Diversity and Difference? Focusing on Similarity through ‘Approaches to
Learning’
Monica McLean and Keith Trigwell
Institute for the Advancement of University Learning, University of Oxford
Introduction
Should university students from a diversity of backgrounds be thought about as being
different? While a case can be made for such a focus, a consideration of students’
similarities, particularly in relation to learning goals or outcomes, is an alternative
way of addressing issues of diversity. The paper starts by explaining what relational
research tells us about university learning and teaching that can be applied to all
students in all institutional contexts. We go on to explore why the theories arising
from the research has not had more influence on pedagogic practice than might be
expected, suggesting that it is because such research is easy to misunderstand. There
is also some suspicion about a theory which is apparently simple, carries a universal
message and appears divorced from socio-economic, historical and political
considerations. We suggest that the benefits of the insights provided by the
approaches to learning and teaching research are that they challenge elitism and have
purchase on practice. They cannot, however, explain and guide all practice so we
suggest that a way to respond pedagogically to diversity might be to make use of
complementary theories and research.
Approaches to Learning
What is valued in learning, by most academic teaching staff and educationalists, is an
engagement by the learners with what is being learnt, in a way that leads to a personal
and meaningful understanding. If there are approaches to teaching, or elements
within the students’ learning environment that they perceive to support or hinder this
type of learning, then addressing those factors, for all students, may be a way of
addressing diversity issues.
A personal engagement with learning in a way that leads to a meaningful
understanding is known as a deep approach to learning. This approach may appear to
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differ when adopted in different disciplines, but at the core of all deep approaches is
an intention by the student to understand ideas and seek meanings. The same student,
perceiving a different context, with different expectations, may adopt a surface
approach, where tasks are seen as being externally imposed. Their intention is to
cope with, and meet these requirements, particularly as they relate to assessment
systems (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999, pp 90-92).
Many studies have shown that how students perceive their learning environment is
also related to the approach to learning that they adopt (Ramsden, 2003). Among the
more recent of these studies is an investigation at the University of Oxford into
students’ perceptions of the quality of their teaching, the clarity of the goals and
standards of their course, their workload, the nature of the assessment on the course,
and how these perceptions are related to their approaches to learning (Trigwell and
Ashwin, 2003). The correlation co-efficients of the relations between these variables
is shown in Table 1.
Table 1: Relations between students’ perceptions of context variables and their
approaches to learning
Context variable scales and items
Deep
Surface
Good teaching scale
.43
-.34
Clear goals and standards scale
.11*
-.33
Appropriate workload scale
.24
-.69
Appropriate assessment scale
.25
-.35
My tutors motivate me to do my best work
.26
-.29
My tutors put a lot of time into commenting (orally and/or
.26
-.23
My tutors work hard to make their subjects interesting
.28
-.28
My tutors are extremely good at explaining things
.24
-.29
My tutors normally give me helpful feedback on my
.18
-.20
.19
-.22
Teaching experience items
in writing) on my work
progress
My tutors make a real effort to understand difficulties I
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may be having with my work
N = 2317-2329; p<.001 in all cases except*
Table 1 shows that all four perceptions scales correlate negatively and statistically
significantly with surface approaches to learning. When students experience a
workload that for them is too high, they are likely to describe a surface approach to
learning. These relations suggest that reducing surface approaches to learning may be
achieved through changes to students’ perceptions of this or other context variables.
The correlations are positive but less strong between a deep approach and three of the
four variables. The teaching variable shows a strong positive correlation with a deep
approach, which suggests that paths to improving all students’ engagement with their
learning might lie within teaching approaches and conceptions.
Approaches to Teaching
The features of teaching that are associated with deep approaches to learning (lower
section of Table 1) are, according to students, motivating students to do their best
work, putting a lot of time into commenting on student work and giving feedback on
progress, working hard to make their subjects interesting, explaining things clearly
and making a real effort to understand difficulties students may have.
Related studies, from the teachers’ perspective, show that in the classes where
teachers say that their main intention is to transmit information, their students are
more likely to adopt surface and non-deep approaches to learning, and that where
there is an intention to teach for change in students’ ways of thinking, the adopted
student learning is more likely to involve deep and non-surface approaches (Trigwell,
Prosser and Waterhouse, 1999).
Teachers vary in how they approach their teaching (Prosser, Trigwell and Taylor,
1994; Martin, et al., 2000). In some contexts, teachers keep more of a focus on their
students in their planning and their activities. They tend to see their role as helping
their students develop and change their conceptions or world views, their focus is on
the bigger picture – an overview of the topic or how the components of the
information are related to each other, and on students’ prior knowledge – and what
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students bring to the situation. In these contexts, their planning and teaching methods
are in alignment with this conception and their approach is called a conceptual
change/student-focused (CCSF) approach.
