as formal attributes of learning (Colley
et al, 2003).
One of very few recent studies directly focused on learning in FE
(Bloomer & Hodkinson, 2000) found that students’ dispositions towards
learning were intricately related to their wider social lives, both inside
and outside the college setting. In other words, there were strong, even
dominant cultural dimensions to those dispositions. These cultural
dimensions were partly related to the nature of the particular institution
attended (Hodkinson & Bloomer, 2000). Furthermore, for many learners,
393
dispositions changed over a 3-year period, centred around their time in

FE. However, this study did not investigate the links between the
dispositions of learners and their learning, or examine relationships
between their changing dispositions and their learning experiences and
encounters in the FE colleges they attended. It also did not take account
of the dispositions and learning of teachers, implicitly seeing colleges as
sites where only students learned. This work led us to recognise the need
for a study directly focused on the nature of learning cultures that
identifies aspects of those cultures amenable to intervention at various
levels. To help conceptualise this, we turned to the work of Pierre
Bourdieu (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977, 1989, 1998; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992;
Grenfell & James, 1998). There were five principal reasons for this
orientation, as follows.
First, Bourdieu’s theory-as-method offers researchers a relational
approach to social practices. Developing a distinction made by Cassirer,
Bourdieu contrasts relational with substantialist thinking: the latter treats
the preferences and activities of individuals or groups as if they indicate
an essence, whilst the former sees them as instances of the intersection
of relationships and positions in social space (see, for example, Bourdieu,
1998, p 4). Earlier work within the team had shown that this distinction
had practical, as well as theoretical implications (e.g. James, 1995).

Secondly, and closely related to this, the approach 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 that enable the ‘unpacking’ of social practices in social spaces:
examples of these ‘tools’ include the notions of habitus (i.e. a collection
of durable, transposable dispositions) and field (a set of positions and
relationships defined by the possession and interaction of different
amounts of economic, social and cultural capital). Habitus and field are
mutually constituting, a point of significance for the way that the actions
of tutors, students and institutions are studied and understood. Put more
concretely, our assumption was that learning would depend upon the
complex interactions between the following factors, amongst others:
• students’ positions, dispositions and actions, influenced by their
previous life histories;
• tutors’ positions, dispositions and actions, influenced by their
previous life histories;
• the nature of the subject, including broader issues of ‘disciplinary
identity’ and status, as well as specifics such as syllabus, assessment
requirements, links with external agencies or employers, etc.;
• college management approaches and procedures, together with
organisational structures, site location and resources;
394
• national policies towards FE, including qualification, funding and

inspection regimes;
• wider social, economic and political contexts, which inter-penetrate all
of the other points.
Thinking relationally in the project meant seeing ‘learning’ in relation to
people, organisations, times and places (for example, Who? When?
Where?); in other words, the field site or context. Rather than taking the
validity or utility of specific individual or institutional definitions of
learning at face value, one might seek to understand them in terms of
their location amongst a series of possible socially-positioned definitions
and in relation to other definitions in use.
Thirdly, we had a wish to work across discipline boundaries. A
Bourdieusian approach promotes a questioning stance in relation to the
‘capture’ of certain questions by particular academic disciplines, and as
such has strong parallels in socio-cultural theory (e.g. Wertsch, 1998) and
in cultural studies (e.g. Smith, 2000). A degree of interdisciplinarity would
help the project to focus on its object of study (i.e. learning in a particular
institutional context as a set of practices to be understood, explained or
transformed). Given the dominance of some pre-existing models of
learning, this was an important consideration. Fourthly, a Bourdieusian

