ABSTRACT
The notion of ‘culture’ played a central role in the TLC project. As we have seen in Chapter 1, one of the main purposes of our research was to understand the formation and transformation of learning cultures in FE and the ways in which particular learning cultures create particular learning opportunities. The reason for a focus on learning cultures rather than on teaching or curriculum or student approaches to learning partly followed from our wish to understand teaching and learning in FE in its full complexity. Our assumption at the outset of the project was that learning would depend upon the complex interactions between a range of different factors, aspects and dimensions, rather than on only one or a few of them. We used the notion of ‘learning culture’ first of all to refer to the particular ways in which the interactions between many different factors shape students’ learning opportunities and practices. Learning cultures were, however, not only the object of our research. The idea of a learning culture also crucially shaped our thinking about teaching and learning and improvement. Thus, the TLC project was informed not only by a theory of learning cultures, but also by a cultural theory of learning, a theory which conceives of learning not as something that happens in the heads, minds or brains of students, but sees it as something that happens in and ‘through’ social practices. Taken together, the theory of learning cultures and the cultural theory of learning do not only help us to understand the dynamics and complexities of teaching and learning in a different and more ‘authentic’ way. They also suggest a different approach towards the improvement of teaching and learning, one which focuses on changing the culture
rather than on only one element of it. It is important for our approach not to forget that the dispositions, actions and individual histories of students are part of the learning culture. This means that student learning is not simply the ‘outcome’ or ‘product’ of a particular learning culture but at the very same time also something that shapes the culture. This is one important reason why the idea of ‘a science of teaching’ – the idea that through research we might be able to find a secure cause-effect relationship between teaching and learning – is simply implausible.
