What is learned in a ‘learning culture’?

The notion of a learning culture provides a useful tool to explore meanings and practices in specific contexts and the impact on learning. However, I argue that a significant omission within the concept of learning cultures as a theory of an

Recent work by Kathryn Ecclestone also indicates the importance of this issue. In her exploration of assessment practices in vocational education in FE, Ecclestone (2007a) employs a sociocultural perspective in drawing out some of the implications of contemporary concerns about student engagement. She highlights what is gained by adopting a cultural view of learning, as it is explicated within the notion of learning cultures. Her analysis provides useful insights into students’ and teachers’ experiences of formative assessment and the way in which these practices and understandings are co-constructed. She highlights how a cultural understanding:

illuminates how feedback, internalizing the criteria, self-assessment and using detailed grade descriptors and exemplars can, in some learning cultures, encourage superficial compliance with atomized tasks derived from the assessment criteria, bureaucratic forms of self-assessment and high expectations of coaching and support. In the learning cultures discussed in this paper, teachers use these processes to build confidence for learners they see as ‘second chance’ or ‘fragile’.

(Ecclestone, 2007a: 329-330)

These observations also resonate with the notion of ritual practice and the vignette of the wrong letter.

Ecclestone observes that the learning cultures she described in her research were largely positive in the sense that they were supportive: students were active participants and their activities resulted in a degree of success in relation to the assessment criteria. She goes on to suggest, however, that there were negative

implications in relation to what she terms the development of ‘commitment, compliance and comfort zones’. Ecclestone highlights the stereotypes that surround the expectations about vocational students’ characteristics: their needs, wants and abilities. She asserts that “narrow instrumentalism has become central to those expectations” (Ecclestone, 2007a: 330) but also adds that “instrumentalism has contradictory effects: indeed, instrumentalism to achieve meaningful, challenging tasks cannot be said to be ‘uneducational’ per se” (pp. 330-331).

This distinction is an important one, as it highlights the key tension between concerns about the disengagement of particular groups of young people from formal education and concerns about their engagement with subject knowledge. Ecclestone explains that:

In discussions at conferences about earlier versions of this paper, some argued that the trade-off spreads attainment more widely, enabling disadvantaged students to gain credentials and a positive sense of themselves as successful learners. A contrasting view is that settling for these goals removes aspirations for high quality learning and critical autonomy in clearly defined subject domains, thereby limiting the knowledge and cultural capital available to students in low status tracks.

(Ecclestone, 2007a: 331)

The tension highlighted here relates to a concern with social justice and hinges upon not only the meaning that teachers and students discern within a particular learning context, but also on what I could (with some hesitation) refer to as a more

‘fundamental’ interpretation of subject knowledge or formal school knowledge. This fundamental meaning relates to the connection between school knowledge and the occupational or disciplinary knowledge to which that school knowledge ‘corresponds’.

The notion of learning cultures does provide a useful tool to examine the ways in which meaning is negotiated within a context. However, while it can take account of the wider meanings which are, for example, implicit within the artefacts and institutions which reify practices (Hodkinson et al., 2007b: 419), it has much less to say about the issues raised by Ecclestone. It is worthwhile quoting Ecclestone’s closing remarks at length. She suggests that:

Unless teachers have a strong professional subject expertise and commitment that can interpret these imaginatively, it is logical for narrow, instrumental assessment tasks to fill a curriculum vacuum. Vocational students are undoubtedly ‘achieving’ but what are they ‘learning’? The current rush to develop Specialist Vocational Diplomas is dominated by goals of achievement and motivation. Yet, comfortable, instrumental motivation and procedural autonomy, in a segregated, predetermined track, beg serious questions about the quality of education offered to young people still widely seen as ‘second best, second chance’ learners.

(Ecclestone, 2007a: 331)

The view that Ecclestone expresses here captures some of the key elements of the concerns about meaning and relevance, discussed earlier. Ecclestone, it seems to me,

is also posing questions about the relationship with knowledge, as I have defined it, i.e. as the way in which disciplinary knowledge can become meaningful. Her argument implies that under the conditions she describes, disciplinary knowledge may not become meaningful to some students.

Ecclestone points out that instrumentalism is not ‘uneducational’ per se. This raises the question: In what sense can it be educational? A broader question is to ask: In what sense is what is done in the context educational? It could be argued that there is little in the notion of learning cultures that distinguishes it as being concerned with formal educational contexts, and indeed this is probably intentional. It could be the case that, in seeking to acknowledge the learning that takes place in informal contexts, and to validate the knowledge that is acquired in those contexts – in the situated, anthropological approaches such as Lave’s (Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991) for example – the role of formal education as being concerned with the transmission and acquisition of a particular type of knowledge is obscured. The manner in which knowledge is acquired, which could for example be through participatory approaches, is a separate issue (see Young, 2008a for a discussion of the difference between curriculum and pedagogy). Lave’s and the learning cultures approach emphasises

learning, but it should be remembered, as Finlay et al. (2007) point out in relation to their critique of policy discourse, that learning does not always have a positive outcome: it can also “weaken families and neighbourhoods if, for example, it takes place in a deviant, gang culture, or if graduates move away from the localities where they were born to find jobs” (p. 140). In other words, it is also critical to consider