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Rethinking ‘Learning’ in Higher Education: Viewing the Student as Social Actor
Abstract
A number of authors from different theoretical perspectives
have called for new interdisciplinary ways of considering learning within
the higher education context. Peter Jarvis’s lifelong learning perspective
offers a viable alternative, but lacks a strong theory of the person as
self, agent and actor. In response I propose that Margaret Archer’s realist
social theory has a particular utility for bridging ‘common dualisms’ as
part of an interdisciplinary enquiry into higher education learning, and
offers a strong theory of the person.
... In each of our universities we have discourses or dominant ideas that define or limit what is possible to do. Williams (2012) proposes that the social realist theory (Archer, 1995(Archer, , 2000(Archer, , 2003 can be effectively employed to guide research on student learning in higher education so as to better understand students' needs. Biggs (2012) argues for an in-depth understanding of how students learn and affirms that education is about conceptual change not just acquiring information. ...
... In his work Williams (2012) proposes that what is needed is an "analytically and ontologically stronger basis for understanding the person who learns" (p. 320). ...
University social responsibility is an intrinsic discourse in South Africa. Universities grapple with their identities relating to learning, teaching, research and community engagement. This paper explores how the drive for transformation particularly at universities of technology has promoted a culture of social responsibility among student and staff agents. Two universities were considered in the analysis of existing norms and understanding how institutions integrate the culture of social responsibility while adhering to mandates of creating knowledge societies. This study provides recommendations that could be endorsed as policy to develop innovative developmental strategies and enact new social responsibility partnerships within university spaces.
... This semantic analysis is followed by a social realist interpretation. This interpretation is based on Archer's social realist framework and in particular as it is understood by Williams (2012) in the context of student learning. ...
... Emotions have a key role to play as they are commentaries on our concerns and commitments. What is more, emotions can modify these concerns enabling a dynamic, reflexive response (Williams, 2012). Being predominantly meta-reflexive, this incident provoked internal conversations guiding me towards deeper reflection. ...
Over the years, programmes such as the Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education (PGDipHE) have been developed and introduced both worldwide and in South Africa in response to the rapidly changing academic environment. The emphasis of such programmes is typically on the development of a scholarly approach to teaching, assessment and curriculum design. Much research has been done on the way such programmes facilitate the development of academic practice, academics’ sense of reflexivity as well as providing academics with the insight and skills needed to better design and develop curricula. Not much has been said, however, about the development of academic identity over time within a PGDipHE. This is a case study changing identity.
The focus of this social realist study is on an engineering academic’s personal, transformative journey through such a PGDipHE programme. The purpose of the study is to describe and explain shifts in academic identity over time through this journey. In realising this goal, Archer’s morphogenetic framework provides a good theoretical framework as it highlights the importance of the interplay between structures and cultures in the emergence of one’s personal powers and potentials. The Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) dimensions of Specialization and Semantics are used as explanatory frameworks to describe and account for shifts in academic identity through making explicit changes in discourse. In this research report, I argue for the use of a principled and scholarly approach for research within the field of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The social realist framework emerged as being particularly useful in examining shifts in academic identity within such a PGDipHE. The analysis highlighted the qualitative nature of the shifts in identity over time. It also enabled one to trace changes in discourse over time. The practice of writing responses to articles emerged as particularly instrumental in the development of an educational gaze and facilitating shifts in academic identity.
... culture is all that is learned by every individual" (Jarvis, 2009in Williams, 2012. ...
... In the vein of thought developed by Archer, 2000, Case, 2013and Williams, 2012 Pilot study the Study programme will serve as an immediate context and social and learning environment for primarily the international students and the lecturers who are the focus of this study. ...
The report, which constitutes Part 1 (of 2), is a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art literature within internationalization of education. The analysis is centered around the major challenges in terms of adapting a Danish curriculum to an international context as well as on the development of a supportive learning environment for all students. The aim of the study is to establish evidence for the relevance of a research project from a user perspective, which is planned to take place in 2016-2017. Using the theoretical findings from this report, Part 2 thus constitutes the primary data-gathering of the overall pilot study which is to be completed by the end of 2015.
... A new direction has been signalled recently in the work of Williams (2012), who suggests that the social realist theory of the sociologist Margaret Archer (1995Archer ( , 2000Archer ( , 2003Archer ( , 2007 can be productively applied to guide and frame research on student learning in higher education. Williams argues that Archer's approach links well into what has been considered an 'ontological turn' in student learning research, with a focus on students 'being' and 'becoming' rather than just on knowledge and skills (Barnett, 2009;Dall'Alba & Barnacle, 2007). ...
... Williams argues that Archer's approach links well into what has been considered an 'ontological turn' in student learning research, with a focus on students 'being' and 'becoming' rather than just on knowledge and skills (Barnett, 2009;Dall'Alba & Barnacle, 2007). Williams (2012) proposes that what is needed to underpin this work is an 'analytically and ontologically stronger basis for understanding the person who learns' (p. 320) and in this preliminary work he demonstrates that Archer's theory is well suited to this task. ...
Contemporary critiques of student learning research call for new theoretical and methodological approaches. This article proposes a social realist approach to this research, using the morphogenetic theory of sociologist Margaret Archer. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated by reference to an empirical study of engineering students at a South African university, using narrative analysis. In the article itself, two narratives are given in some detail, illustrating the key outlines of the analysis. Students’ emerging personal identities are shown to be highly dependent on their social backgrounds, yet when in the university the possibilities for the morphogenesis of student agency are very constrained. A critical interrogation of these findings proposes that a true higher education should facilitate the development of an enlarged sense of agency for students.
... The analytical framework for this article is informed by Margaret Archer's social realism (see Archer 1995;1996), which has been used extensively in higher education research (see Williams 2012;Case 2015;Boughey and McKenna 2021). We draw on one tool from Archer's proverbial toolbox, which she refers to as analytical dualism (Archer 1995, 165-194). ...
In many South African universities, full research students receive little support during the research conceptualisation stage of the research journey, other than that provided by their supervisors, who tend to have limited time to engage with their students. Furthermore, during the proposal phase, scant attention is paid to the role of writing in research conceptualisation and scholarly development. In an attempt to address this neglect, the authors of this article worked collaboratively with academic staff from two schools within the Faculty of Commerce, Law, and Management at the University of the Witwatersrand to pilot academic literacies-informed projects aimed at integrating writing in the first year of existing postgraduate research programmes. This article provides insight into factors that constrain and enable such an integration endeavour. Data was collected through focus group discussions with the project teams from the participating schools. Drawing on Margaret Archer's structure, culture, and agency as the analytical framework, five themes emerged from the data: leadership and oversight, supervision and postgraduate pedagogy, supervisor awareness and support, the postgraduate research education curriculum, and student engagement and commitment. The authors discuss these themes in terms of their enabling and constraining dimensions, and conclude with observations that could inform similar initiatives in other postgraduate research programmes.
... While these factors have been explored extensively there is need to focus on sociocultural factors as they relate to student learning. Sociocultural factors include the relationships, culture, traditions and values of a community or institution [19]. Leibowitz et al. [20] explain that in order for learning to successfully occur, continual consideration and reflection needs to be placed on the social, cultural, and community factors that promote or constrain learning. ...
Background
The discussion of access in medical education has its focus largely on physical and epistemological access, leaving a qualitative gap regarding sociocultural factors which enable access in this context. This study introduces and defines symbolic access, a concept with a specific lens on sociocultural inclusion, and the influence it has on student learning within the South African medical education landscape.
Methods
A phenomenographic design was used to explore students’ conceptions of symbolic access and its impact on learning. One-on-one exploratory interviews were conducted with fifteen final year medical students at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Interviews were analysed using Sjöström and Dahlgren‘s seven-step phenomenography model.
