From Learning Cultures to Educational Cultures: Values and Judgements in Educational Research and...

ORI GIN AL ARTICLE

From Learning Cultures to Educational Cultures:Values and Judgements in Educational Researchand Educational Improvement

Gert Biesta

Published online: 16 November 2011

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract This article outlines a new approach to the study learning and the

improvement of education. The approach consists of two elements: a theory of

learning cultures and a cultural theory of learning. Learning cultures are different

from learning contexts or learning environments in that they are to be understood as

the social practices through which people learn. Learning cultures therefore do not

exist objectively, but only in function of concrete practices of learning. This

requires that the study of learning needs to, ‘follow the learning’. In the cultural

theory of learning, learning itself is seen as practical, embodied and social. While

learning is often seen as a descriptive term, it is argued that the use of the word

learning always implies a value judgement about change (for example change in

cognition, behaviour or disposition). Unlike the study of physical objects such as

trees or planets, the study of learning therefore needs to start from a conception of

good or desirable learning. This becomes even more important when the cultural

approach is utilised for the improvement of educational processes and practices. It is

argued that in such cases we need to move from the notion of learning cultures to

the notion of educational cultures. An educational culture is defined as a learning

culture that is framed by particular purposes. A cultural approach therefore not only

provides new ways for educational research and educational improvement, but also

highlights that both research and improvement can only proceed on the basis of

judgements about what counts as good or desirable learning.

Keywords Learning cultures � Educational cultures � Educational research �Educational improvement

Resume Cet article presente une nouvelle approche a l’etude de l’apprentissage et

a l’amelioration de l’education. L’approche se compose de deux elements: une

G. Biesta (&)

School of Education & Laboratory for Educational Theory, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

e-mail: gert.biesta@stir.ac.uk

123

IJEC (2011) 43:199–210

DOI 10.1007/s13158-011-0042-x

theorie des cultures de l’apprentissage et une theorie culturelle de l’apprentissage.

Les cultures de l’apprentissage sont differentes des contextes d’apprentissage ou des

environnements d’apprentissage en ce sens qu’elles doivent etre comprises comme

les pratiques sociales a travers lesquelles les gens apprennent. Les cultures de

l’apprentissage n’existent donc pas objectivement, mais seulement en fonction des

pratiques concretes de l’apprentissage. Cela requiert que l’etude de l’apprentissage

doive «suivre l’apprentissage». Dans la theorie culturelle de l’apprentissage,

l’apprentissage lui-meme est percu comme pratique, incarne et social. Alors que

l’apprentissage est souvent considere comme un terme descriptif, il est soutenu que

l’utilisation du mot apprentissage implique toujours un jugement de valeur sur le

changement (par exemple le changement de la cognition, du comportement ou de la

disposition). Contrairement a l’etude d’objets physiques comme des arbres ou des

planetes, l’etude de l’apprentissage doit donc partir d’une conception de l’appren-

tissage considere bon ou souhaitable. Cela devient encore plus important lorsque

l’approche culturelle est utilisee pour l’amelioration des processus et des pratiques

educatives. Il est soutenu que dans de tels cas, nous devons aller de la notion de

cultures de l’apprentissage a la notion de cultures educatives. Une culture educative

est definie comme une culture de l’apprentissage qui est encadree par des fins

particulieres. Par consequent, une approche culturelle ne fournit pas seulement de

nouvelles voies pour la recherche educative et l’amelioration de l’education, mais

elle souligne aussi que tant la recherche que l’amelioration de l’education ne peu-

vent proceder que sur la base de jugements sur ce qui est considere comme un

apprentissage bon ou souhaitable.

Resumen Este documento destaca un nuevo enfoque para el estudio del

aprendizaje y la mejora de la educacion. El enfoque consiste en dos elementos: una

teorıa de culturas de aprendizaje y una teorıa cultural de aprendizaje. Las culturas de

aprendizaje son distintas a los contextos o entornos de aprendizaje, ya que deben

entenderse como las practicas sociales a traves de las cuales las personas aprenden.

