BERA Symposium: Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education: Professionality

Interventions, Intervening Events, Transformations and Learning Cultures

by

David James,

University of the West of England, Bristol

A paper presented at the Annual Conference of the

British Educational Research Association,

Manchester, September 2004.

Work in Progress; please do not quote without permission

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BERA Symposium: Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education: Professionality, Intervention and Change in the FE Context

Interventions, Intervening Events, Transformations and Learning Cultures

DavidJamesUniversity of the West of England, Bristol

Abstract

What does it mean for the contemporary teacher in FE to try to improve teaching and learning? What makes such efforts more or less successful? Within its broad interest in learning cultures and their transformation in further education, the TLC project has as one of its specific foci, FE practitioner interventions, interventions ‘from outside’, and the changes that may flow from these. This paper describes a tool we have developed for the qualitative analysis of interventions, which we use generatively, as an aid to narrative analysis, combined with some categorical features. It discusses the early application of the tool and some of the themes that deserve attention when instances are compared, and makes brief mention of the conceptual anchorage of the tool and its relationship to our cultural approach to learning.

Introduction

One of our interim findings in the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC)[i] project states that ‘in some situations, current FE funding, management and curricula policies and practices are likely to reduce the quality of learning, whilst tutors themselves are routinely expected to improve it’ (TLC, 2003). It is worth unpacking this last point a little further. We would argue that in FE at least, most thinking about teaching and learning emphasises such matters as individual styles or preferences of learners, the nature of interaction between teachers and learners, and the style or pace of the communication of information. These are of course crucial facets of teaching and learning, but the notion of ‘pedagogy’ underpinning them is rather narrower than some – compare it with that we might take from Friere (1973), for example. Most significantly, however, these facets are largely thought of as the responsibility of the teacher. If we focus on them in a narrow sense, the discussion remains in the realm of (at worst) tips for teachers or (at best) sets of evidence about ‘what works’ that claim to be applicable across a range of teaching situations. Change in teaching and learning practices is commonly conceived in the realm of how to communicate better with students, how to use formative assessment to best effect, how to organise tasks so that students might get involved and stay involved. These things are all important, but seeing change for the better in this way constantly runs into the problem of coming up with decontextualised findings that are hard to integrate in new settings (Simons et al 2003). The idea of classic empiricism continues to enjoy a high level of unwarranted faith.

There is another problem with it too. Whilst it is very seductive to see the teacher as the prime site for activity, change and improvement (and many teachers appear only too willing to see themselves as solely responsible, sometimes to highly detrimental effect), this can continually deflect attention away from the myriad of other people, assumptions, structures and struggles that are at stake in any instance of college-based learning. Much of the data and analysis in the project suggests that this complexity is important. It also suggests that it is pointless to focus on teaching and learning in the narrower sense. In other words it would be a mistake to render invisible the conditions, structures and circumstances in which learning and teaching are constructed and realised. A cultural view of learning starts from a different position, seeing the conditions and the practices of teaching and learning as mutually constitutive. The project is making progress in developing an appropriate cultural theory, which draws in particular on Bourdieu’s social theory, Lave and Wenger’s notion of participation, and on pragmatist ideas (see Hodkinson et al, 2004).

The project and the derivation of the ‘interventions tool’

It is worth spending little time on how the ‘interventions tool’ was generated. The process was a team-based one, and it reflects the unusual design of the TLC project. The project is carried out by a team of 30 people who combine their part-time efforts on it in particular ways. 20 of them are FE practitioners, and of these, 16 are participating tutors and 4 are FE-based research fellows. The other 10 people are HE-based researchers (5 are HE-based research fellows and 5 are project directors). The overall team and the different mechanisms in place for it to function reflect a strand of the project that resembles action research. Essentially, the participating tutors are researchers, practitioners and ‘researched practitioners’, all at the same time. The project has provided a kind of enclave, a supportive environment in which to examine practices and reflect upon their origins, effects, value-base, sustainability and so forth. It has also invited and encouraged the tutors to innovate on the basis of these emerging understandings. Many of them have done so. The ‘interventions tool’ is an attempt to look across some examples of this process through the lens of the project’s main theoretical work, i.e. the development of a cultural understanding of learning in the FE context.

At the point where the team began to discuss what might go into such a tool, there had already been well over two years of project activity, which included the gathering of a range of data from detailed fieldwork with learners and teachers, but also the experience of regular meetings of HE-based and FE-based researchers with FE practitioners in our four regional partnerships. As the project progressed, the focus of these meetings (and indeed of some of our tutor interviews) turned to ‘interventions’ and ‘intervening events’. In other words, we began to place more emphasis on what tutors decided to do in deliberate attempts to shift teaching and learning practices or the circumstances surrounding these. Sometimes, we surmised, these would be self-generated ideas, based perhaps on a tutor’s values or theories they might hold about learning. At other times the actions of tutors would be a response to intervening events which felt as if they were more or less imposed, inevitable or unavoidable.