Results
Four categories of description were induced, which described students’ understanding of symbolic access, these were rejection, disregard, invalidation, and actualization. Four dimensions of variation were discovered expressing the diversity of events which informed the collectives’ understanding of the phenomenon. These dimensions were; interactions with educators, peer relationships, educational environment, and race. Categories of description and dimensions of variation formed the Outcome Space, a visual representation of the student experience of symbolic access. The outcome space had a double narrative related to symbolic access; exclusion (major) and actualization (minor). Medical student’s chief experience within the medical community was exclusion, however clinical immersion, meaningful participation, peer-relationships, and clinical skills lessons facilitated community enculturation, and impacted learning.
Conclusion
Despite deeply exclusionary experiences throughout their programme, medical students articulated a paradox of both awareness and no awareness of symbolic access. The awareness of symbolic access was predominantly influenced by clinical experiences and clinical immersion during the pre-clinical and clinical years of study. Further, descriptions of valuable learning experiences were connected to clinical events and the involvement with patient care. This study suggests that the actualization of symbolic access and description of meaningful learning experiences are linked. Medical educationalists should design undergraduate curricula with early clinical immersion at the fore and explore symbolic concepts pertaining to access, as they are linked to transformative learning experiences for the medical student.
... We consider agency through the social realist lens offered by Archer s (1995Archer s ( 2000 morphogenetic approach which has been viewed as productive for reflecting on student learning in higher education (Case 2015;Williams 2012). This approach considers agency as one of three spheres of social life, the other two being structures and culture. ...
The concept of agency features with increasing prominence in academic
discourse, particularly within the field of literacy education. This concept is
highly relevant to research which focuses on students who are beginning their
postgraduate journey and who need to make a shift from being undergraduates
to becoming independent postgraduate students. Our concerns about enabling
conditions of possibility for the development of student agency emerged
strongly in 2020 when we switched from face-to-face to online teaching and
learning. One specific concern was whether agentive and engaged dialogic
learning could be facilitated in an online space. In attempting to address this
concern we asked students in a Bachelor of Education Honours course to post, in an online forum, their reflective responses to weekly readings and to each
other s posts. This discussion forum became the engine of the students course.
In this chapter we analyse the forum posts of the 2020 and 2021 student cohorts,
focusing specifically on how agency emerged in and from these forum
interactions, and on the agency enacted in the various roles students played in
their dialogic exchanges with peers and lecturers. We have termed these three
roles: pivot, provocateur, and wallflower. We argue that the online discussion
forums created the right to speak (Norton 2013) and that the course
requirement for all participants to speak created a rich learning environment in
which students were exposed to, and gradually acquired, a range of voices. To
conclude, we explore some implications of our findings for postgraduate
curriculum design and pedagogy.
... While these factors have been explored extensively there is need to focus on sociocultural factors as they relate to student learning. Sociocultural factors include the relationships, culture, traditions and values of a community or institution [19]. Leibowitz et al [20] explain that in order for learning to successfully occur, continual consideration and re ection needs to be placed on the social, cultural, and community factors that promote or constrain learning. ...
Background: The discussion of access in medical education has its focus largely on physical and epistemological access, leaving a qualitative gap regarding sociocultural factors which enable access in this context. This study introduces and defines symbolic access, a concept with a specific lens on sociocultural enculturation, and the influence it has on student learning within the South African medical education landscape.
Methods: A phenomenographic design was used to explore students’ conceptions of symbolic access and its impact on learning. One-on-one exploratory interviews were conducted with fifteen final year medical students at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Interviews were analysed using Sjöström and Dahlgren‘s seven-step phenomenography model.
Results: Four categories of description were induced, which described students’ understanding of symbolic access, these were rejection, disregard, invalidation and actualization. Five dimensions of variation were discovered, these dimensions expressed the different ways the categories were experienced. These dimensions were; interactions with educators, peer relationships, educational environment, race and hierarchy. Categories of description and dimensions of variation formed the Outcome Space, a visual representation of the student experience of symbolic access. The outcome space had a double narrative related to symbolic access; exclusion (major) and actualization (minor). Medical student’s chief experience within the medical community was exclusion, however experiences of peer-relationships, clinical skills lessons and participation within the clinical setting facilitated community inclusion, enculturation, and impacted learning.
Conclusion: Despite deeply exclusionary experiences throughout their programme, medical students articulated attaining symbolic access into the community, which is predominantly influenced by clinical experiences during the pre-clinical and clinical years of study. Furthermore descriptions of valuable learning experiences were connected to clinical events and the involvement with patient care. This study suggests that the actualization of symbolic access and description of meaningful learning experiences are linked. Medical educationalists should design undergraduate curricula with early clinical immersion at the fore and explore symbolic concepts pertaining to access, as they are linked to transformative learning experiences for the medical student.
... The underlying pedagogy and structure of mainstream education are placing young people, who potentially would benefit from more experiential teaching approaches, in a disadvantaged position, as the institutionalised measures of social esteem and what competencies are deemed worthy of recognition favour certain types of quantifiable capabilities (Cuervo, 2020). Such absence or withholding of recognition jeopardises a person's positive relation to self, which in turn, stunts the emergence of agency and influences how young people perceive their capabilities and themselves as learners (Reay, 2010;Williams, 2012). ...
Experiences at school are fundamental in shaping young people’s worldviews, sense of worth and willingness to engage, not only at school but also with wider society. This article seeks to gain a deeper understanding of processes of inequality and social exclusion by qualitatively investigating Australian young people’s narratives about their school experiences, paying attention to how relationality shapes schooling subjectivities. The framework of recognition theory is applied to analyse social relations embedded in and across these sites. The article underscores the difficulties disadvantaged students face in challenging their marginalised positioning, as these positions were relentlessly reinforced in their encounter with the educational system and institutional judgement. A student’s apparent ‘apathy’ and ‘disengagement’ towards school can in many cases be seen as resistance to exclusionary social relations. Schooling structures and processes taking account of young people’s relational struggles and strivings to belong may more successfully engage students at risk of disengaging.
... It is drawn from a learner's point of view so that the student (including learners, children or novices) is positioned as "one" or "subject", whereas the teacher (educators, parents or experts), discipline (existing knowledge, tradition, solidified subject contents or beliefs), and new knowledge (science, creativity or new ideas) are placed in "the other" or "object" positions. It shows how tensions between "one" and different "others" facilitate a dialectical relationship between them and how important it is to defix one's pre-determined position in order to facilitate one and the other's learning (Williams, 2012). Dervin and Dirba (2006), taking the example of speaking a foreign language, argue that one sometimes needs to take a position as a "stranger" to achieve effective communication in an intercultural context. ...
Looking beyond analytical philosophy which underlies most pedagogical thinking, this study presents a novel idea of fluid education. Fluid dialectic is not only a theory but a method of this study, which draws on the Hegelian dialectics supplemented by Taoism. It recognises the messiness of educational reality by exploring how pedagogic antinomies can help transpose, de-fix or reposition traditional roles in the classroom, and therefore allow a different type of teaching, learning or educational adventure to take place. In contrast to a reality of fixed roles in traditional education, it acknowledges the non-linearity and oppositions that an educational reality usually has. However, instead of arguing against it, we believe the tensions and antinomies presented are valuable in dialectic and interparadigmatic teaching and learning. A framework of fluid education that emphasises the dialectic movements between different antinomies is presented. How one is liberated from fixed time, space and position is discussed.
... Furthermore, Case (2015) challenges us to re-think the contemporary pedagogical model of 'student-centred teaching' in terms of whether we will end up seeking to please students who have become 'satisfied' customers enjoying gamified learning experiences to the full extent (Kelly, 2011). If learning is not commercialised, the substantive sociological theory of interaction at least suggests that we consider the relationship between the operation and structures (e.g., Case, 2015;Piiroinen, 2013;Williams, 2012), challenging the researcher to look at the topic more broadly. ...
