Meditations on Mediation- Towards a Cultural Analysis of Interventions and Intervening

ECER 2005 Dublin

Main Conference: 7 – 10 September 2005

Meditations on mediation- towards a cultural analysis of interventions and intervening events in Further Education

Prof David James, University of West of England, UK

ABSTRACT

The Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education Project, located in England, began in 2001 and comes to a close during 2005. It aims to (a) deepen understanding of the complexities of learning, (b) identify, implement and evaluate strategies for the improvement of learning opportunities, and (c) set in place an enhanced and lasting capacity among practitioners for enquiry into Further Education practice. To this end it combines a large volume of in-depth qualitative work, using interviews, observation and other methods, and a student survey, over a four-year period. The method also incorporates an element of action research, through which a group of teachers from the four case-study colleges have worked closely with researchers to look at teaching and learning practices and their contexts. The project sits within the Teaching and Learning Research Programme,overseen by the Economic and Social Research Council.

In common with much of the wider Programme, the TLC project’s concern with improvement, in the second of its three aims, is revealing of the relationship between the field of educational research and the wider political field, and reflects the Programme’s response to a period of vociferous criticism of educational research (see Grenfell and James, 2004). ‘Improvement’ is of course problematic, not least if we ask what changes and which learning processes and outcomes can be taken as evidence that it has occurred (James, 2005). The cultural view of learning and teaching adopted by the project (see for example Hodkinson et al, 2004) highlights the complexity of tutor interventions and tutor responses to intervening events. This paper argues that a concept of mediation helps us to appreciate the subtleties of tutors’ responses to the many new opportunities, new constraints, or contradictory demands in their sector, without losing sight of their own generative capacity and activity. Use of the concept also enables us to keep in view the ways in which a tutor’s professional habitus engages with changing structural conditions, and the implications of this.

Drawing on case studies from across the project (e.g. Colley, 2002; James and Diment, 2002) and more recent site-by-site analyses of interventions, the paper shows that whilst precise circumstances vary, there are some important patterns across the practices of tutors, and that understanding these has practical implications. At the same time, an understanding of tutor mediation is quite difficult to share discursively in a policy context that (i) expects universally-applicable recipes, (ii) habitually sees the individual teacher as solely responsible for the nature and quality of teaching and learning, (iii) continues to see ‘good practice’ in terms of ‘one size fits all’ or as being spread through the production of new materials, and (iv) celebrates and rewards conformity to ‘standards’. The paper closes with some suggestions for dealing with this dilemma.