Por ende, las culturas de aprendizaje no existen objetivamente, sino solo en funcion

de practicas concretas de aprendizaje. Esto requiere que el estudio del aprendizaje

necesite ‘‘seguir el aprendizaje’’. En la teorıa cultural del aprendizaje, el aprendizaje

en sı es considerado practico, personificado y social. Mientras que el aprendizaje es

a menudo visto como un termino descriptivo, se argumenta que el uso de la palabra

aprendizaje siempre implica una opinion valorada acerca del cambio (por ejemplo

cambio de cognicion, conducta o disposicion). A diferencia del estudio de objetos

fısicos como arboles o planetas, el estudio del aprendizaje, por ende, debe partir de

un aprendizaje bueno o deseable. Esto se vuelve aun mas importante cuando el

enfoque cultural es utilizado para la mejora de procesos y practicas educativas. Se

argumenta que en estos casos debemos pasar de la nocion de culturas de aprendizaje

a la de culturas educativas. Una cultura educativa se define como aquella cultura de

aprendizaje enmarcada en propositos particulares. Por lo tanto, un enfoque cultural

no solo ofrece nuevas formas para la investigacion y mejora educativa, sino que

tambien destaca que tanto la investigacion como la mejora solo pueden proceder

sobre la base de las opiniones de lo que se considera un aprendizaje bueno o

deseable.

200 G. Biesta

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Introduction

In recent years there has been a shift in many domains of educational practice and

educational research from a focus on education to a focus on learning. One of the

reasons behind this shift is the idea that the language of learning appears to be more

open and less constrained than the language of education. While a language of

education tends to focus on the activities and intentions of those who educate, the

language of learning allows for a focus on what children and young people

themselves do, that is, on how they learn, both in relation to the activities of

educators, but often also beyond or outside of particular educational arrangements,

scenarios and structures. This is why over the past decades educational researchers

have developed a wide range of different approaches to the study of learning, both

in formal educational settings and in a wide range of other more informal and non-

formal settings, such as the family, work, local communities, and society at large.

The main purpose of this article is to present a new approach to the study of

learning that was developed in the context of a large research project on the Further

Education sector in Britain—the sector that deals with academic and vocational

education of young people and adults from the age of 16 upwards. This approach—

which we termed a cultural approach—consists of two elements: a theory of

learning cultures and a cultural theory of learning (see James and Biesta 2007;

Hodkinson et al. 2007, 2008). The cultural approach not only allows for a more

authentic, more encompassing and in a sense more holistic approach for the study of

learning. It also provides a different avenue towards the improvement of learning,

one that focuses on the transformation of learning cultures as a whole, rather than

only on the change of one or more of its ‘elements’ (such as, for example, teaching,

curriculum or student approaches to studying). Because the cultural approach sees

the dispositions, actions, histories and trajectories of individual students as

constitutive parts of a learning culture, student learning is not simply seen as an

‘outcome’ or ‘product’ of a particular learning culture but at the very same time as

something that shapes and forms the culture.

While we developed the cultural approach in the context of our research on the

education of young people and adults, the approach has the potential to be useful in

a much wider range of settings (for some examples of the use of the cultural

approach in other settings see Ashwin 2009; Billett 2009; Maxwell 2010;

Quennerstedt et al. 2011). The other contributions to the special issue of which

this article is a part focus on the differing ways in which a cultural approach can be

useful for research on and improvement of learning in early childhood settings. This

article provides some of the theoretical ‘groundwork’ for the other articles by

presenting the key components of the cultural approach and by raising some critical

questions about the ways in which this approach can contribute to understanding

and improving learning. With regard to the latter, it also points at some of the

limitations of the cultural approach, particularly where it concerns the role of values

and judgements in research on and improvement of learning cultures. In this

context, it is suggested that the idea of learning cultures should at least be

complemented by the notion of educational cultures. The idea of educational

cultures highlights more explicitly the normative dimensions that constitute

From Learning Cultures to Educational Cultures 201

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educational processes and practices, and thus makes it possible to show the role that

values and value judgements play both in research on such practices and in attempts

to change such practices for the better.