approach necessitates a robust form of reflexivity, which we felt was in
keeping with 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. Finally, we were
attracted by the possibility that Bourdieu’s ‘theory-as-method’ and in
particular the stance it promotes in relation to culture, could bring fresh
insight to bear on the understanding of educational issues and settings
(Grenfell & James, 1998). However, having detailed these reasons for a
particular theoretical orientation, it is important to note that theoretical
work in the project does not limit itself to Bourdieusian tools. For
example, ongoing work on cultural analysis of learning sites draws on
Dewey and Lave & Wenger, as well as Bourdieu.
Methodology
To organise data collection, we adopted nested case studies. Four case
study FE colleges were selected, and the design of the project negotiated
with their principals and key staff. Each college was paired with one of
the four host universities in the project. The colleges are of different
types, serving different catchment areas and communities, in different
parts of England. At the second level, within each college, four specific
sites of learning and teaching were identified, providing 16 initial sites
across the whole project. By ‘site’ we meant a location where tutor(s) and
students worked together on learning. Site selection depended on
395
negotiations between the research team and college management, and on

the willingness of the tutor concerned to participate. Beyond that, we
looked for variety of coverage, so that some sites resemble conventional
classrooms, others workshops or workplaces, and others drop-in centres
or distance learning. Sites cover a range of different types of course
provision, at different levels of qualification. As might be expected, there
has been some change to sites during the life of the project, which has
had the effect of increasing the overall number of cases within the
project. The resulting 19 sites are as follows:
• access students individual tutoring (from September 2003 – replacing
‘mature student support’ – see below);
• Business Studies GNVQ (General National Vocational Qualifications)
Intermediate level – 1-year, level two course;
• CACHE Diploma (Child Care and Education) – a 2-year level three
course, formerly known as ‘nursery nursing’;
• an entry-level course for school leavers with moderate learning and
behavioural difficulties;
• Drama (‘Entry level drama’) – a 1- or 2-year entry-level course in drama
production for students with learning difficulties, leading to an ASDAN
Expressive Arts award;
• Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications (National

Certificate, 2 years, day release);
• ESOL Learning Services – English for Speakers of Other Languages
(roll-on, roll-off);
• Health Studies BTEC (Business and Technician Education Council)
National Diploma – a 2-year course;
• Information Technology by flexible learning, ‘drop-in’ (City and Guilds
7261) (2001-2002 only);
• Information Technology GNVQ (replacing the one above, from Sept
2002);
• mature students support (up to September 2003) – one-to-one tutoring
in a learning centre for students needing support in maths, English or
study skills in relation to dyslexia;
• Modern languages AS level (from September 2002);
• on-line basic IT skills;
• pathways for parents (re-engagement course for young parents);
• Photography (BTEC + City & Guilds; 1 and 2 years full or part time);
• Psychology AS (Advanced, supplementary) level (from 2001-2002 only);
• Travel and Tourism (Advanced Vocational Certificate in Education) – a
1- or 2-year course;
• a vocational course for KS4 school students, replacing one of their
GCSEs with a college course in Administration/Information
Technology;
• work-based NVQ assessment in Administration, business and
technology, National Vocational Qualifications, levels 2/3.
396
This sample is not representative of the whole of FE provision, but it does

provide a wide enough range to allow for the identification of significant
variations between sites or significant common issues across them. It is
evident that higher education provision is absent. Also, there is a slight
preponderance of newer, almost experimental provision, because of the
interest in examining this by some partner colleges. The main tutor in
each site was funded for 2 hours a week, to participate in the research.
These ‘participating tutors’ attended regular meetings and workshops
with their host university/college research team, were encouraged to
keep reflective log books or diaries, and to observe each other’s sites.
They were encouraged to innovate as the research progressed and,
where new approaches were attempted, the research provided ongoing
evidence of what happened. Engaging with them as partners, combined
with legitimate college interests in not letting research near their poor
provision, has no doubt given a bias in the overall TLC sample. The tutors
are mainly full-time, experienced and relatively enthusiastic, and overall
teaching standards appear to be high.
In addition to the participating tutors, each local research team has
three core members:
• one of the project directors, nominally for 1 day per week;
• a half-time academic researcher, employed by the university;