Digital Open Badge-Driven Learning – Competence-based Professional Development for Vocational Teachers Rovaniemi: University of Lapland 2019, 175 p. Acta Universitas Lapponiensis 380 Thesis: University of Lapland, Faculty of Education ISBN 978-952-337-109-5 ISSN 0788-7604
In the digital era, institutions of vocational education and training (VET) have emerged as transformational and flexible development environments; consequently, it is important to develop digital professional learning opportunities for vocational teachers who need to meet the requirements of their working lives. More research regarding such opportunities is needed in order to find new tools for planning and conducting studies on continuing professional development and to achieve and maintain the versatile competences required in vocational teachers’ demanding careers. This study aims to fill a research gap regarding advanced competence-based professional development by investigating the process of digital open badge-driven learning in the context of professional teacher education (vocational teacher education). The research question considers how digital open badges structure the gamified competence-based learning process in the continuing professional development of vocational pre- and in-service teachers. Theoretically, this study draws attention to the motivational effects of digital badging, gamification and the competence-based approach.
The research aimed to explore vocational teachers’ different ideas, views and experiences of the competence-based approach to professional development of digital pedagogical competences; it also sought to investigate the structure and process of digital open badge-driven learning. The data were collected from Finnish pre- and in-service vocational teachers (n=29) in 2016 via group online interviews (n=6) and via online questionnaires in 2017 (n=329). The study draws on descriptive mixed research methodologies: qualitative content analysis, constrained correspondence analysis (CCA) and phenomenography. All of these approaches provide researchers with deep conceptual understandings and opportunities to draw new concepts and derive implications for novel educational practices. Further, the latter two studies provide a strong underpinning for further research related to the descriptive quantitative methodology and CCA.
8 • Digital Open Badge-Driven Learning – Competence-based Professional Development for Vocational Teachers
The aim of the first sub-study was to reveal what motivates students in the badge-driven learning process. The study focused on mapping students’ experiences of stimulating and supportive digital open badge-driven learning, ultimately determining motivational factors affecting the digital open badge-driven learning process. The findings present a multifaceted model of recognising competence and embracing gamified learning to encourage students’ achievement orientation and intrinsic motivation. In the second sub-study, we viewed the process from the perspective of guidance and scaffolding, asking how students experience scaffolding in badge-driven learning. The results indicate that a stage model of scaffolding and instructional badging holds value in structuring the badge-driven learning process. The third study aimed to identify students who were particularly motivated by digital open badge-driven learning. The research question sought to explore what triggers learning in the badge-driven process, with results indicating similarities and differences in experiences based on the achieved skill-set level and competence-development continuum for vocational teachers. The findings also suggest the value of applying gamification and digital badging in the professional development of both pre- and in-service teachers. Based on our findings, we propose digital open badge-driven learning triggered by flexible study options that include customising studies and learning new and up-to-date competences. The final and fourth study further describes vocational pre- and in-service teachers’ experiences of the competence-based approach in digital open badge-driven learning. By explaining different aspects of the phenomenon, the study employed both constrained correspondence analysis and phenomenography to deepen our existing knowledge of digital open badge-driven learning. The results describe the impact of the competence-based approach on teachers’ professional development during the digital open badge-driven learning process.
Each of the four sub-studies contribute to answering the study’s overarching research question: how do digital open badges structure the gamified competence-based learning process in the continuing professional development of vocational pre- and in-service teachers? The primary results from the various sub-studies and theoretical approaches culminate in defining digital open badge-driven learning process grounded on the badge constellation of competences. The entity of digital open badge-driven learning includes learning materials, badge criteria, instructional badging, scaffolding and peer support. This study offers insights into the process structure and layered design for applying the competence-based approach, digital open badges and gamification in professional development. Further, the process approach embodies the ideal of study path customisation and personalisation in order to meet teachers’ personal needs for their working lives.
Keywords: Digital Open Badges, Competence-based Approach, Motivation, Gamification, Professional Development, Vocational Teachers
... Many studies on higher education research have built on Archer's social realism theory to argue for the need to incorporate an analytical dualist approach in understanding and proffering solutions to the challenges of higher education. For example, Williams (2012) argues that the approach can be applied to framing and guiding research on students' learning in higher education since they are social beings and actors in the knowledge production process. Similarly, based on the premise that human interactions take place in a context that has been conditioned by the twin effects of structure and culture, Case (2015) argues that the notion of a situational logic is pertinent. ...
There is a constant interplay between the “people” (agency) and the “parts” (structure and culture), not only in teaching and learning, but also in postgraduate supervision practices globally. However, in South Africa, the tendency to use structure (higher education architecture, institutional history, institutional rules, policies and procedures) to address all challenges related to postgraduate (especially doctoral) studies has resulted in university managers ignoring the role that institutional research culture (social norms, expectations and practice) plays, not only in perpetuating some of these challenges, but also in understanding and resolving them. At the University of Zululand (UniZulu), these factors combine to affect not only the postgraduate supervision practices of supervisors, but also the quality of doctoral throughput (doctorateness) with overall implications for society in general. This article is a critical self-reflection on the author’s postgraduate supervision practice at UniZulu between 2011 and 2016 with a view to highlight how structure and culture combine to impact on his supervision work at the institution. The discussion shows how these factors impact on the quality of doctoral output with implications for the author’s practice and society in general. To deal with the challenges arising from the discussion, the article recommends: establishing a dedicated postgraduate studies unit headed by a director or dean as supervisors and supervisees need a support system that functions optimally; improving staff qualifications and training of supervisors to keep up with best practice in postgraduate supervision; and the Department of Higher Education and Training factoring differentiation realities into its funding modules for universities.
... Put another way, if all students do not gain the social and political access necessary to participate as full citizens of the academy, they are unlikely to gain 'epistemic access' to the disciplines and achieve the prized intellectual enhancement that HE offers (Luckett, 2016). Misrecognition, exclusion and remedial treatment lead to low self-esteem, which in turn, stunts the emergence of agency and therefore the capacity to learn (Williams, 2012). Bernstein (2000) viewed teaching and learning as a relational, communicative practice. ...
ABSTRACT
This article addresses the challenge of reclaiming higher education
(HE) as a public good for building effective democracies. We use
Bernstein’s model of pedagogic rights and Fraser’s model of social
justice to develop a normative framework for discussing how
universities in unequal societies might mitigate social injustice.
Referring to recent student protests in South Africa, we show the
extent of student anger and frustration at the misrecognition they
experience due to the reproduction of colonial hierarchies at
postcolonial universities. The article is an attempt to respond to
students’ calls about ‘black pain’, ‘black debt’ and for the ‘decolonisation’
of South African universities. In particular, we focus on
theories of recognition and how these are being played out in the
current South African HE context. Our aim is not to critique
student politics, but to understand the position and heed the cry
of the subaltern student. We deliberate on what an adequate
response, framed within a model of pedagogic rights, might be
from those who teach in and manage universities. We note some
impediments to implementing this response and conclude by
asserting the importance of working with a politics of recognition
and representation as well as redistribution.
... The notion of a learning web (Weston, 1996) anticipates ubiquitous global access to learning with free and flexible communication between learners and teachers. Today, as people retire earlier and live longer, lifelong learning (Williams, 2012) is becoming the norm in many parts of the world. Therefore, it is now becoming more readily possible for people from different cultures and with differing beliefs and backgrounds to register at any one time as e-learners for a variety of online courses. ...
A collaborative research initiative was undertaken to evaluate the pedagogical variation model (PVM) for online learning and teaching at Kuwait University. Outcomes from sample populations of students - both postgraduates and undergraduates - from the Faculty of Education were analyzed for comparison. As predicted in the PVM, the findings indicate that online e-learners do have preferences for particular e-moderator online teaching strategies. No generalizations can be made due to the small size of the sample. However, joint international research initiatives are developing online learning materials in order to widen access to Web courses and resources.
... Globally, the employability of existing and prospective employees continues to be a matter of major concern for employers (Guzman & Choi, 2013;Savickas, 2011). Employability is associated with the notion of lifelong learning in a rapidly changing and technologically advancing knowledge economy (Steur, Jansen & Hofman, 2012;Williams, 2012). Employers and their employees increasingly realise that in order to flourish in a highly competitive and turbulent business environment they need to invest in the continued education, training and development of their employees (Tshilongamulenzhe, 2012). ...
