ABSTRACT
In this book we have tried to give an answer to the question of how teaching and learning in Further Education might be improved. Our answer, as we already stated in Chapter 1, is deceptively simply: Change the culture! But as we have shown in several chapters, transforming a learning culture is more easily said than done. This is first of all because learning cultures are complex and multifaceted entities. Although one might be able to influence some of the factors that shape a learning culture, other factors may be much more difficult or even impossible to change. Changing the culture is also difficult because learning cultures are made by people. Learning cultures, as we have argued, are not the environments in which people learn but the social practices through which they learn, which means that they exist through the actions, dispositions and interpretations of the participants. This does not mean that the participants in a particular learning culture are completely free to construct the learning culture in any way they want. Many of the examples in this book show the constraints under which tutors, students and college managers have to operate. Such constraints are partly cultural, partly structural, and partly ideological, in that they have to do with prevailing ideas about the point and purpose of Further Education and about good teaching and worthwhile learning. Improving learning cultures in FE therefore not only entails the transformation of the immediate practices of teaching and learning themselves, but also draws attention to the wider factors that constitute those cultures and
practices. Finally, transforming learning cultures is not easy because learning cultures are not static but are themselves always in transformation.
