Learning in the academic workplace: the harmonization of the collective and the individual habitus

One of the challenges of research into social practice is finding a way to take both the structural aspects of the social contexts and individual agency into account. This paper describes the use of Bourdieu’s social practice theory together with Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory to understand how the learning of practice takes place within the academic workplace. Drawing on interviews with academics across three departments at a research intensive historically white university in South Africa, I explored how new academics engaged with the assessment practices in their departments and developed their confidence to judge student performance of complex assessment tasks. The study provides a set of conceptual tools for academic staff development practitioners to use in supporting academics in their learning to teach. An argument is made for the process of learning in the workplace to be understood in terms of the harmonization of the individual habitus with the collective habitus in the departmental communities of practice. Evidence is also provided of the importance of context in understanding how academics learn. Learning in the academic workplace Theories of social practice regard learning as arising out of the social relationships within the workplace or learning environment (Billett 2001; Brown, Collins and Duguid 1989; Eraut 2004; Lave 1996; Lave and Wenger 1991). In this perspective learning results from participating ‘in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities’ (Wenger 1998, 4). It is viewed as the ‘inevitable product of everyday thinking and acting, shaped by workplace practices in which individuals participate’ (Billett 2001, 19). The structure of work activities and the nature of relationships in the workplace provide opportunities for learning. The majority of these opportunities consist of informal learning experiences involving ‘learning from other people and learning from personal experience’ (Eraut 2004, 248). Billett (2004) argues that in many workplaces structured pathways of activities exist for newcomers that are ‘inherently pedagogical’ and provide ‘access to the knowledge needed to sustain those practices’ (Billett 2004, 119). At one level these theories appear to foreground the structural aspects of the experience of learning for newcomers to a social context. Some authors have highlighted the difficulties experienced by new academics entering a department in exerting their agency as they engage with the ‘understandings and assumptions held collectively in the community of practice’ (Trowler and Knight 2000, 31). For example, assessment practice in higher education involves tacit knowledge that often cannot be described because ‘the assessor’s knowledge exists in the practice of the skill and not in a set of published maxims’ (Gonzalez Arnal and Burwood 2003, 383). Learning to assess complex student performance involves ‘participating in relevant social practices, observing, copying [and] imitating’ (Gonzalez Arnal and Burwood 2003, 386). This article reports on a study into how academics learn to judge student performance in complex assessment tasks in three departments at the South African University (SAU) a historically white research intensive university. The names of the institution and departments involved have been changed to protect their identities. The study drew on Bourdieu’s theory of practice to analyse the relationship between individual academics and the structuring potential of their academic contexts, ∗ Correspondence: HAESDU, Centre for Higher Education Development, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa. Email: [email protected] Jeff Jawitz University of Cape Town 2 and Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory to explore how academics learn through participation in a community of practice. The concepts of field, capital and habitus are central to Bourdieu’s theory of practice. A field consists of a set of objective, historical relations between positions anchored in certain forms of power (or capital) . . . , a relational configuration . . . which it imposes on all the objects and agents which enter in it. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 16-17) A close study of the three departments highlighted the dynamic nature of the field of higher education at SAU. The pressures for change form part of a social revolution in South Africa demanding transformation and greater social responsiveness and accountability from the higher education sector. Pressures also arise from the growth of new disciplines and interdisciplinary research challenging older configurations of academic life and organisation. Each of the three case studies revealed academic practices that were evolving in the midst of ongoing change including: increasing student numbers; changing employment requirements for new academics; changing age, race or gender profiles of academic staff; the merging of departments and emergence of new sub-disciplines, and changing models of departmental leadership. The field of higher education itself contains several fields, such as those associated with the disciplines or professions, in which particular forms of capital are valued. Bourdieu identifies four forms of capital: economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Economic capital refers to access to economic resources and is usually related to income and wealth. Social capital is based on the network of social relations that individuals establish and build; cultural capital is accumulated through the process of education, and symbolic capital is derived from ‘culturally significant attributes such as prestige, status and authority’ (Mahar, Harker and Wilkes 1990, 13). Within social practice theory, each individual in a field carries a habitus which is ‘all at once a “craft”, a collection of techniques, references, a set of “beliefs” ’ (Bourdieu 1993, 72-3) formed out of past experiences and socialisation processes. However the concept of habitus encapsulates more than just experience. Each individual’s habitus also generates strategies that form the basis of the actions they perform in the field. Bourdieu argues that these actions can be ‘consistent with the objective interests of their authors without having been expressly designed to that end’ (Bourdieu 1993, 76). Furthermore, the habitus of individuals exposed to the same fields and the same ‘logic of action’ over an extended period of time, gives rise to a ‘class habitus’ which ‘enables practices to be objectively harmonized without any . . . direct intervention or . . . explicit co-ordination’ (Bourdieu 1990, 58). How new academics experience the effects of the field they enter is shaped by the capital that they bring. The acquisition of the tacit knowledge of academic practice favours newcomers with forms of cultural capital that match the capital valued by the field. As newcomers become aware of the limitations of their capital within their new contexts, their habitus generates strategies to ‘maximize their capital’ and ensure their continued participation in the field. But the field imposes limits on what strategies and actions a newcomer may successfully adopt without resistance. In particular the older members of the field tend to resist changes to the field that could threaten their monopoly of the capital (Bourdieu 1993). The central focus of situated learning theory is the relationship between individual agents and communities through engagement with practice. According to situated learning theory knowledge is distributed amongst the members of a community of practice and can only be understood with the ‘interpretive support’ provided by participation in the community of practice itself (Lave and Wenger 1991). A community of practice is constituted by the way people interact with each other and thereby establish and ‘tune’ their ‘relations with each other’ through mutual engagement in a joint enterprise, using a shared repertoire of ‘routines, words, tools, ways of doing things’ (Wenger 1998, 83). Legitimate peripheral participation forms the basis of learning and progress towards more advanced participation within the community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991). It involves the newcomer being exposed to what the community of practice values through initial engagement with legitimate Jeff Jawitz University of Cape Town 3 tasks, in a peripheral capacity, and with low levels of responsibility. As the experience of participation increases so the newcomer’s identity settles into one or other trajectory linking past experiences with future possibilities of membership of the community of practice (Wenger 1998). Wenger suggests that certain ‘paradigmatic trajectories’ have greater significance than others as they ‘embody the history of the community’ and that ‘exposure to this field of paradigmatic trajectories is likely to be the most influential factor shaping the learning of newcomers’ (Wenger 1998, 156). But as this study reveals newcomers have agency and might choose a trajectory other than the paradigmatic one.