Orientation: Research provides empirical evidence of the importance employers andemployees attach to continuous learning and development opportunities as aspects ofemployees’ employability, retention and job and career satisfaction.Research purpose: The objective of the research was to investigate the relation between adultlearners’ cognitive learning strategies (measured by the examination preparation inventory)and their psychosocial employability attributes (measured by the employability attributesscale).Motivation for the study: Recent research has made important progress in understanding thenotions of cognitive learning styles in learning and psychosocial employability attributes insustaining individuals’ employability in the contemporary world of work. However, researchon how adult learners’ cognitive learning strategies influence the psychosocial attributes theyneed to manage and sustain their employability has been lacking.Research approach, design and method: A quantitative cross-sectional survey design wasused, involving a stratified proportional random sample of 1102 predominantly early careerblack female undergraduate level adult learners. The participants were enrolled for distancelearning studies in the economic and management sciences field at a South African highereducation institution.Main findings: Canonical correlation and multiple regression analysis indicated the abstracttheoretical and factual practical cognitive learning strategies as useful predictors of theparticipants’ overall level of psychosocial employability attributes and especially their levelsof career self-management and proactivity.Practical/managerial implications: Learning practitioners should strive to integrate cognitivelearning strategies in the design of learning and assessment activities in order to fosterthe psychosocial employability attributes adult learners need to manage their continuedemployability in the contemporary workplace.Contribution: The study contributes new insights to the employability and learning andeducation literature. The results may potentially inform formal learning and assessmentdesign in order to improve adult learners’ learning performance and employability.
INTRODUCTION
The paucity of research originating from low- and middle-income countries, particularly in the field of emergency care, demands that those entrenched in the healthcare system go on to make meaningful contributions to the knowledge economy of low- and middle-income countries. While the rest of the world builds an appetite for highly skilled South African prehospital practitioners, the emergency care field in South Africa desperately needs practitioners who can engage with research and advance the profession through evidence-based practice. Achieving this requires emergency care practitioners to embark on postgraduate education programmes to learn research skills. Given the shortage of emergency care practitioners in South Africa, the paucity of prehospital-specific research and the large number of paramedics that pursue employment and education abroad, understanding the factors that influence emergency care practitioner’s agency in pursuing or eschewing postgraduate education is extremely important as this affects the paramedic workforce and the development of the field in South Africa.
AIM
The study aimed to formulate a deeper understanding of why ECPs pursue or eschew
postgraduate education.
METHODS
The study made use of a mixed-method exploratory sequential research design. Using
both quantitative and qualitative methods generated a thorough understanding of the
research problem in the given context. The qualitative phase constituted Phase 1 of the study and used focus group discussions and one-on-one interviews with key stakeholders in the emergency medical services. The findings of this phase informed the quantitative phase (Phase 2) of the study, in which an online structured questionnaire was administered to emergency care practitioners.
FINDINGS
More than half (54%) of the sample of emergency care practitioners pursued
postgraduate education. Among the 46% of emergency care practitioners who eschewed postgraduate education, the majority applied their profession in South Africa. This study, therefore, found a decrease in the likelihood of pursuing postgraduate education among emergency care practitioners working in South Africa compared to those working abroad (OR 0.57, CI: 0.25–1.25). The largest proportion (81%) of those who pursued postgraduate education occupied roles within academia. Those emergency care practitioners within operational (72.1%) and managerial (15.6%) roles constituted the largest proportion of those who eschewed postgraduate education.
Structural conditions owing to the paucity of financial incentives (86%), support (57%)
and career progression pathways (92%) predominantly motivated emergency care
practitioners within the South African prehospital milieu to eschew postgraduate
education. Cultural conditions motivated emergency care practitioners, regardless of
location or area of speciality, to pursue postgraduate education. The constructs of the
individual or collectively held ideals, beliefs, and values were identified as the cultural
conditions, which are not easy to change and have lasting conditional influence among
emergency care practitioners.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, the study established and presented, from the emergency care
practitioners’ point of view, the cultural and structural conditions that influence their
agency: motivations to pursue or eschew postgraduate education. The findings highlight the structural and cultural dynamic and interchangeable nature and the overlap of the prehospital milieu's values, practices and behaviours. It notably identified the interconnections as all the practices and behaviours underpinned by the motivations emerging from the prehospital milieu. The study further demonstrated that a comprehensive and deeper understanding of how individuals interpret their structural and cultural conditions is essential. The objective goal of developing the profession is interlinked with establishing institutional and cultural norms that capacitate and support those within the profession.
Key Words
Prehospital, postgraduate education, pursue, eschew, Emergency Medical Care
In keeping with the 2021 IACR Conference theme (Re) Envisaging Emancipatory Research, Science and Practice, this paper reviews over fifty instances of critical realist research in Africa which have sought to establish emancipatory research praxis by using critical realism to underlabour a range of applied studies in a diversity of disciplines and countries. The initiators of this research have been drawn to critical realism for several reasons, most notably its return to ontology, its interest in transformed, transformative praxis, and its potential for addressing knowledge and experiences exclusions. The paper ends with a reflection on ‘What's in a Conference Theme', returning to the earlier 2012 IACR conference hosted in Africa, and the 2021 conference’s focus on emancipatory research. It argues both for the deepening of conversations between critical realism and Africana Critical Theory; and for the grounding of these conversations in the voices and power of the people in our communities.
The centrality of learner agency notion, as an indicator of school learning environment transformation, implies the necessity of its conceptualization by the academics. The concept of learner agency is being elaborated following the rails of sociological definition of agency, which puts this notion in the procedural field of interaction with structural and cultural factors. Two theoretical perspectives — social cognitive theory of Bandura and social morphogenesis theory of Archer — form the basis for understanding the notion of learner agency, defined in the framework of a given theoretical research. The key features of learner agency concept are its emergent and temporal character, as well as agent’s personal identity level. Such understanding of learner agency requires from school learning environment: a) to coordinate the learning process with learners’ different time horizons in order to enable learning process taking into account past experience, future plans and aspirations, and present knowledge and skills’ level; b) to provide the possibility, firstly, for Self-knowledge, Self-identification, and, afterwards, for realization of learners’ individual peculiarities and interests throughout the whole learning process; c) to maintain a conducive mode of learners’ interaction with both structural and cultural factors of learning environment.
Decolonisation is being embraced as an imperative within Higher Education, yet many institutions have struggled to formulate a coherent response. This article reports on a case study of a research-intensive South African university where the call for decolonisation emerged amidst considerable conflict on campus. The research takes as its departure point the notion that the discourse on decolonisation, thus far dominated by calls to re-examine Western ways of knowing, would nonetheless benefit from perspectives grounded in the paradigm of critical realism and from a social realist analysis. It found that an intellectual and cultural solipsism, as a form of fractured reflexivity, rooted in social and cultural identity, played a causal role in constricting the collective reflexivity of the corporate agents that shape the Western academic environment, resulting in a reproduction of an exclusionary intellectual and cultural environment.
This paper explores how academics navigate the Higher Education (HE) landscape being reshaped by the convergence of unbundling, marketisation and digitisation processes. Social Realism distinguishes three layers of social reality (in this case higher education): the empirical, the actual and the real. The empirical layer is presented by the academics and their teaching; the actual are the institutional processes of teaching, learning, assessment, mode of provision (online, blended); the real are the power and regulatory mechanisms that shape the first two and affect academics’ agency. Two dimensions of academics’ experiences and perceptions are presented. The structural dimension reflects academics’ perceptions of the emergent organisation of the education environment including the changing narratives around digitisation, marketisation and unbundling in the context of digital inequalities. The professional dimension aspects play out at the actor level with respect to work-related issues, particularly their own. This dimension is portrayed in academics’ concerns about ownership and control.
Traditionally, universities of technology (UoTs) have focussed on education to prepare students for the workplace. The Durban University of Technology (DUT) is currently undergoing a pedagogical transformation with the inclusion of a general education curriculum that aims to prepare students for an increasingly complex globalised work environment. This critical paradigm shift in curriculum design foregrounds new ways of teaching, thinking and learning based broadly on humanistic principles. Writing centres in universities are positioned to sustain a teaching and learning environment in which students grow as critical citizens. This article reports on research that explored – through the thematic analysis of tutor reflections – how a humanising pedagogy underpins a responsive writing centre practice within the changing South African context. Thematic analysis of the tutors’ reflections revealed their self-awareness of the significance of communities of practice in their work. These communities of practice could be seen to cultivate a humanising pedagogy within writing centre work, which might contribute to the aesthetic, socio-political and cultural environments in which students live and work.