• an FE practitioner/researcher, seconded for 2 days a week, to work on
the project.
The local research teams meet approximately once per month. In
addition to working with the participating tutors, the core researchers
interview about six students per site twice a year, using semi-structured
interviews, and observe the practice in each site on regular occasions.
Regular observations of teaching within normal FE practice are designed
to express judgements about teaching quality (potentially linked to pay
and contracts) structured around a narrow set of criteria. Within the
research, observation (sometimes termed ‘shadowing’) is based on a
wide and fluid set of questions. It is concerned to find what is going on,
rather than to evaluate whether this meets audit measures. Core
researchers and visiting participating tutors simply record their
impressions of the practices and settings in the sites. Participating tutors
are also regularly interviewed, and given periodic feedback about what
the research shows about their particular site, and more general issues
across the project as a whole.
In addition to these 16 qualitative case studies, the TLC also uses
regular questionnaire sweeps, to generate a broader picture of the sites.
One director and one part-time researcher work exclusively on this part
of the project. We aim for as close to 100% coverage of students in each
site as we can get. Actual response rates vary from site to site, but the
survey allows us to contextualise the students who are intensively
397
followed up by interview, and helps reveal patterns of similarity and

difference between the sites. The article by Postlethwaite & Maull, in this
issue, discusses the questionnaire methods more fully and presents some
of the early findings.
In approaching the analysis of data, the TLC faced some difficult
problems, each of which is also a strength. First, the sheer volume of
data, that gives us such rich and detailed pictures of learning, is
potentially overwhelming. By the conclusion we will have six
questionnaire sweeps, about 600 student interviews, 100 tutor interviews,
16 log books, between 500 and 1000 sets of observation notes, notes from
local team meetings and discussions, interviews with a small number of
college managers, and a large amount of documentary material. In
response to this volume, we developed the following strategy. Initially,
the quantitative and qualitative data are analysed separately. They are
then integrated through an iterative process, between each major sweep
of data collection. The analysis of quantitative data is described by
Postlethwaite & Maull, elsewhere in this issue. For the qualitative data,
we used each site as the main unit of analysis. After the first round of data
collection, a detailed case study account was produced for each site. As
the project progressed, these have been updated progressively, focusing
on deepening understanding, mapping change, and examining in depth

the impact of various interventions into site culture – either initiated by
the participating tutors or externally imposed. For an example of a case
study account, see Wahlberg & Gleeson, in this issue. Analysis also took
place with each case, exploring student perspectives (Davies & Tedder,
this issue) and issues of tutor professionalism (Anderson et al, this
issue). We have also worked on similarities and differences between sites,
through the quantitative data (Postlethwaite & Maull) and through
combined case study accounts (Colley et al, in this issue). At the time of
writing, we are commencing the complex task of analysing learning
cultures at a more macro and less idiosyncratic level.
Our second problem comes from the size, diversity and dispersion
of the core research team – 14 people, all part-time, with different
professional roots and identities, split across four geographically distant
partnerships. This gives depth of understanding to all our work, as
sometimes contrasting perspectives are blended. However, it also means
that managing the project is more challenging than it is in many projects,
and there are inevitably some tensions when some members feel that
their perspectives or needs are marginalised. All team members have to
balance their TLC activity against the rest of their busy working and
family lives.
A third problem concerns the role of the participating tutors. They
are partners in the research, but also the subject of it. To fully
understand the power-relations in each site, we decided from the outset
that participating tutors would not be involved in interviewing students,
398
that core team researchers would interview them, and that we could not
share with them the raw data from the student interviews. Thus, the
participating tutors are not given access to everything that the core team
know about their own sites. If students are on a 2-year course, issues of
confidentiality can prevent such sharing for a long period of time. In
practice, tutors get two forms of feedback. There are informal discussions
with a core team member and draft written accounts of their site are
shared for comment, from time to time. Despite the difficulties, there are
real strengths in this unusual research relationship. The research collects
data from students that might not have been made available to tutors as
researchers, and extensive insight from tutor diaries, meetings and
discussions. The tutors gain a greater understanding of FE, and of
teaching and learning, and some have used the opportunity to rethink
aspects of their practice and to introduce changes, as a result of research
involvement (Anderson et al, this issue). Also, tutors remain in total
control of their own teaching practices.
The fourth problem derives from the TLRP mission to directly
improve learning or, put slightly more realistically, make a positive
impact. This entails considerable team effort in constructing ways to
share our insights with others, in the partner colleges and beyond. This is
time-consuming, running, as it does, alongside data collection, analysis,