Learning Cultures

In our approach the word ‘culture’—which, according to Raymond Williams (1983,

p. 87) is ’one of the two or three most difficult words in the English language’—is

used in an anthropological sense where culture is seen as a way of acting and being

and, more generally, as a way of life. Cultures are produced and reproduced by

human activity, most often collective activity. To think of culture as the product of

human activity does not entail an agency-driven conception of culture, that is, a

view which reduces culture to the intentions and actions of individual agents. While

cultures are the product of human action, they can become a ‘force’ in their own

right and in this way can begin to influence and shape opportunities for further

action. We can see this, for example, with social customs and rules, or in the way in

which laws and institutions function. Cultures are thus both structured and

structuring, which means that individuals are neither totally determined by

particular cultures, nor are they totally free. Individuals are, however, differently

positioned with regard to the shaping and changing of a culture, which means that

we cannot assume that everyone has the same power to shape and structure a

particular culture. Cultures have history and endurance, and their endurance is both

the result of people enacting cultures and of the materialities that embody cultures.

School buildings, classrooms, and even school furniture are therefore not the neutral

backdrop for education, but always embody particular educational ideas, practices,

and traditions, and therefore influence what can be done and what cannot be done. It

is, however, what people do with such cultural materialities that is the decisive

factor. This means that cultures ultimately exist and continue to exist through

interaction and communication or, in more general terms, as practice (see Bauman

1973).

One of the most important implications to follow from this understanding of

culture is that a learning culture should not be understood as the context or

environment within which learning takes place. Rather, learning cultures are thesocial practices through which people learn. A cultural understanding of learning

therefore implies that learning is not simply occurring in a cultural context but is

itself to be understood as a cultural practice. The key task for a cultural approach to

the study of learning is therefore that of understanding how particular practices

impact upon the learning opportunities of those who make up the practice. The

central question, in other words, is to understand what forms and ways of learning

are made possible through a particular learning culture and what forms of learning

are made difficult or even impossible. To answer this question, we need an

understanding of the dynamics of learning cultures and how they ‘work,’ which

requires that we pay attention to three dimensions: time, scale and action. In our

own work we have developed these ideas further with reference to Bourdieu’s

notions of ‘field’ and ‘habitus’ (see James and Biesta 2007).

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With regard to time, we need an understanding of how particular learning cultures

come into existence, how they stay in existence, how they change over time—both as

a result of deliberate attempts to change them and as a result of intervening events

and unintended consequences of actions—and also how learning cultures decline and

eventually disappear. We need, in other words, to gain an understanding of the

history and development of learning cultures—their formation and transformation—

and we need to gain an insight into both continuity and change. To do this, we need a

theory of learning cultures that is able to operate at different scales so as to

understand both proximal and distant factors, that is, both the factors that are at play

at the concrete level of practice—such as the actions and interactions of students and

teachers—and the factors that shape learning cultures from a distance, such as, for

example, policies at local, national or even international level. (In this respect, our

cultural approach differs from participatory approaches to learning.) Because

learning cultures are constituted by the actions of all those who, in some way, take

part in the culture—which always includes students—we also need an understanding

of the ways in which learning happens through the actions of those who take part in a

particular learning culture. This is why a cultural approach requires both a theory of

learning cultures and a cultural theory of learning (see below).