There were two key steps. Firstly, on the basis of preliminary analysis and discussions of data up to that time, we decided, in a team discussion and brainstorm, on a list of potentially useful questions that one could ask about tutor-initiated change in a learning site. The list was long and diverse. It included suggestions about the importance of the ‘arena’ of the change (was it a change to a curriculum, to relationships, to pedagogy, to some aspect of the organisation or the physical arrangements, for example). It also contained items around weighing up the possible effects or outcomes of some change. Naturally, the list of suggestions reflected our individual and collective predilections and the range of reading we had discussed about teaching and learning. But more importantly, it reflected a range of episodes and events we had actually observed and which had been the object of discussion with the FE tutors. Prolonged exposure to the learning sites had by that time produced substantial case studies of each one, and these had been shared and compared by the team. In an important sense, the list we produced was grounded in practice.

The second stage of the process involved looking for a way of patterning the many suggestions, so that they might form the basis of a device to aid comparison across sites. It is important to note that we do not attempt to classify interventions in FE in a crude sense, or to develop a ‘categorical’ understanding of tutor-initiated change. We are however seeking to develop a series of narrative accounts of what tutors do, and then to articulate overlaps, contrasts and connections between them. Our goal is to develop a practical knowledge of social practices around learning in FE, and we take instances of tutor interventions as one ‘way in’ to this cultural understanding.

From our discussions up to this time it seemed as if the distinction between ‘intervention’ and ‘intervening event’ would be important to keep in view. Our working definition of these terms is as follows:

• An intervention is where a participating tutor deliberately and consciously shifts some aspect of the activity system in order to produce other changes of some kind. Such shifts might be purely tutor-initiated, or might, in a strong or weak sense, be ‘someone else’s agenda’.

An intervening event is a change in the site that is clearly from ‘outside’, whether or not it is in keeping with a tutor’s wishes, practices or values. Tutors are likely to have to make changes to the activity system as a result of intervening events. Another way of putting this is that intervening events are likely to produce further interventions.

The net result of the second stage was an instrument or ‘tool’ with five ‘nodes’, with prompts contained in each, as follows:

The five ‘nodes’ of the analytical tool

A. Nature, origins and impetus?

If the tutor decides to do something differently, to what is the decision attributed by him/her? Is it on the back of experience, or tutor values, or official/unofficial feedback from students or managers or others? Thrown up by external pressures? Is it immanent in the situation, ie ready and waiting to happen? There’s lots of scope here for ideas like ‘alignment’ (where someone tries to achieve a closer fit between student backgrounds/expectations and college provision) and individual or collective attempts to gain some greater harmony or synergy between one thing and something else. Concepts like field, disposition and habitus may be useful (what does ‘developing a more appropriate course for this type of student’ actually mean?), but so may social psychological ideas about motivation (such as ‘cognitive dissonance’) or about how the self is positioned as more or less in control (e.g. ‘locus of control’). If we think of tutors as learners, remember that the trigger for expansive learning (a la Engestrom) is contradiction or disparity arising from an activity (Young, 2001). Some learning cultures may be more ‘nailed down’, less open to change in some respect. Interactionist notions of the self, self and others may also be helpful.

B. Situated rationale/justification?

What are the reasons given by the persons most directly involved for the intervention? How many different reasons are there, and by whom are they given? Are they private or public? Do they appear to belong to the tutor only, or can they be seen as shared in the immediate or wider relevant social group? What ‘order’ of rationale or justification is there (e.g. personal, professional, educational, financial, managerial, corporate, ethical, etc?) and what focus (e.g. is it pedagogical, strategic, communicative)? Is a particular intervention related to college or sector policy that has a technical-rational justification (e.g. ‘improvement’, ‘efficiency’, ‘service’ or ‘progress’), albeit translated into a local form? More controversially,for example, is a change in (say) tutorial arrangements given justification on the grounds that it will protect student interests in the face of damaging institutional developments? Who gives these justifications, and why might that be?

C. Outcomes and consequences

Is there a discernible effect? Who says so? Would it be impossible to tell if there was? Are there intended and unintended consequences of the intervention? Will any effects show up in conventional measurements (e.g. retention and achievement) or will they be more subtle, or of a different order? Is it possible to check different perceptions of the same event or series of events? Are the consequences ones for tutors, students, the organisation, others – or some combination of these? Are they one-offs, or sustained in the site? Are there ‘transferable’ elements in the eyes of the people involved? If there is change, how fundamental is it, and for whom? Are there transformations at the level of individuals, groups, cultures? How significant is tutor intervention in relation to other intervening events? How much difference can the tutor make? If there is improvement, then improvement according to whom and by what criteria? How does power figure in relation to the intervention? Does it challenge or reproduce existing power structures?