This article makes a critique of using Post-Development as a tool in teaching an introductory course in development studies. Such a debate was initiated by Harcourt in a previous issue of Third World Quarterly as she reflected on her teaching experience in a European Institution. Harcourt concludes that the lack of engagement of some of the students in the course reflects the unwillingness of privileged middle-class pupils to challenge western lifestyles. I draw on a critical realist meta-theory about the process of learning in higher education to challenge the ontological support of that conclusion and invite her to reconsider her teaching strategy.
An economic agenda, characterized by the mastery of subject knowledge or expertise, increasingly dominates higher education. In this article, I argue that this agenda fails to satisfy the full range of students’ aspirations, responsibilities and needs. Neither does it meet the needs of society. Rather, the overall purpose of higher education should be the morphogenesis of the agency of students, considered on an individual and on a collective basis. The article builds on recent critical realist theorizing to trace the generative mechanisms that affect the morphogenesis of such agency. I argue that reflexive deliberation shapes the agency of students as they engage in teaching–learning interactions. It may be possible to enhance the agency of students if approaches are used that consider curricular knowledge, the presence of supportive social relations and the dedication of students. The article offers ways to promote the flourishing of students rather than their dehumanization.
It is argued that the rapidly changing context of the workplace requires radical changes in the teaching methods and modes of delivery of the lifelong learner. This means that the approach to teaching and learning in higher education should place the emphasis on students that are autonomous and self-directed
. This leads to profound implications for designers of open and distance learning (ODL) study materials as students in this environment usually reside far away from the institution and often feel alienated when starting this learning process. E-learning can change this landscape to become a platform where knowledge can be shared and discussed amongst peers. In this chapter I will, through a case study, give an example of such a process that not only creates a virtual rich environment for active e-learning, but also delivers critical thinking graduates to the workplace.
The relationship between teaching and learning is represented in contemporary higher education research which has looked at the correlations between students’ approaches to learning and teachers’ approaches to teaching. This article proposes a rethinking of this relationship, building on a critical realist perspective. Here, the teaching–learning interaction is argued to be emergent from the activities of teaching and of learning, and it is this emergent property which provides the explanatory mechanism for the relationship between them. Support for this position is located in recent work by Paul Ashwin and also in the sociology of Margaret Archer.
Student engagement has become problematic following the rise of mass and universal forms of higher education. Significant attention has been devoted to identifying factors that are associated with higher levels of engagement, but it remains the case that the underlying reasons for student engagement and, indeed, the notion itself of ‘student engagement’ remain weakly theorised. In this article, we seek to develop the theoretical basis for student engagement in a way that highlights the student's own contribution. We explore how learning involves students taking responsibility for action in the face of uncertainty, whether in pursuit of personal or communal concerns. Drawing on perspectives primarily from realist social theory, we suggest that student engagement may be shaped by extended, restricted and fractured modes of reflexivity and co-reflexivity. In this way student engagement in higher education is theorised as a form of distributed agency, with the impact of a learning environment on this agency mediated by reflexivity. Reflexivity itself is further influenced by the tasks and social relations encountered by students in a given learning environment. The role that social relations play in students' responses to learning specifically offers a means to strengthen the moral basis for education. Our account provides an explanation as to why specific educational practices, such as those termed ‘high impact’, might lead to higher levels of student engagement within the wider context of a knowledge society. We thus offer insights towards new forms of educational practice and relations that have the potential to engage students more fully.
This article is a sequel to the conversation on learning initiated by the editors of Educational Researcher in volume 25, number 4. The author’s first aim is to elicit the metaphors for learning that guide our work as learners, teachers, and researchers. Two such metaphors are identified: the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor. Subsequently, their entailments are discussed and evaluated. Although some of the implications are deemed desirable and others are regarded as harmful, the article neither speaks against a particular metaphor nor tries to make a case for the other. Rather, these interpretations and applications of the metaphors undergo critical evaluation. In the end, the question of theoretical unification of the research on learning is addressed, wherein the purpose is to show how too great a devotion to one particular metaphor can lead to theoretical distortions and to undesirable practices.
How many times do I have to tell you that this is a BOOK.
I have sent you my LIST OF PUBLICATIONS so you can STOP MAKING THESE MISTAKES.
IDON'T NEED YOU OR YOUR INSULTING SUGGESTIONS ABOUT 'INCREASING MY PROFILE'!!!!!
unless you rectify these errors, of your making, I will simply leave.
Why knowledge? In two of his final papers Basil Bernstein codified and extended a conceptualisation of the different structures of knowledge associated with intellectual fields (1999a) and signalled a more general move in his theory 'from pedagogies to knowledges' (2001). In so doing he returned to a longstanding interest in discourse, a focus that has brought the approach associated with Bernstein's sociology into regular and fruitful relations with systemic functional linguistics. Such cross-disciplinary dialogue has been ongoing since Bernstein in his early work adapted the linguistic notion of 'code' to his own sociological purposes, refining it over the years into a highly formal analytical concept: Thus a code is a regulative principle, tacitly acquired, which selects and integrates meanings, forms of realizations, and evoking contexts (Bernstein 1990: 101; emphasis in original) It may be useful to re-visit those sociological purposes, addressing Bernstein's particular appropriation of 'code', his analysis of the 'pedagogic device' and subsequent move 'from pedagogies to knowledges'. The intention is to make more comprehensible the distinctive nature of Bernstein's preoccupation with forms of 1 The reference for this paper is: Maton, K. & Muller, J. (2006) 'A sociology for the transmission of knowledges', http://www.KarlMaton.com. The paper was written for an edited collection and references to 'this volume' are to other papers in the book. The published version was significantly changed without the knowledge or consent of the first author.
Education Academy which aimed at mapping the research base around the student learning experience in higher education (HE). The project aimed to 1) provide an overview of the ways in which the student learning experience in HE has been and is conceptualised; 2) provide an overview of
interventions aimed at producing a more effective learning experience; and 3) review the methodological approaches adopted to investigate the student learning experience. The paper outlines the review approach adopted by this project and presents an analytical map in which reviewed studies
are categorised in terms of the methods they adopt and the area of investigation. Selected findings in the areas of inventory-based studies, assessment and feedback and teaching, curriculum and learning environments are discussed. The project identified a large, but broad, heterogeneous and
somewhat scattered research base, dominated by a tradition of studies using inventory methods, and otherwise by small and localised studies often conducted by practitioners researching their own subject areas. The paper concludes with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the project's
methods, and recommendations for developing the student learning experience research base in the future.
ABSTRACT— Recent advances in neuroscience are highlighting connections between emotion, social functioning, and decision making that have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the role of affect in education. In particular, the neurobiological evidence suggests that the aspects of cognition that we recruit most heavily in schools, namely learning, attention, memory, decision making, and social functioning, are both profoundly affected by and subsumed within the processes of emotion; we call these aspects emotional thought. Moreover, the evidence from brain-damaged patients suggests the hypothesis that emotion-related processes are required for skills and knowledge to be transferred from the structured school environment to real-world decision making because they provide an emotional rudder to guide judgment and action. Taken together, the evidence we present sketches an account of the neurobiological underpinnings of morality, creativity, and culture, all topics of critical importance to education. Our hope is that a better understanding of the neurobiological relationships between these constructs will provide a new basis for innovation in the design of learning environments.
This article is a sequel to the conversation on learning initiated by the editors of Educational Researcher in volume 25, number 4. The author’s first aim is to elicit the metaphors for learning that guide our work as learners, teachers, and researchers. Two such metaphors are identified: the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor. Subsequently, their entailments are discussed and evaluated. Although some of the implications are deemed desirable and others are regarded as harmful, the article neither speaks against a particular metaphor nor tries to make a case for the other. Rather, these interpretations and applications of the metaphors undergo critical evaluation. In the end, the question of theoretical unification of the research on learning is addressed, wherein the purpose is to show how too great a devotion to one particular metaphor can lead to theoretical distortions and to undesirable practices.