In adopting this approach these teachers focus their attention on the students and
monitor their perceptions, activity and understanding. Transmission is seen to be
necessary, but rarely sufficient. They assume students construct their own
knowledge, so the task of the teacher is also to challenge current ideas through
questions, problems, discussion and presentation. This approach includes a mastery
of teaching techniques, including those associated with transmission, but this is seen
as an empty display without learning.
In other contexts, the same teachers may work with a focus on what they do as
teachers, or on the detail – individual concepts in the syllabus or textbook, or their
own knowledge structure – without acknowledgment of what students may bring to
the situation or experience in the situation. They see their role as mainly transmitting
information based upon that knowledge to their students. In adopting this information
transmission/teacher-focused (ITTF) approach to teaching, forward planning, good
management skills, use of an armoury of teaching competencies, and the ability to use
IT are seen as important. The subject matter information is often complex and
requires their skill as an organiser and presenter.
Two large-scale surveys of students’ learning and their teachers’ teaching carried out
in the mid 1990s both utilised inventories designed to capture variation in teachers’
approaches to teaching and students’ approaches to learning. The results of the larger
study (Trigwell, et al., 1998) involving 55 first year courses yielding data from 408
teachers and 8829 students in the classes of those teachers, are shown in Table 2.
Table 2 suggests that when teachers report that their focus is on what they do in their
teaching, when they believe students have little or no prior knowledge of the subject
they are teaching, when they do little more than transmit facts so that students will
have a good set of notes (a ITTF approach), their students are more likely to report
adopting a surface approach to learning. Conversely, when teachers report that they
have students as the focus of their activities, where it matters more to them what the
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student is doing and learning than what the teacher is doing or covering, where the
teacher is one who encourages self directed learning, who makes time (in formal
‘teaching’ time) for students to interact and to discuss the problems they encounter,
where the teacher assesses to reveal conceptual change, where the teacher provokes
debate, uses a lot of time to question students’ ideas and to develop a ‘conversation’
with students in lectures (a CCSF approach), their students are less likely to report
adopting a surface approach and more likely to report adopting a deep approach. But
crucially, as shown in the relations between teaching intention and strategy (Trigwell
& Prosser, 1996) these strategies are underpinned by a conception of teaching that has
the student as the focus of activities. It matters more to this teacher what the student
is doing and learning and experiencing than what the teacher is doing or covering.
Table 2: Correlation between teachers' approach to teaching and students' approach
to learning variables (Trigwell, et al., 1998).
Variable
Variable
Deep approach to learning
Surface approach to learning
CCSF approach to teaching
ITTF approach to teaching
Deep
-
Surf
-.22
-
CCSF
.38*
-.48*
-
ITTF
-.15
.38*
-.30
-
*p<.05, n=55
CCSF conceptual change/student-focused
ITTF information transmission/teacher-focused
Approaches to Learning and Teaching and Difference
Research associated with approaches to learning and teaching applies to all university
students: whether the students are traditional or non-traditional it offers possibilities
of becoming engaged in academic learning. The research is well-established and
well-known, appearing in policy documents as well as being a common feature of
courses for university teaching around the country. Nevertheless, we suspect that the
potential for the insights set out above to be a resource for improving university
teaching and learning is often not realised. In part this is because it can appear simple
but is often not well understood. A common misunderstanding is that an approach to
learning (deep or surface) is an attribute of individual students rather than a set of
intentions, amounting to an ‘approach’, which are a response to perceiving the
5
learning environment in particular ways: if perceptions change so do the intentions.
While this misunderstanding can be comparatively easily clarified, a more serious
problem might be that the difficulty and uncertainty of pursuing student-focused
teaching or attempting to change student perceptions is underestimated (see, for
example, Cope and Staehr, 2005; and, Wilson and Fowler, 2005). The relations
between student perceptions of the learning environment and approach to learning are
well-established, but as Prosser and Trigwell (1999) point out, findings are
‘descriptive and analytic, not […] causal and explanatory’ (p.172). When searching
for practical teaching guidance, it seems rational to use the powerful relationships that
the approaches to learning and teaching research reveal to justify attempts to
manipulate students’ perceptions or to change the learning environment or to become
student-focused, but none of these are necessarily easy to achieve and there is room to
doubt that such efforts will be successful. From our perspective, more persistence is
needed.
A second reason that this relational research on higher education pedagogy does not
realise its practical potential is that interested people with leanings towards sociocultural perspectives (including participants of courses for teaching) reject the
approaches to learning and teaching findings for a raft of reasons (Haggis, 2003;
Webb, 1997). In this paper we deal with two related criticisms which have a bearing
on the theme of universities’ response to students with diverse academic and pastoral
needs: the first criticism is that the theory does not take account of difference and
diversity; and, the second is that the theory divorces itself from socio-political
concerns and the broader goals of higher education. We believe that the first criticism
is unjustified, while the second has some justification.