While it might be relatively easy to conduct research on the contexts within

which learning takes place, research on learning cultures understood in the way

outlined above is far more complicated. This is first of all because of the dimensions

of time and scale. Unlike learning contexts, learning cultures do not have clear

boundaries, so we always need to look beyond what is immediately present. But it is

also because of the dimension of action, that is, the fact that learning cultures only

exist in and through the actions of all those who, in some way, take part in and

constitute such cultures. This not only means that learning cultures are in some

respect always in the process of change; they are, so we might say, living entities. It

also means that there are potentially as many different learning cultures as there are

individuals engaged in learning. While learning contexts might, therefore, be

relatively easy to identify, learning cultures only exist in function of processes and

practices of learning. This means that the main rule for the study of learning cultures

is to ‘follow the learning’ and, from there, both ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’ in space

(scale) and time. However, to ‘follow the learning’ requires that we are able to

identify ‘the learning’—which raises questions both about how to theorise learning

and how to conceptualise learning. The first of these questions brings us to our

cultural theory of learning, which is the second component of our cultural approach.

A Cultural Theory of Learning

The cultural theory of learning is a theory that sees learning as practical, embodied

and social. Seeing learning as practical means that it is understood as something that is

done—that is, intrinsically connected to our actions and activities—and thus not

simply as something that happens in the human mind, but as something that is

thoroughly embodied. These aspects of our cultural theory of learning draw

inspiration from pragmatism, both the work of John Dewey (see Biesta 2009a) and

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George Herbert Mead (see Biesta 2005). What we can find in Dewey is the idea that

learning involves the whole living human being in continuous interaction—or as

Dewey would prefer: transaction—with its environment (see, for example, Dewey

1957, 1963). Dewey challenges the idea that mind and body can be understood as

ontologically separate with the mind being the true location of human cognition and

learning, and with mental/rational processes as being superior to the emotional and the

practical. For Dewey mind is not a separate entity but a function of human action,

action that is characterised by anticipation, foresight, and embodied judgement. It is

as a result of the ongoing transactions with the environments in and through which we

act—which is a formulation that corresponds with what we said about learning

cultures—that our ‘habits’, our predispositions for action, are formed and trans-

formed. It is first of all at this practical and embodied level that learning takes place

and takes shape; learning that is itself embodied in that it first of all is learning that, as

Dewey (1957) has put it, ‘lives in the muscles’ (see also Biesta and Burbules 2003).

The fact that learning occurs ‘in transaction’ makes it also inherently social, since

the environments through which we act are not simply physical or material

environments, but also social environments, that is, environments populated by other

human beings. To highlight that learning is social thus implies that it involves co-

ordination of our actions and activities with the actions and activities of others—which

is likely to involve tension and conflict as well. It also implies that learning involves

communication, the sharing of meaning and understanding (see Biesta 2009a). At this

point, it is important to emphasise that the claim that learning is practical and

embodied does not mean that it is no more than the subconscious transformation of our

dispositions. We learn not only by doing but also by reflecting upon what we do and by

monitoring our actions. This is an important aspect of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus in

that habitus not only generates meaningful practices but also meaning-giving

perceptions (see Sayer 2005, p. 27). As Sayer (ibid. p. 28) explains: ’Ways of thinking

can become habitual. Once learned they change from something we struggle to grasp

to something we can think with.’ The point is even made more poignantly by the

pragmatists, particularly Mead, who operates with the distinction between meaning—

which he sees as embodied and located at the level of our habits—and consciousness of

meaning—which concerns the transformation of embodied meaning into proposi-

tions, understanding, language and reflection, so that we not only become aware of

what we have learned but can also use this to think, reflect and act (see Biesta 1998).

What is interesting about Mead, and this brings us straight back to the social

dimensions of a cultural theory of learning, is the fact that he sees the distinction

between meaning and consciousness of meaning not as something that is generated

from the inside out—it is not, generated by our brain or genetic make up—but emerges

from the ways in which we coordinate our actions with those of others (see also Biesta

1999; Mead 2008). The distinction itself, therefore, has a social origin.

