A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

10 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
as schemata. As new understandings, experiences, actions and information are
assimilated and accommodated the schemata change. Unless schemata are changed,
learning will not occur. Learning (whether in cognitive, affective, interpersonal or
psychomotor domains) is said to involve a process of individual transformation. Thus
people actively construct their knowledge (Biggs and Moore, 1993).
Piaget (1950) and Bruner (1960, 1966) are two of the twentieth century’s most eminent
educationalists, with views that are largely congruent with constructivism. For example,
Bruner’s ideas relating to inducting students into the modes of thinking in individual
disciplines and his notion of revisiting knowledge at ever higher levels of understanding,
leading to the idea of a spiral curriculum, have been very influential. In the discipline
of history, for instance, Bruner is often cited as the inspiration for changing the focus of
history teaching in schools in England. This shifted the balance from regurgitation of
factual information to understanding. Some of the ways in which this was done were to
encourage learners to understand how the past is reconstructed and understood, for
example by learning how to empathise and to work from primary sources.
Constructivism tells us that we learn by fitting new understanding and knowledge
into and with, extending and supplanting, old understanding and knowledge. As
teachers, we need to be aware that we are rarely if ever ‘writing on a blank slate’, even if
prior understanding is rudimentary, or wrong. Without changes or additions to preexisting
knowledge and understanding, little learning will occur.
Very frequently learning is thought of in terms only of adding more knowledge,
whereas teachers should be considering also how to bring about change or transformation
to the pre-existing knowledge of their learners (Mezirow, 1991). Additions to knowledge,
in the sense of accumulated ‘facts’, may sometimes be possible without substantial
transformation, but any learning of a higher order, involving understanding or creativity,
for example, can usually only happen when the underlying schemata are themselves
changed to incorporate new, more refined understanding and linkages. Such change
will itself be likely to facilitate retention of facts for the longer term (see Approaches to
study, below).
APPROACHES TO STUDY
In the 1970s, Marton (1975) conducted empirical work that has subsequently gained much
credibility and currency in higher education. Considerable further work has taken place,
including in and across a range of disciplinary contexts (e.g. Lizzio et al., 2002). Marton’s
research, investigating the interaction between a student and a set learning task, led to
the conclusion that students’ approaches to the task (their intention) determined the
extent to which they engaged with their subject and this affected the quality of outcomes.
These were classified as deep and surface approaches to learning.
The deep approach to learning is typified by an intention to understand and seek
meaning, leading students to attempt to relate concepts to existing understanding and to
each other, to distinguish between new ideas and existing knowledge, and to critically