This paper forms one of the contributions to CHERI's research report 'Higher education and society'. It reports on one of the centre's ESRC-funded research projects - Higher Education and Regional Transformation.
This report draws on a substantial body of research undertaken by the Open University’s Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) on the changing relationships between higher education and society. Higher education currently faces many changes, some externally driven by government policies and changing patterns of social and economic demand and some internally driven by changes in the way knowledge is produced and organised within universities and other ‘knowledge organisations’. CHERI examines these changes through empirical research which is policy relevant though not policy dictated, frequently international, and broadly focused on the social impacts of higher education. Does higher education make a difference and to whom? In their different ways, the articles in this report seek to provide answers to this important but difficult question.
From the Executive Summary: Executive Summary The project 1. The project on which this report is based brought together more than 25 researchers from 15 countries in Central and Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa (including South Africa), Central Asia and Latin America. Its aim was to increase understanding of the various ways in which universities and other higher education institutions generate, contribute to or inhibit social, economic and political change. Its focus was on countries and regions that had recently undergone, or were undergoing, major transformation. 2. This report synthesizes the findings reported in a set of more specific national, institutional and thematic reports produced by the project. These consisted of national reports from Bulgaria, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa; overview reports from Brazil and Mexico; institutional reports from private universities in Belarus, Bulgaria, Kyrgzstan and Russia; and a set of reports from research fellows supported by the Open Society Institute drawing on experiences from Bangladesh, Estonia, Poland, India and Slovenia and providing additional perspectives on Bulgaria and Russia. 3. The project was co-ordinated jointly by the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) and the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) of the UK Open University. It received financial support from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the Open Society Institute and the Swedish Foundation for International Co-operation in Research and Higher Education (STINT). 4. This report attempts to highlight both the roles universities have played in the orchestration and management of wider social transformations and the ways in which they have themselves been transformed by wider social processes.
Drawing on Archer’s perspectives on the agency / structure relationship, this paper explains situations where students in varied, challenging circumstances find ways to negotiate difficult conditions. The paper firstly reports specific findings of a study on student access and use of technology in three universities in South Africa; and then uses Archer’s concept of agency to explain the findings.
The context of the study is a South African higher education system clearly committed to preparing university students for participation in the knowledge society as is evident in numerous policy documents. However, the response to this rapid worldwide social and economic transformation has occurred simultaneously with the substantial restructuring of a fragmented, divided and unequal sector, the legacy of racially demarcated and differentially resourced apartheid institutions (Department of Education, 2001, Gillard, 2004).
Additionally, social demands on South African higher education institutions have intensified in recent years. Increased participation by a diverse range of students has resulted in massification of the sector within a context of limited or even reduced funding (Maasen and Cloete, 2002). As is the case internationally, there are both more and different students entering the sector.
[from the introduction] Arthur E. Levine, President of the Teachers College of Columbia University, writes that "In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, the Yale Report of 1828 asked whether the needs of a changing society required either major or minor changes in higher education. The report concluded that it had asked the wrong question. The right question was, What is the purpose of higher education?" Levine goes on to add that questions related to higher education “have their deepest roots in that fundamental question” and that “faced with a society in motion, we must not only ask that question again, but must actively pursue answers, if our colleges and universities are to retain their vitality in a dramatically different world”. I propose to speak about three issues: the first is about our changing world; the second is about the three purposes of higher education; the third is about what I consider to be the five key roles of higher education. Finally, I want to conclude by making some observations on the sometimes unrealistic expectations of higher education.
A greater acknowledgment of relational interdependence between individual and social agencies is warranted within current conceptions of learning throughout working life. Currently, some accounts of learning tend to overly privilege social agency in the form of situational contributions. This de-emphasises the contributions of the more widely socially sourced, relational and negotiated contributions of both individual and social agency. As these accounts fail to fully acknowledge the accumulated outcomes of interactions between the cognitive and social experience that shapes human cognition ontogentically and which also act to remake culture, they remain incomplete and unsatisfactory. In response, this paper proposes a consideration for the role of individual agency (e.g. intentionality, subjectivity and identity), how it socially shaped overtime and serves to be generative of individuals' cognitive experience, and its role in subsequently construing what is experience socially. This agency also enacts a relational interdependence with social and historical contributions. Through advancing the conception of relational interdependence it aims to balance views that currently privilege particular social influences in conceptions of learning for work and throughout working life. Yes Yes
Building on her seminal contribution to social theory in Culture and Agency, in this 1995 book Margaret Archer develops her morphogenetic approach, applying it to the problem of structure and agency. Since structure and agency constitute different levels of stratified social reality, each possesses distinctive emergent properties which are real and causally efficacious but irreducible to one another. The problem, therefore, is shown to be how to link the two rather than conflate them, as has been common theoretical practice. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach not only rejects methodological individualism and holism, but argues that the debate between them has been replaced by a new one, between elisionary theorising and emergentist theories based on a realist ontology of the social world. The morphogenetic approach is the sociological complement of transcendental realism, and together they provide a basis for non-conflationary theorizing which is also of direct utility to the practising social analyst.
Humanity and the very notion of the human subject are under threat from postmodernist thinking which has declared not only the 'Death of God' but also the 'Death of Man'. This book is a revindication of the concept of humanity, rejecting contemporary social theory that seeks to diminish human properties and powers. Archer argues that being human depends on an interaction with the real world in which practice takes primacy over language in the emergence of human self-consciousness, thought, emotionality and personal identity - all of which are prior to, and more basic than, our acquisition of a social identity. This original and provocative new book from leading social theorist Margaret S. Archer builds on the themes explored in her previous books Culture and Agency (CUP 1988) and Realist Social Theory (CUP 1995). It will be required reading for academics and students of social theory, cultural theory, political theory, philosophy and theology.
Learning is a lifelong process and we are the result of our own learning. But how exactly do we learn to be a person through living? In this book, Peter Jarvis draws together all the aspects of becoming a person into the framework of learning. Considering the ongoing, "nature versus nurture" debate over how we become people, Jarvis's study of nurture - what learning is primarily about – builds on a detailed recognition of our genetic inheritance and evolutionary reality. It demonstrates the ways in which we become social human beings: internalising, accommodating and rejecting the culture to which we are exposed (both primarily and through electronic mediation) while growing and developing as human beings and people.
How do we reflect upon ourselves and our concerns in relation to society, and vice versa? Human reflexivity works through ‘internal conversations’ using language, but also emotions, sensations and images. Most people acknowledge this ‘inner-dialogue’ and can report upon it. However, little research has been conducted on ‘internal conversations’ and how they mediate between our ultimate concerns and the social contexts we confront. Margaret Archer argues that reflexivity is progressively replacing routine action in late modernity, shaping how ordinary people make their way through the world. Using interviewees' life and work histories, she shows how ‘internal conversations’ guide the occupations people seek, keep or quit; their stances towards structural constraints and enablements; and their resulting patterns of social mobility. © Margaret S. Archer 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
This book critically assesses the learning that is required and provided within a learning society and gives a detailed sociological analysis of the emerging role of lifelong learning with examples from around the globe. Divided into three clear parts the book: looks at the development of the knowledge economy; provides a critique of lifelong learning and the learning society; focuses on the changing nature of research in the learning society. The author, well-known and highly respected in this field, examines how lifelong learning and the learning society have become social phenomena across the globe. He argues that the driving forces of globalisation are radically changing lifelong learning and shows that adult education/learning only gained mainstream status because of these global changes and as learning became more work orientated.
