ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 begins with a problem many lecturers grapple with: many students’ tendency to break knowledge and related knowing, doing and being practices into pieces, often aligned with learning for tests or completing assignments. The most common result of this segmentation of the whole of meaning captured within a curriculum is the undermining of students’ ultimate transformation into different kinds of skilled, knowledgeable, professional graduates. This is echoed in comments across industry in different countries about graduates lacking, particularly, forms of professionalism or valued ways of acting in and adapting to working environments. Rather than addressing these complaints with generic graduate attributes, this chapter argues that teaching needs to enable cumulative learning, where students are able to see and create meaningful connections between parts of the curriculum, between different modules within a degree programme, and between their academic and eventual professional or vocational contexts. This chapter uses the concepts of semantic profiles and semantic waves from Legitimation Code Theory to help you theorize the ways in which knowledge and learning can be both contextualized and abstracted from contexts, and that both kinds of meanings are vital for successful learning. Achieving this requires meaning-making practices that connect knowledge with ways of knowing, doing and being to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.
