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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: [email protected]
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
123
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
123
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).
202 G. Biesta
123
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
From Learning Cultures to Educational Cultures 203
123
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
204 G. Biesta
123
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
From Learning Cultures to Educational Cultures 205
123
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
206 G. Biesta
123
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
From Learning Cultures to Educational Cultures 207
123
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
208 G. Biesta
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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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