As interest grows in theories of lifelong learning not only across society but also as an area of serious academic study, the need has arisen for a thorough and critical study of the phenomenon. This distillation of the work of renowned writer Peter Jarvis addresses this need, looking at the processes involved in human learning from birth to old age and moving the field on from previous unsystematic and mainly psychological studies. Instead, Jarvis argues that learning is existential, and so its study must be complex and interdisciplinary. The result is a giant step towards building a complete and integrated theory of how humans learn, taking account of existing theories to see if they can be reconciled with a more complex model. Applying his expert analytical approach to this wide-ranging topic, Jarvis looks in detail at: • learning in the social context. • the transformation of experience. • the outcomes of learning. • learning and action. • cognitive theories. • emotions and learning. • experiential learning.
There is no single idea of the university. Ever since its medieval origin, the concept of the university has continued to change. The metaphysical university gave way successively to the scientific university, and then to the corporate and the entrepreneurial university. But what, then, might lie ahead? Being a University both charts this conceptual development and examines the future possibilities for the idea of the university. Ronald Barnett pursues this quest through an exploration of pairs of contending concepts that speak to the idea of the university - such as space and time; being and becoming; and culture and anarchy. On this foundation is developed an imaginative exposition of possible ideas of the university, including the liquid university and the authentic university. In the course of this inquiry, it is argued that: Any thought that the idea of the entrepreneurial university represents the end-point of the evolution of the idea of the university has to be abandoned. The entrepreneurial university is excessively parochial and ill-matched to the challenges facing the university. A responsibility of the university is precisely that of working out an imaginative conception of its future possibilities. The boldest and largest thinking is urgently required. The fullest expression of the university's possibilities lies in a reclamation of the universal aspirations that lay in earlier ideas of the university. The ecological university represents just such a universal aspiration, suited to the unfolding demands of the future. Being a University will be of wide interest, to institutional leaders and managers, higher education planners, academics in all disciplines and students of higher education, in educational policy and politics, and the philosophy, sociology and theory of education, and indeed, anyone who believes in the future of the university.
'This book tackles some of the most important educational questions of the day... It is rare to find a book on education which is theoretically sophisticated and practically relevant: this book is.' From the Foreword by Hugh Lauder What is it in the twenty-first century that we want young people, and adults returning to study, to know? What is it about the kind of knowledge that people can acquire at school, college or university that distinguishes it from the knowledge that people acquire in their everyday lives everyday lives, at work, and in their families? Bringing Knowledge Back In draws on recent developments in the sociology of knowledge to propose answers to these key, but often overlooked, educational questions. Michael Young traces the changes in his own thinking about the question of knowledge in education since his earlier books Knowledge and Control and The Curriculum of the Future. He argues for the continuing relevance of the writings of Durkheim and Vygotsky and the unique importance of Basil Bernstein's often under-appreciated work. He illustrates the importance of questions about knowledge by investigating the dilemmas faced by researchers and policy makers in a range of fields. He also considers the broader issue of the role of sociologists in relation to educational policy in the context of increasingly interventionist governments. In so doing, the book: provides conceptual tools for people to think and debate about knowledge and education in new ways, provides clear expositions of difficult ideas at the interface of epistemology and the sociology of knowledge, makes explicit links between theoretical issues and practical /policy questions, offers a clear focus for the future development of the sociology of education as a key field within educational studies. This compelling and provocative book will be essential reading for anyone involved in research and debates about the curriculum as well as those with a specific interest in the sociology of education.
This is a book with a difference: it produces a completely new perspective on lifelong learning and the learning society and locates them within humanity itself. Five themes run through this book: Humankind has always been aware of the imperfections of human society: as a consequence, it has looked back to a mythological past and forward to a utopian future that might be religious, political, economic or even educational to find something better. Lifelong learning as we currently see it is like two sides of the same coin: we learn in order to be workers who produce, and learn we have a need to consume. We then devour the commodities we have produced, whilst others take the profits! One of the greatest paradoxes of the human condition has been the place of the individual in the group/community, or conversely how the groups allow the individual to exist rather than stifle individuality Modernity is flawed and the type of society that we currently have, which we in the West call a learning society, is in need of an ethical overhaul in this late modern age. There is a need to bring a different perspective - both political and ethical - on lifelong learning and the learning society in order to try to understand what the good society and the good life might become. In Democracy, Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society, the third volume of his trilogy on lifelong learning, Professor Jarvis expertly addresses the issues that arise from the vision of the learning society. The book concludes that since human beings continue to learn, so the learning society must be a process within the incomplete project of humanity. All three books in the trilogy will be essential reading for students in education, HRD and teaching and learning generally, in addition to academics and informed practitioners. The Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society Trilogy Volume 1: Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Human Learning. Volume 2: Globalisation, Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society. Volume 3: Democracy, Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society. Peter Jarvis is an internationally renowned expert in the field of adult learning and continuing education. He is Professor of Continuing Education at the University of Surrey, UK, and honorary Adjunct Professor in Adult Education at the University of Georgia, USA.
An area of the sociology of education which has received little attention concerns the sociological factors related to what and how well students learn in the American school system. This review of existing literature includes studies on the effects of: classroom structure and techniques; the school system as a whole; student peer groups; and social groups outside the school system such as family, ethnic and neighborhood groups, and the larger community. Even with such factors as individual ability held constant, it seems clear that social factors affect student performance and that these factors are themselves interrelated.
What culture is and what culture does are the subjects of conceptual confusion throughout social theory. This state of affairs is attributed to a pervasive Myth of Cultural Integration which wrongly conflates Cultural System integration (a logical property characterizing relations between ideas) with Socio-Cultural integration (a causal property pertaining to relations between people). A reconceptualization of culture in terms of analytical dualism is proposed, for it is suggested that an examination of the interplay between Cultural System integration and Socio-Cultural integration will give a better explanatory purchase on cultural dynamics and also allow culture to be examined in the same generic manner as structure.
Why pursue a social rather than a more familiar psychological theory of learning? 'To the extent that being human is a relational matter, generated in social living, historically, in social formations whose participants engage with each other as a condition and precondition for their existence, theories that conceive of learning as a special universal mental process impoverish and misrecognize it. My colleagues and I have been trying to convey out understanding of this claim for some years (e.g., Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991) and I will try to develop the argument a little further here. There is another sort of reason for pursuing a theoretical perspective on the social nature of learning. Theories that reduce learning to individual mental capacity/activity in the last instance blame marginalized people for being marginal. Common theories of learning begin and end with individuals (though these days they often nod at "the social" or "the environment" in. between). Such theories are deeply concerned with individual differences, with notions of better and worse, more and less learning, and with comparison of these things across groups-of-individuals. Psychological theories of learning prescribe ideals and paths to excellence and identify the kinds of individuals (by no means all) who should arrive; the absence of movement away from some putatively common starting point becomes grounds for labeling others sub-normal. The logic that makes success exceptional but nonetheless characterizes lack of success as not normal won't do. It reflects and contributes to a politics by which disinherited and disenfranchised individuals, whether taken one at a time or in masses, are identified as the disabled, and thereby made responsible for their "plight" (e.g., McDermott, 1993). It seems imperative to explore ways of understanding learning that do not naturalize and underwrite divisions of social inequality in our society. A reconsideration of learning as a social, collective, rather than individual, psychological phenomenon offers the only way beyond the current state of affairs that I can envision at the present time.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the notion of 'removing barriers' offers a limited foundation for widening participation to higher education. Drawing on realist social theory, we consider how decisions to participate or not participate form part of a process to establish a modus
vivendi or 'way of life' for oneself. We explore factors that affect how individuals pursue courses of action around entry into potentially alien educational contexts. Our analysis suggests that interventions designed to widen participation should take account of different modes of reflexive
deliberation, underpinning social and cultural structures, and a range of notions of human flourishing.
This article explores some implications of using a critical realist theoretical framework for the study of education, in particular the core activities of learning and teaching. Many approaches have been made to understanding learning and teaching, but they tend to fall into one of two camps. The first includes approaches known as objectivism, instructivism and behaviourism, and is interpreted here as embodying principles of empiricism (positivism). The second comprises various takes on constructivism, particularly social constructivism, and is interpreted here as embodying idealism (poststructuralism/postmodernism/interpretivism). This paper does not wholly endorse or reject either objectivism or constructivism, but draws elements from each. The key difference for educators is that the starting position is not the transmission of knowledge, as in objectivism, or the construction of knowledge by learners, as in social constructivism. Instead it foregrounds the learning environment, arising from the (critical) realist premise that the possibilities for knowledge are given in the ontology. For educators this means the learning environment is not simply the location of learning, as widely construed, but the set of conditions that enable and constrain learning.