The Problem with ‘Learning’

So far I have argued that the theory of learning cultures provides a new perspective

for the study of learning, one which aims to understand the conditions that promote

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or impede learning through an investigation into the temporal, ’scalar,’ and action

dimensions of learning cultures understood as the practices through which people

learn, and in which action always involves social interaction. (This, in turn, also

provides a new avenue towards the improvement of learning—an issue to which I

will return below.) Since learning cultures are not the same as learning contexts, the

way to ‘access’ a learning culture is through the learning itself—which led me to the

claim that the way into the study of learning cultures is by ‘following the learning.’ I

then showed how learning is theorised within what we have referred to as a cultural

theory of learning, one that sees learning as practical, embodied and social. While

the latter provides us with a theory of learning—that is, with a way to understand

how learning takes place—it does not in itself provide us with a conceptualisation of

learning, that is, with a way to identify learning as a ’phenomenon.’ It is, however,

essential that we can do so. After all, if we cannot identify learning we can also not

follow it. Precisely at this point things become a bit more complicated, as there is a

particular problem with the notion of ’learning.’

The first thing to bear in mind is that in the English language the word ‘learning’

can refer both to an activity and to an ‘outcome’ (in the literature often referred to as

learning as process and learning as product). When the word is used in the first

sense, for example, when it is said that students are ‘engaged in learning’, it is meant

to describe certain behaviours or actions, such as when students are reading a book,

making notes, working on an assignment, surfing on the internet, doing their

homework, and so on. The difficulty here is, however, that such activities can only

be identified as learning if we can in some way connect them to real or anticipated

outcomes. Reading a book, or surfing the internet, or talking to one’s fellow students

is not, in itself, a learning activity, but can become so either when we can conclude,

later on, that the activity has resulted in learning or when, from the perspective of

the educator, there is at least the intention that the activities will result in learning.

That is why the use of the word ‘learning’ to refer to such activities is potentially

confusing, and it might be better to use more descriptive terms such as reading,

talking, surfing the internet, doing one’s homework, making an effort, or studying.

Whether such activities can count as learning activities thus depends on whether

they will result in learning—which brings us to the use of ‘learning’ to describe a

certain ‘outcome.’ The idea of learning as an outcome is well captured in one of the

most general definitions of learning as being ’any more or less durable change that is

not the result of maturation.’ This definition aims to distinguish those changes that

are the result of maturation from those changes that are the result of what we might

call the interaction of individuals with their (material and social) environments—

and in the cultural theory of learning outlined above we have described the

interactional aspects of this process in more detail. It also tries to distinguish

relatively minor changes from changes that ‘stick,’ so to speak. What can be added

to this definition is an indication of what has changed—which, as mentioned, can

include both changes at the level of our habits and dispositions, and changes in

meaning, knowledge and understanding. The interesting thing here is that when we

use the word ‘learning’ we do not tend to use it in order to refer to all changes that

are not the result of maturation—if that were the case there would, after all, not be a

reason to distinguish between change and learning—but only to those changes that

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we deem to be either desirable or undesirable. When we use the word ‘learning,’ in

other words, we make a judgement about change and it is this judgement that singles

out some change as learning (and other change as ‘just change’). Such evaluations

are positive when we make statements like ‘Tom has learned to ride his bike’ or

‘Mary has learned the second law of thermodynamics.’ Such evaluations are

negative when we say that someone has picked up a ‘bad habit’—and the language

here is interesting in itself, both the word ‘bad’ which already reveals the negative

evaluation and the word ‘habit’ which indicates that something has been learned

without us being totally in control of it. This suggests, however, that ‘learning’ is

not so much a descriptive term as that it is an evaluative term, a term we deploy to

indicate the value of particular change.

This means that we can only use the word ‘learning’ retrospectively, that is, after

some change has happened—which is the reason why we can never know that

someone is currently learning something; the most we can know is that someone is

currently doing something, which might include making a conscious effort to

change. Sometimes we can identify that learning has happened fairly quickly;

however, there are also things we only realise we have learned long after the event

(such as, for example, the deeper insights about one’s life that emerge towards the

end of it). In educational settings, we use assessment to ‘speed up’ this process by

requesting from students that they make their learning visible (which may suggest

that assessment quite often ‘produces’ learning rather than that it simply assesses it).