team meetings and meeting wider TLRP commitments. It is also difficult, if
we are to move beyond simple dissemination – through professionally-
orientated publications, and frequent seminar and conference
presentations. The difficulties are intensified because the audit culture of
FE, mentioned earlier, means that colleges have to focus almost all their
attention on detailed measures used for funding and inspection. This
means that the more complex cultural insights of this research, which is
increasingly challenging aspects of that culture, are difficult for colleges
to acknowledge. The sorts of impact we are beginning to chart are also
likely to be medium, rather than short term, and may be seen by some
college managements as idealistic at best and threatening at worst.
However, treating the issue of impact seriously brings the research many
benefits. It reminds the team of the terms of the original partnership it
forged with the Further Education Development Agency (now the
Learning and Skills Development Agency), which included practitioner-
orientated dissemination beyond the colleges with whom the project
works most closely (see James, 2004). It also makes us more aware of the
pressures that variously constrain and enable some transformations of
learning culture. In addition, the contemporary general emphasis on
impact increases that chance that those FE managers and practitioners,
who are receptive to our findings, will encounter them and find ways to
make some use of them. It will be several years before any serious
attempt can be made to evaluate this aspect of our research.
399
Early Findings
The articles in this Special Issue set out some of the findings of the TLC
project thus far. In this section, we attempt a brief overview, whilst
contexualising each article in turn. When we analysed the data collected
thus far, we were struck by the variations between the various sites.
These differences are far from trivial and superficial. The ways in which
sites achieved learner success varied significantly, as did some of the
issues and problems that they faced. Each site had a strong culture, of
which students and tutors were constituent parts. The different aspects
of those cultures were closely interrelated and the effects of teacher
actions depended upon those interrelationships. Sometimes, many of
these aspects were acting in a positively synergistic manner. On other
occasions, there were tensions. Two sites are described in some detail in
this issue.
James and Diment illustrate their analysis of the value of adopting a
cultural perspective on learning, by examining a workplace learning site,
using a National Vocational Qualification (NVQ). The participating tutor
concerned was employed to assess students’ work in the workplace.
However, the high completion rates on the course, so valued by the
college in relation to current audit measures, were a result of the large

amounts of unofficial teaching and student support that she gave.
Furthermore, the opportunity for such contact was being reduced by the
college, primarily in an attempt to cut existing costs of provision. Whilst
it is easy to understand the pressures on the college to do this, it also
demonstrates a lack of institutional comprehension about why the course
was so successful and suggests that ‘improvement’ cannot be conceived
in simple or straightforward terms.
Walhberg and Gleeson analyse the GNVQ Business Studies site.
They show how tensions between dispositions, the qualification and the
nature of learning create problems for both tutors and students.
Contrasting dispositions are located in the positions and past lives of
participants. For the tutors, there was a strong sense of loss of
professional identity, as they were ‘forced’ to abandon their disciplinary
roots, and become responsible for an area, business studies and, a new
qualification, GNVQ, with which they could not identify. A further source
of tension lay around the tenuous links between the course and eventual
employment. Students felt that a business studies qualification should
lead directly to a good job. However, the course had no work experience
provision and there was no clear progression route into employment.
At one level, it makes good sense to consider each learning site as
unique. As these and other accounts in our work show, even what counts
as good teaching and learning can be very different from site to site, and
the complex interactions between numerous factors, almost inevitably
means that specific characteristics of any site should be recognised and
400
taken into account. It is this fact that leads to our first two major interim
findings:
1. There are considerable benefits in understanding learning as a cultural
phenomenon.
2. What works, or is deemed good practice in one learning site may not
work or be good practice in another.
Both these findings are strongly at odds with the current hegemonic
rhetoric about FE, based as it is on the idea that individual needs are
sufficiently known to tailor provision most effectively, within a framework
of standardised approaches to teaching, measuring and funding success.
However, we are also beginning to see ways to group and compare
different sites. Over the whole project, the questionnaire data is revealing
clear patterns of provision, some of which are described by Postlethwaite
& Maull. In their article, they were only able to deal with the data from the
first round of questionnaires. This showed up significant differences, for
example between sites that contained predominantly young full-time
students, and those where students were mainly part-time, and where age
ranges were more varied. They also picked up significant differences in
perceptions of learning by students in different sites, using part of the
Constructivist Learning Environment Survey. This explored perceptions