It is apposite in a paper for a series of seminars about the influence on pedagogy of
‘social diversity and difference’ to discuss the status as universal of theories
associated with approaches to learning and teaching. It might be illuminating to start
the discussion by drawing attention to the intellectual context into which the theories
of relational research have emerged. It can be argued that preoccupation with
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‘diversity and difference’ has arisen from insights offered by postmodern theories1
which hold that the contemporary social world is characterised by plurality,
‘hybridisation’, fragmentation, complexity and chaos, and, therefore, that there are no
universal grounds for being certain about anything. So we should eschew ‘grand
narratives’ about reason, truth, progress and emancipation and attempt to extract
meaning from the contemplation of incommensurate ‘differences’. This view, of
course, is not uncontested2 but it is influential and has resulted in widespread
suspicion of claims to ‘goodness’ or ‘truth’. For all this, we are interested in the
practicalities of assisting university students to develop their minds and, accepting
that education is a normative moral-practical social activity, it is difficult to see how
we are to do so without believing in some (albeit provisional) form of progress or
rationality.
In the context of caution about universal propositions, our remarks about approaches
to learning and teaching comprise both a defence against the charge of ignoring
difference and propounding truth and a challenge to the focus on differences between
students. The first point of defence is that the theory we are discussing is not
monolithic, what it has established is a set of relationships that are ‘more likely’ (in
particular, the relationship between perceptions of the learning environment and
approach to learning). The finding that certain relationships are ‘more likely’ than
others signals to us that the similarities between student learners should occupy us at
least as much as the differences. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, relational
research, particularly the phenomenographic branch – out of which the approaches to
learning and teaching findings come – is intensely interested in difference because
what matters is the world as experienced by individuals:
‘[T]he dividing line between “the outer” and the “inner” disappears.
There are not two things, and one is not held to explain the other.
There is not a real world “out there” and a subjective world “in
here”. The world is not constructed by the learner, nor is it imposed
upon her; it is constituted as an internal relation between them.
There is only one world, but it is the world that we experience, a
1
In particular the work of French philosophers Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois
Lyotard.
2
Jurgen Habermas, for example, offers universal propositions about language use and the potential of
human beings for learning
7
world in which we live, a world that is ours.’ (Marton and Booth,
1997, p. 13, emphasis in text)
Following from this, learning is about coming to experience the world in different and
better ways. This construction of human experience and learning might justifiably
draw the criticism that real social injustices are underplayed, but not that the
differences between humans are unimportant.
Approaches to learning and general pedagogic principles
We move now to challenging the idea that differences rather than similarities should
be the focus of our attention as teachers. Universities cannot in any direct manner
‘compensate for society’ (to use Basil Bernstein’s famous phrase), but we can think
about equality in terms of how to engage students in the experience of academic
learning and here we suggest that this could involve a search for general pedagogic
principles and that the relationships revealed by the approaches to learning and
teaching research is a fruitful starting point.
The extent to which we emphasise similarities or differences in the capacity to learn
has always been a key component of ideas about pedagogy. In the 1970s Brian Simon
wrote a seminal essay entitled ‘Why No Pedagogy in England’ (1999) in which he
draws attention to the ‘amateurish and highly pragmatic’ (p.34) character of
educational theory and practice especially in the universities. He calls urgently for a
pedagogy that is systematic and focused on the commonality of learners. Taking an
historical perspective, he argues that in England a ‘science of teaching’ has been
‘shunned’ in large part because of the ‘contemptuous rejection’ of the idea of
professional training for teaching by the public schools and elite universities, and
because of the rise, over fifty years ago, of the intelligence tests which invited a focus
on ability and individualism. It is arguable that neither of these attitudes has been
shaken off. Jerome Bruner, similarly argues that ‘education goes forward today
without any clearly defined or widely accepted theory of instruction’ (1974, p.114).
Both Bruner and Simon propose a version of ‘perfectibility of the intellect’ (ibid.)
which emphasises that the similarities of humans as learners are more important than
individual differences, and that pedagogic theory should help us to estimate what is
possible in terms of capacity for learning and to draw up general principles of
teaching based on what students ‘have in common as members of the human species’
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(Simon, 1999, p.42). Emphasising the similarities between learners does not mean
that specific individual needs are not considered; only that such considerations are
informed by understanding the similarities between learners.
