learning-styles

LSRC reference Section 9
page 142/143
The main charge here is that the socio-economic
and the cultural context of students’ lives and of the
institutions where they seek to learn tend to be omitted
from the learning styles literature. Learners are not
all alike, nor are they all suspended in cyberspace
via distance learning, nor do they live out their lives
in psychological laboratories. Instead, they live in
particular socio-economic settings where age, gender,
race and class all interact to influence their attitudes to
learning. Moreover, their social lives with their partners
and friends, their family lives with their parents and
siblings, and their economic lives with their employers
and fellow workers influence their learning in significant
ways. All these factors tend to be played down or simply
ignored in most of the learning styles literature.
Lack of communication between different research
perspectives on pedagogy
What is needed in the UK now is a theory (or set
of theories) of pedagogy for post-16 learning, but this
does not exist. What we have instead is a number
of different research schools, each with its own
language, theories, methods, literature, journals,
conferences and advice to practitioners; and these
traditions do not so much argue with as ignore each
other. We have, for example, on the one hand those
researchers who empirically test the theories of Basil
Bernstein and who seem almost totally unaware
of – or at least appear unwilling to engage with – the
large body of researchers who study learning styles and
pedagogy and whose models we review in this report.
For example, the recent collection of articles devoted
to exploring Bernstein’s contribution to developing
a sociology of pedagogy (Morais et al. 2001) contains
only two references by one out of 15 contributors
to the work of ‘Entwhistle’ (sic). The learning style
researchers, for their part, continue to write and argue
among themselves, either as if Bernstein’s theorising
on pedagogy had never been published or as if it had
nothing important to say about their central research
interests. For instance, Entwistle’s publications contain
neither a detailed discussion of Bernstein’s thinking
nor even a reference to it.
Similarly, there are other groups of researchers who
explore the ideas of Bourdieu or Engeström or Knowles
and are content to remain within their preferred
paradigm, choosing to ignore significant and relevant
research in cognate areas. There are, however,
honourable exceptions which prove the rule:
Daniels (2001), for example, has contrasted the two
theoretical traditions of Engeström (activity theory)
and Bernstein (pedagogy); and his book Vygotsky and
pedagogy shows how Bernstein’s contribution may
lead to a generative model of pedagogy ‘which connects
a macro level of institutional analysis with the micro
level of interpersonal analysis’ (2001, 175). The
rhetoric of the universities’ funding councils attempts
to counteract such compartmentalisation and
fragmentation by extolling the virtues of interdisciplinary
research, but their current reward structures [eg the
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)] continue to
remunerate those who develop narrow specialisations.
Within the subject discipline of education, one
of the most unhelpful divisions is that between
sociologists and psychologists, who too often hold
each other’s research in mutual suspicion, if not
contempt. For example, at psychological conferences,
many psychologists, when talking to each other, use
the adjective ‘sociological’ as a pejorative term,
which they place, as it were, within inverted commas
to indicate their distaste, if not fear; sociology for them
is neither history nor politics nor a discipline in its own
right. Similarly, at their conferences, sociologists too
readily dismiss the work of psychologists by hinting that
the latter choose their discipline in the hope of finding
some insight into, and some alleviation of, their
personal problems.
The practical consequence of this divide is two separate
literatures on pedagogy which rarely interact with
each other. Typically, sociologists and psychologists
pass each other by in silence, for all the world like two
sets of engineers drilling two parallel tunnels towards
the same objective in total ignorance of each other.
One of the values of the concept of lifelong learning
is that it should make us re-examine the major
stratifications within the education system because
the very notion implies continuity and progression.
Zukas and Malcolm, however, point out that instead
of conceptual bridges, we run into pedagogical walls
‘between those sectors that might be regarded as
contributing to the virtual concept of lifelong learning.
There is little conceptual connection between adult
and further education, higher education, training and
professional development’ (2002, 203).
What national policy and local practice need, however,
is for these unconnected literatures to be brought
together, and for the main protagonists to be actively
encouraged to use each other’s findings, not to poke
fun at their opponents, but to test and improve their
own ideas. Such a rapprochement is one of the biggest
challenges facing the ESRC’s programme of research
into teaching and learning in the post-compulsory phase
(see www.tlrp.org) and could become one of its most
significant achievements. It would be a fitting tribute to
Bernstein’s memory if there were to be wider recognition
of his argument that what is required is less allegiance
to an approach but more dedication to a problem.