of shared control, critical voice and student negotiation. Analysis of this
scale reinforced the distinction between part-time and full-time sites, but
also threw up some significant anomalies within each grouping, which are
discussed in detail in the article. What we do not know until further
rounds of data are analysed, is whether or not these site differences are
consistent over time, or change, as the students progress. Answering this
question will largely determine the amount of effort devoted to
understanding the possible site differences that are emerging. In any
event, this sort of analysis adds significantly to the understanding of the
individual site cultures developed in the qualitative case studies.
Colley et al direct attention on a small group of sites that are of
direct relevance to the readers of this journal. They focus on three sites –
health care, nursery nursing and engineering – where there are
established links between employment and college provision. All are
aimed primarily at young students and, on all courses, part of the time is
spent in college and part in the workplace. Taking a cultural view of
learning in these sites has highlighted the significance of learning as
becoming or what, following Bourdieu, we term the formation of
vocational habitus. That is, on these courses, successful students have to
become enculturated into the values and practices of the linked
profession. These shared and often implicit values and practices are co-
constructed by tutors, students, employers and fellow workers. They
facilitate some very effective learning, but make taking a critical stance
difficult, and reinforce some values and practices that may be
401
undesirable – such as gender stereotyping, relatively low pay and status,

together with burdens of emotional labour, for females in caring
professions.
This sort of analysis combines with individual case studies, and
results in our third provisional finding:
3. Learning and teaching, especially in vocational courses, are strongly
framed by structures, dispositions and practices from outside as well as
inside the college, and over which college and tutors have little influence.
This claim does not challenge recognition that, as the articles in this issue
reveal and our wider research also shows, participating tutors exert a
major influence over the culture of the sites where they teach and on the
learning of the students in those sites. Our research also shows the
breadth and variety of what tutors do, much of which lies outside the
direct scope of inspection or teaching standards criteria. It may be
valuable to think of teachers as managers of learning culture, much of
which is not of their own direct making, as they respond to changing
circumstances to preserve and hopefully improve the quality of learning,
or to minimise the effects of some external pressures. Furthermore,
making significant changes to teaching often entails more than applying
new techniques, which is how it is often portrayed. Changes in

disposition and identity are involved, and such changes are not easy to
bring about. This leads to our fourth and fifth interim findings:
4. Despite the significance of other factors, the dispositions and actions of a
tutor have a major influence on learning in a site.
5. Change and improvement to a tutor’s teaching activity often goes beyond
the realm of techniques. It is just as likely to require fundamental shifts that
challenge dispositional characteristics, and is sometimes difficult to achieve.
The next article in this Special Issue focuses explicitly on the roles and
professionalism of FE staff. Anderson et al discuss the relationships
between research and professional practice. They explore the different
positions and dispositions of university-based researchers, college-based
researchers and participating tutors within the TLC project. They show
how engagement in the research process can, itself, be a valuable
learning experience for practitioners. This is followed by a typology of
different types of relationship between research and professional
practice.
This article, when combined with some of the others (Walhberg &
Gleeson, James & Diment), illustrates aspects of our final interim finding.
Across the TLC project as a whole, some participating tutors have
succeeded in bringing about valuable improvement to their teaching
and/or to the cultures of their sites. However, there have been rather
more cases of tutors fighting a rearguard action, against imposed and
often financially driven changes from beyond the immediate learning site.
402
In several sites, based upon what we know, this is likely to have a