The work of Bruner and Simon between them contributes five specific criteria for a
pedagogic theory. We list them below and it will be seen that what
phenomenography tells us about student learning fulfils all but the last. The theory
should:
1. be convincing – the relations of approaches to learning have been tested over
many years in many settings
2. be relevant to all students, not just those who are highly motivated or alienated
(see the discussion above);
3. make practical sense and not obscure what needs to be done – approaches to
learning and teaching suggests many practical strategies (even if there is a
danger of over-simplification – for example ‘clarifying goals’ is a long and
iterative process);
4. connect the process of learning and the process of teaching – the relationship
between how a student experiences all aspects of their university courses and
how they approach learning is direct; and
5. relate to important matters in society – approaches to learning and teaching
does not do this and we will discuss the matter later.
This list helps us see why approaches to learning and teaching offers university
teachers a chance to base their practice on coherent precepts founded on exceptionally
well-established empirical research which is theoretically informed, rather than on the
idiosyncrasies of classroom encounters. In Diana Laurillard’s view it ‘offers the best
hope for a principled way of generating teaching strategy from research outcomes.’
(2002, p.71) Nevertheless, we do not intend to imply that there are no other general
principles based on theories that would not also be convincing and useful3.
3
For example, Leach and Moon (1999) draw on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) idea to claim that
pedagogy is concerned with ‘the construction and practice of learning communities’ (p.268) and from
here make five assertions about ‘effective pedagogic settings’.
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Socio-cultural considerations: Syntheses
In terms of the criteria for a general pedagogic theory set out above, approaches to
learning and teaching does not fulfil having a direct connection to contemporary
social problems. Phenomenographic researchers will argue that they cannot be
criticised for what they do not set out to do: the focus on the learning of ‘phenomena’
abstracted from ‘situation’ is deliberate. For example, Marton and Booth (1997) state
that ‘the thematic field that surrounds the [phenomena being studied] is made up of
aspects of a wider, more general global world, with roots in the current culture and
branches that reach out to the learners’ future world.’ (p.142). They clarify that the
choice not to engage with critiques of society or alternative futures is conscious. On
the one hand, this choice does lay the theory open to technical-rational interpretation;
on the other, depth of study often results in being partial and what John Stuart Mill
had to say about philosophy also applies to pedagogic theory: ‘It is not so much a
matter of embracing falsehood for the truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the
whole’(quoted in Critchley, 2001, p.47).
We suggest that – instead of attempting to assert one theory over another – useful
work could be done to synthesise the insights offered by approaches to learning and
teaching with insights offered by other perspectives. For example, radical pedagogies
remind us how formal learning (especially in a university) can be alienating (see, for
example, the ‘academic literacies’ tradition [Lea and Street, 1999]); different forms of
‘critical thinking’ can provide a framework for university teachers interested in
critical goals to think about how they teach (Barnett, 1997); the notion of pedagogical
content knowledge directs attention to the central importance of being a strong
discipline expert at university level ideas about discipline-specific pedagogy
(Shulman,1987); and, we could take account of the profoundly emotional nature of
forming an identity as a critically thinking university student (Damasio, 1999;
Hochschild, 1983). An exploration of what these theories might offer shows that they
are not incommensurate with approaches to learning and teaching, rather they are
complementary, especially when viewed in the light of the two distinguishing features
of phenomenographic research: the identification of the student experience and
intentions as critical factors; and, the teacher’s task expressed as creating an
environment for learning.
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Conclusion
We have turned the theme of this seminar into the question ‘How can universities
respond to supporting students with diverse academic needs?’ and answered it by
examining the notion of similarity or commonality with reference to the approaches to
learning and teaching research. A ‘deep approach to learning’ is shorthand for
learning which engages students in a search for understanding and meaning and we
think that this as a sound educational goal for all students. Although there are no
guarantees, courses could be designed that incorporate features more likely to
encourage deep learning and university teachers can learn about how their own
conceptions of teaching can affect learning. As a theory, approaches to learning
offers the possibility of a practicum that challenges ‘intellectual elitism’ (Lawton,
1977), but commitment to the principles suggested by relation research does carry
prescriptive implications and such principles can become mechanical, meaningless
orthodoxies unless university teachers make theories their own in the light of critical
reflections on their own teaching4.
Furthermore, we have yet to understand the weight of the influence of educational and
social background on approaches to learning in different institutional contexts; we
need research which unpacks the effects of class, gender and race on efforts to change
students’ perceptions; we need more rigorous research projects exploring what it
means to attempt to change the learning environment in different hierarchically
located institutions which reveal both constraints and enabling factors; finally,
researchers need to collaborate rather than compete to build up a more holistic picture
of student experience and how it affects academic engagement across the sector.
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The Postgraduate Diploma in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education at University of Oxford
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implications critically; and to explore other perspectives. Each year in portfolios can be seen how
individual interpretations are as the teachers record their own attempts to influence their students
learning environment.
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