It is generally supposed that a curriculum should engage students with worthwhile knowledge, which requires an understanding of what it means for something to be worthwhile: a substantive conception of the good. Yet a number of influential curriculum theories deny or undermine one or another aspect of the key assumption upon which a meaningful account of the good depends - that people are the agents of their own beliefs, desires and actions. This renders a significant encounter between the curriculum and substantive ethics highly problematic. In this article I explore the meeting between curriculum and human agency in four seminal curriculum theories, and offer a framework to engage the curriculum with this key concept of substantive ethics.
In this interview, Basil Bernstein replies to Joseph Solomon's questions concerning the concept of pedagogy, its role in his theory of symbolic control and cultural production, reproduction and change, and its capacities to deal with different modes of construction and regulation both inside and outside the context of formal education. Furthermore, the questions probe Bernstein's key concept of boundary, its relation to code and the production of social identities. The final issues discussed raise questions about Bernstein's methodology, and changes and weaknesses in the theory.
This paper sets out an explanation about the nature of learning cultures and how they work. In so doing, it directly addresses some key weaknesses in current situated learning theoretical writing, by working to overcome unhelpful dualisms, such as the individual and the social, and structure and agency. It does this through extensive use of some of Pierre Bourdieu's key ideas—seeing learning cultures operating as fields of force. This makes clear the relationality of learning cultures, and the fact that they operate across conventionally drawn boundaries of scale. The paper argues that this approach also paves the way for the full incorporation of individual learners into situated learning accounts.
People are inescapably shaped by the culture in which they live, while culture itself is made and remade by people. Human beings in their daily lives feel a genuine freedom of thought and belief, yet this is unavoidably constrained by cultural limitations--such as those imposed by the language spoken, the knowledge developed and the information available at any time. In this book, Margaret Archer provides an analysis of the nature and stringency of cultural constraints, and the conditions and degrees of cultural freedom, and offers a radical new explanation of the tension between them. She suggests that the "problem of culture and agency" directly parallels the "problem of structure and agency," and that both problems can be solved by using the same analytical framework. She therefore paves the way toward the theoretical unification of the structural and cultural fields.
For some time there has been a focus in higher education research towards understanding the student experience of learning. This article presents a narrative analysis of the experience of a teacher who re-entered the learning world of undergraduate students by enrolling in a challenging chemical engineering course. The analysis identifies multiple lenses in the narrative: of student, of researcher, of teacher and of mature student. A personal reflective genre was noted which displayed an overriding emotional tenor, linked both to the emotions associated with the individual experience of struggling with difficult tasks and those arising from negotiating the social interactions of the learning environment. This hermeneutic engagement points to the value in teachers exploring their own learning, as well as new possibilities for critically examining the implications of apparently progressive teaching methodologies.
Many scholars continue to accord routine action a central role in social theory and defend the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's habitus. Simultaneously, most recognize the importance of reflexivity. In this article, I consider three versions of the effort to render these concepts compatible, which I term “empirical combination,”“hybridization,” and “ontological and theoretical reconciliation.” None of the efforts is ultimately successful in analytical terms. Moreover, I argue on empirical grounds that the relevance of habitus began to decrease toward the end of the 20th century, given major changes in the structures of the advanced capitalist democracies. In these circumstances, habitual forms prove incapable of providing guidelines for people's lives and, thus, make reflexivity imperative. I conclude by arguing that even the reproduction of natal background is a reflexive activity today and that the mode most favorable to producing it—what I call “communicative reflexivity”—is becoming harder to sustain.
Recent advancements in neuroscience heighten its relevance to education. Newly developed imaging technologies enable scientists to peer into the working brain for the first time, providing powerful insights into how we learn. Research reveals that the brain is not a stable and isolated entity, but a dynamic system that is keenly responsive to experience. This work underscores the crucial role of education in shaping the brain's abilities. Brain research provides scientific evidence that emotion is fundamental to learning. Neuroscience also gives insights into how we learn language, literacy and mathematics that can inform the design of the national/state curriculum and teacher training.
This article contains the results of two research projects in the faculty of social science of the University of Amsterdam into the hidden curriculum in university.1 The results show that students do experience something like a hidden curriculum in university study. The article first goes into the question what the hidden curriculum in university is and what extra things are learnt in addition to the official curriculum. Then a second aspect of these projects is examined: that of study motivation and study attitude. There appears to be a tendency among students to study not only for the sake of a diploma (exchange value), but also to make the study more practicable in their personal lives and find a link with their own everyday experience (practical value). The latter attitude towards study appears to be an important factor to minimize the effect of the hidden curriculum and so to do more justice to the official curriculum.
This paper examines research into teaching, learning and assessment (TLA) in higher education in terms of structure and agency. It argues that although issues of structure and agency are seen as crucial in social theory, they are very little discussed in research into TLA in higher education and that a consideration of structure and agency raises some important questions about this research and the quality of the explanations that it generates. It is therefore time to reconsider this research from the standpoint of structure and agency so that more sophisticated approaches to researching, and generating explanations of, teaching, learning and assessment in higher education can be developed.
There is something of a controversy taking place over how best to theorize human learning. This article joins the debate over the relation between sociocultural and constructivist perspectives on learning. These 2 perspectives differ not just in their conceptions of knowledge (epistemological assumptions) but also in their assumptions about the known world and the knowing human (ontological assumptions). Articulated in this article are 6 themes of a nondualist ontology seen at work in the sociocultural perspective, and suggested is a reconciliation of the 2. This article proposes that learning involves becoming a member of a community, constructing knowledge at various levels of expertise as a participant, but also taking a stand on the culture of one's community in an effort to take up and overcome the estrangement and division that are consequences of participation. Learning entails transformation both of the person and of the social world. This article explores the implications of this view of learning for thinking about schooling and for the conduct of educational research.
In this article, the implications of foregrounding ontology for teaching and learning in higher education are explored. In conventional approaches to higher education programmes, ontology has tended to be subordinated to epistemological concerns. This has meant the flourishing of notions such as the transfer and acquisition of knowledge and skills, either generic or discipline-specific. The authors challenge this emphasis on what students acquire through education by foregrounding instead the question of who they become. They do this through a theoretical/conceptual exploration of an approach to learning that undermines a narrow focus on the intellect by promoting the integration of knowing, acting and being.
What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith here argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientistâs quest to interpret and explain social life. In this ambitious book, Smith presents a new model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society. Finding much current thinking on personhood to be confusing or misleading, Smith finds inspiration in critical realism and personalism. Drawing on these ideas, he constructs a theory of personhood that forges a middle path between the extremes of positivist science and relativism. Smith then builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell to demonstrate the importance of personhood to our understanding of social structures. From there he broadens his scope to consider how we can know what is good in personal and social life and what sociology can tell us about human rights and dignity. Innovative, critical, and constructive, What Is a Person? offers an inspiring vision of a social science committed to pursuing causal explanations, interpretive understanding, and general knowledge in the service of truth and the moral good.
This paper is a response to the request from the organisers of the HECU4 conference to consider the following three questions in relation to the recent history of research into student learning in higher education: What do we know?, What do we need to know?, and What might we do about it? A survey of article titles reporting on research into student learning was carried out in three key higher education journals, and the results of this were then considered in the context of other, related research perspectives. The paper will first report on the results of this review, and then discuss these results in the context of theoretical moves in psychology and sociology over the same period of time. The trends identified in the higher education journals will then be compared to research into student learning in higher education which is published in two other disciplinary areas: Adult Education and Sociolinguistics. After raising some questions that arise from these comparisons, the final section of the paper will outline some suggestions about ways in which higher education researchers might begin to ‘think differently’ about learning and research in this field.