deleterious effect on learning. In other sites, resource restrictions prevent
further changes that our analysis shows might be beneficial.
6. In some situations, current FE funding and management regimes are likely
to reduce the quality of learning, whilst tutors are routinely expected to
improve it.
In the final article, Davies & Tedder throw the spotlight directly on to the
student experience. Building on the earlier approaches of Bloomer &
Hodkinson (2000), they present detailed accounts of two particular
students’ experiences of vocational courses. They show how vocational
aspirations can frequently change, and are influenced by factors outside
the college, as well as within the course cultures described elsewhere in
this issue. When placed alongside the article by Colley et al, a further
downside of a strong vocational culture becomes apparent. That is, such
courses may not work well for students who come to decide that they do
not want to enter the particular profession upon which the course is
centred. The well-known tensions between specific and more general
vocational education and training thus resurface, from a rather different
perspective. More broadly, this article shows how the TLC research
further confirms Bloomer’s (1997, 2001) observation, that studentship, a

combination of student dispositions and actions relating to the learning
situations they encounter, is a major constituent of the learning process.
Conclusion
At the time of writing, the TLC project is entering a final phase of data-
gathering and at the same time is completing the early stages of data
analysis. This Special Issue reflects a cross-section of project activity,
although not one that we would claim was a representative sample of all
such activity. Our view is that the project is beginning to bear fruit and
that we have a great deal to say, both at the level of detailed insight into
practices and in offering a cultural understanding of learning in FE. The
team is in the process of developing theoretical tools that will assist in
the description and comparison of learning cultures, and in the
understanding of interventions, by tutors and others, in the FE context.
Part of this will entail a greater emphasis on our extensive data on
student experience. There is a great deal still to do. In the meantime, we
would welcome general or specific comments in connection with any of
the material presented in this issue.
403
Acknowledgement
This project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, as
part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme, Award number
L139251025. We are grateful for the financial support.
Correspondence
Professor Phil Hodkinson, Lifelong Learning Institute, Continuing
Education Building, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom
(p.m.hodkinson@leeds.ac.uk).
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Transforming Learning Cultures

• set in place an enhanced and lasting capacity among practitioners for

The Context of the Research

impact. At least in the early days, programme events celebrated research

The Theoretical Rationale for the Project

factors may come to be treated as background or even ignored. Our view

dispositions changed over a 3-year period, centred around their time in

had practical, as well as theoretical implications (e.g. James, 1995).

• national policies towards FE, including qualification, funding and

learning, this was an important consideration. Fourthly, a Bourdieusian

negotiations between the research team and college management, and on

• Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications (National

This sample is not representative of the whole of FE provision, but it does

• a half-time academic researcher, employed by the university;

followed up by interview, and helps reveal patterns of similarity and

on deepening understanding, mapping change, and examining in depth

time-consuming, running, as it does, alongside data collection, analysis,

college in relation to current audit measures, were a result of the large

Constructivist Learning Environment Survey. This explored perceptions

undesirable – such as gender stereotyping, relatively low pay and status,

new techniques, which is how it is often portrayed. Changes in

In several sites, based upon what we know, this is likely to have a

further confirms Bloomer’s (1997, 2001) observation, that studentship, a

Bloomer, M. (2001) Young Lives, Learning and Transformation: some theoretical

Brighton: Falmer Press.

66 (October), pp. 26-29.

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