The foregoing not only suggests that we can use the word ‘learning’ only

retrospectively. It also suggests that we can only use the word ‘learning’

evaluatively—which means that we need to be aware of the values involved in

using the word.

This discussion not only reveals why it is important to make a distinction

between theorising learning and conceptualising learning, but also highlights the

more important point that the study of learning cultures is not like the study of

natural phenomena such as trees, fish or mountains, but actually starts from value

judgements, judgements about the kind of change that is considered to be desirable

or undesirable, as it is only when such judgements have been made that we can

identify learning and thus can begin to follow it to generate an understanding of

what promotes or impedes such learning. This leaves open the question as to who

should be involved in making such judgements. They can be made by researchers,

but researchers can also start from the values and evaluations of those engaged in

the practices they are studying, which can include both educators and students.

From Learning Cultures to Educational Cultures

In the introduction, I have argued that the cultural approach not only provides a

different and more encompassing and holistic way to study learning, but also

provides a different avenue towards educational improvement. Most of the

discussion so far has focused on implications for research on the formation and

transformation of learning cultures and on the ways in which particular configu-

rations promote or impede learning. Yet, the question of the study of learning

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already turned out to be more complicated than what perhaps at first sight was

assumed, the main difficulty being that learning is not a natural phenomenon but can

only be identified on the basis of value judgements, that is judgements that evaluate

change. As long as this is taken into consideration, one could say that the idea of

learning cultures provides a useful and significantly different perspective for

research, although the notion of learning cultures does suffer from the ambiguity of

the word ‘learning,’ that is, the fact that ‘learning’ can both denote process and

outcome.

From an educational perspective this becomes more of a problem. The reason for

this is that in educational settings the intention is not that those involved in such

settings—to which we can refer with such words as pupils, students, or children (see

Biesta 2010b)—learn. The very point of educational settings is that those involved

learn something and that they learn this for a particular reason (or number of

reasons; see below). In addition, what characterises educational settings is that those

involved in them learn from someone. Unlike ‘learning’—which is in a sense a

rather empty or neutral term—education always entails content, purpose and

relationships (see Biesta 2010a). This suggests that it is important to make a

distinction between learning cultures and educational cultures, where educationalcultures are learning cultures framed by purposes. While in many cases it can be

said to be the responsibility of educators to articulate and justify such purposes, this

does not mean that students are necessarily excluded from doing so (see, for

example, Robinson and Taylor 2007).

The distinction between educational cultures and learning cultures is first and

foremost of importance in relation to the question of improvement. While the theory

of learning cultures gives a general suggestion for improvement in that it argues that

improvement necessarily involves a transformation of the culture as a whole—and

in this regard provides a perspective on educational improvement that is

fundamentally different from work that tries to isolate particular factors and then

aims to find out how such factors impact on particular outcomes—the question as to

what counts as improvement can only ever be answered if there is a clear view about

what the aims and objectives of a particular educational setting, practice or activity

are. A cultural perspective on educational improvement, to put it differently, always

needs to begin with the question about what it is one aims to achieve—which, again,

is a normative question that involves evaluations and values. The interesting—but

also complicating—thing about educational practices is that they hardly ever are

orientated towards only one purpose. Or, to put it in more empirical terms:

educational practices tend to impact on a number of different ‘domains.’ Elsewhere

(Biesta 2009b, 2010a), I have suggested to make a distinction between three

potential ‘functions’ of education to which I have referred as qualification,

socialisation and subjectification. Qualification has to do with the domain of

knowledge, skills and dispositions and more general with the ways in which through

education we become qualified to do certain things—things which can range from

the ability to speak a foreign language, to perform mathematical calculations, to

look at society through a geographical or historical lens, up to the acquisition of

certain vocational or professional skills, or the wider knowledge and skills of good

citizenship. Socialisation has to do with the ways in which, through education, we

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become initiated into and become part of existing practises, traditions and wider

socio-cultural, political or professional ‘orders.’ Subjectification has to do with the

ways in which education impacts on the person—on the human subject—and thus

contributes to the formation of human qualities such as, for example, autonomy,

responsibility, democracy or compassion (for more on this see particularly Biesta

2010a).