D. Key contextual matters

It is worth trying to say how much change there is ‘anyway’ in a particular setting. The very notion of intervention implies a backdrop of other things that are not subjected to the same degree of deliberate change – so we need to address this. What makes it an intervention? Does the sheer variety of culture and practice mean that one intervention in one place is a commonplace practice in another? As researchers, are we justified in singling something out as an intervention (to put this another way, how does it differ from the constant, everyday adjustments made?) How difficult is it for the tutor to make intervention x in a particular setting (ie we must have a relational view of this). How is change seen in the particular context, and is this felt through peer pressure? For example, is pedagogical innovation seen as fancy, progressive nonsense or as the ongoing responsibility of the committed professional? Who has ‘power over change’ in the particular setting?

E. Model of change

Does the tutor, the manager (or the students) hold a specific model of change? How is change seen in the particular site, and in the college? If there are notions of change in circulation, how do they focus on individuals (and individual responsibilities) or on the organisation? Is there a ‘rhetoric’ and a ‘reality’ of change? Does the organisation claim that change is rational - measured, incremental proactive - whilst some tutors claim they are in constant, chaotic, reactive change? The ‘change literature’ contains many theories of change. Kezar (2001) puts these into six categories, namely: evolutionary; teleological (rational); life cycle; dialectical/political; social cognition; cultural. Kezar reminds us that each has different assumptions about such things as how and why change occurs and its outcomes. However, many writers draw eclectically from across these categories of theory (p. 2). Finally, Kezar suggests that in relation to higher education at least, ‘…organizational change can best be explained through political, social-cognition, and cultural models’ (p. 2).

The tool in use

At the time of writing, considerable activity is under way across the team to refine descriptions of interventions and intervening events using the tool. In the discussion that follows, the nodes are applied to a particular learning site, and some parallels are drawn with other emerging site analyses. The intention here is modest – to illuminate a difficult but important process in discerning what we can say from comparing activities that, whilst they may all legitimately be called ‘learning’, are actually very diverse indeed.

An intervening event producing interventions

One of our learning sites is located in an area of work that is subject to a great deal of change, historically speaking. Students are on day-release and study for a BTEC National Certificate in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering is a programme located in the Engineering department of a large college in a provincial city. Our student interviews, observations and other data show teaching to be quite ‘traditional’ in this course, with a great deal of transmission of information (especially in the first year). The students we interviewed often expressed mild dissatisfaction with the way they were taught, but on the whole saw the way they were taught as inevitable and unproblematic, with a sense of ‘serving time’ to achieve a qualification that continued to have high currency in the appointment and promotion stakes. We also noticed a high incidence of radical changes ‘from above’, as it were: for example, successive and often short-notice changes to the curriculum specification and assessment requirements, and a declining demand as some employers choose not to continue to send groups of students to college in the numbers that they did, or indeed at all. As John Nolan, the participating tutor, put it recently ‘If we don’t pick up some numbers from somewhere, the whole stack is going to come down, and I don’t think the moaners have quite thought about it. Perhaps they’re not thinking beyond their retirement’ (JN interview, July 04)

From John’s point of view, this is an area of work that is in a long slow terminal decline, which has declining relevance to the needs of the industry and to the way that engineering skills and knowledge are now used. His participation in the project has heightened his sense of being in a ‘dinosaur’ culture because it has increased his exposure to other kinds of work in the college. As he said when talking about shadowing other tutors in other parts of the college, ‘…to look over the fence into other people’s patches – I’m not saying the grass is greener, but at least it’s bloody well growing’ (JN, July 04). The regular comparisons it throws up (through shadowing, discussion and analysis) remind John that he once had a more ‘exciting’ job working for the college’s Enterprise Unit, a job that he thinks he lost because he was not politically astute enough and too readily ‘upset people’. In his view, the college Engineering department has failed to keep up with the times, and exciting new opportunities have been missed. An example would be when the college chose to set up a separate department to deal with the rise in computing courses a few years back. Another would be the setting up of a separate unit to deal with employer’s demands for ‘pick and mix’ Engineering NVQ training and qualifications: though it is literally next door, this unit is separate and has ‘a totally different culture’. Furthermore, the department he is in had just lost two key staff, one of them a much-celebrated ‘youngster’ recently appointed on an AL2 post (“that’s the low rate…halfway between a lecturer and a support worker” – JN, July 04) and who John says became disillusioned when required to teach 27 hours per week, some of it in subject areas that were quite far removed from his core subject knowledge.