ABSTRACT
There are very many different types of learning culture in FE – far too many to describe them all in this chapter.1 The root cause of this diversity is that every single feature that influences a learning culture varies in its form and impact from site to site. It follows that it is possible to classify types of learning culture according to many of these factors. Thus, we could classify cultures according to the types of students in them – older or younger, part-time or full-time, predominantly female, predominantly male, or mixed gender, different levels of prior educational attainment, different social class backgrounds, etc. Alternatively we could classify sites according to curriculum content: academic or vocational, different types of vocational, different levels of target qualification, etc. There may well be good reasons for doing any of these, and many other possible classificatory factors could be listed. This, however, is an unhelpful approach from a cultural point of view because whereas all such potential variables can be important to a greater or lesser extent in all cultures, none is universally pre-eminent. More seriously, taking one such prime variable risks marginalising the significance of others and underestimating the relational nature of the learning.
