The limits of tutor intervention: understanding improvement in a cultural view of FE learning and teaching

摘要

From its inception, the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC) project included an explicit intention to identify some principles for the enhancement of learning cultures in order to improve student and teacher learning, and a wish to see how effective different strategies could be in this endeavour. The project showed that both 'improvement' and 'intervention' were problematic terms, and that common-sense notions of how to bring about change-for-the-better can blind us to important features of prevailing learning cultures. We present a broad typology of tutor interventions and argue that the cultural analysis of them has lessons for policy and practice. Central among these is to avoid the assumption that tutors themselves are always in a position to bring about improvements.