Yet qualification, socialisation and subjectification not only denote three

functions of education. At the very same time, they denote three possible domains

of educational purpose, that is, three domains that are potentially at stake in

discussions about what education is for—discussions that take place both at the

general level of school systems and school concepts and at the level of the everyday

decision-making of educational practitioners. What makes such discussions

interesting and complicated is the fact that it is virtually impossible to separate

out one of these dimensions. While, at the level of explicitly stated aims, one may

wish to try to focus on only one of the dimensions—say, for example, only that of

knowledge and skills—the teaching of knowledge and skills always also commu-

nicates particular norms, values and ideas about appropriate ways of being and

doing (socialisation) and always also impacts on the qualities of the person

(subjectification). In this regard, one could even say that it is educationally

irresponsible to claim that one can and should only be concerned about one of these

dimensions (particularly if this dimension is the qualification dimension—a

dimension that is often singled out in popular and populist discussions about

education as the only dimension that ‘really’ matters). The fact that educational

processes and practices always potentially impact on all three domains does not

mean that such impact is without tension and conflict. While education is partly

complicated because it always impacts on more than one dimension of educational

purpose, it is further complicated by the fact that attention on one domain can be

detrimental to attention in another domain—something we can see, for example, in

the way in which excessive regimes of testing impact negatively on both the

socialisation dimension (where it teaches students that there will always be

‘winners’ and ‘losers’) and the subjectification dimension (where such regimes can

effect long-term damage on self-concept and self-confidence).

Conclusions: Values, Judgement and Complexity in Practice and Research

While the cultural approach provides a general idea about the ‘levers’ for

educational improvement (on this see also James and Biesta 2007), it remains itself

a formal and in a sense ambiguous notion because, as I have shown, the word

‘learning’ is itself formal and ambiguous. This is why I have argued that we need to

move from learning cultures to educational cultures to highlight that in educational

settings there is always the question of the purpose—or, as I have argued: the

purposes—of what goes on in such settings. This is where value judgements come

in—judgements about what is considered educationally desirable—which, in turn,

brings in the notion of the complexity of educational cultures, which has to do with

the fact that the question of purpose in education is always multidimensional and

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with the fact that there can be both synergy and tension and conflict between the

different dimensions, even to the point where progress with regard to one dimension

can cancel out or obstruct progress with regard to another dimension.

A cultural perspective on educational improvement thus begins with the question

what the aims of the educational activities are, that is, what is considered to be

educationally desirable by relevant actors in the practice. It is only then that we can

begin to investigate the dimensions of the practice—the temporal, scalar and action

dimensions—that are likely to promote or hinder or impede such learning, and it is

only in this way that research on educational cultures can begin to shed light on

change and transformation for the better. This shows that value judgements about

what is considered educationally desirable—that is, what is considered to be the set

of purposes that ‘frame’ the particular setting—feed into the research and that, in

turn, the outcomes of the research feed back into the practice in order to support

change for the better. Yet,such research will never generate recipes that actors in the

setting only need to follow. Outcomes from research on educational cultures provide

those acting in the setting with possibilities. Yet, it is ultimately up to those acting in

the situation to consider such possibilities in their always local, always situated,

always practical and always cultural educational judgements (see Biesta 2007,

2010c).

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Reidar Mosvold and the anonymous reviewers of my

manuscript for their helpful and constructive feedback.

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