Learning Computer Science and Engineering in Context

The growing tendency away from transmissive pedagogy to a broadly constructivist pedagogy in higher education is characterised as a cultural change which lacks a strong theoretical foundation within the culture. In this paper, learning is considered from a phenomenographic perspective, which teachers can ground in their own experience of teaching and work with to gain insights into their students' experience of learning. Thereby the theoretical foundation of the culture can successively be strengthened. The message is illustrated with the results of empirical research into students' experience of learning in groups in a project-focused induction course to a computer science and engineering programme. THE SHIFTING CULTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION There is a growing tendency away from a traditional transmissive pedagogy in higher education, towards a pedagogy that can broadly be characterised as constructivist. By `transmissive pedagogy' I mean teaching based on an assumption that students receive information from the teacher and slot it straight into an empty place in their knowledge base, or, at best, work on it later to make it their own. The term `constructivist', in contrast, has grown in usage to represent an approach to teaching and learning which explicitly acknowledges that students do not learn well in a passive transmissive environment but that they learn through a variety of knowledge building processes, and that teaching should encourage students to work actively KK-stiftelse is the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (www.kks.se/english/), and the programme Learning and IT includes a nationwide research school and a number of direted initiatives (www.ped.gu.se/learnit) Correspondence: Shirley Booth, Learning and IT programme, KK-stiftelse, Centre for Educational Development, Chalmers University of Technology, GoÈteborg, Sweden. Tel: +46 031 772 1049, Fax: +46 031 772 2578, E-mail: [email protected] towards understanding within a framework of personal responsibility and institutional freedom. More fundamentally, it refers to learning and teaching moulded by formal epistemological and ontological distinctions associated with a constructivist philosophy, but will here be construed in a wider sense, where some of the ideas from phenomenography, from radical constructivism and from the socio-cultural movement can be pooled around a view of learning that is intentional, experiential and intimately related to its immediate and historical context. While my opening sentence might be strange for teachers in some disciplines Ð let them identify themselves Ð there are indeed notable moves towards, for example, problem-based learning and action research in ®elds related to medicine and business (Margetson, 1994; Zuber-Skerritt, 1992). The reasons for the changes and the forms that such education takes, are, however, largely based on notions of `folk pedagogy' rather than pedagogical research and theory. I am borrowing the word `folk' from Bruner who writes that folk psychology: `̀ is a culture's account of what makes human beings tick. It includes a theory of mind, one's own and others, a theory of motivation, and the rest'' (Bruner, 1990, p. 13). It dominates the transactions of daily life, he adds, and `̀ alters with the culture's changing responses to the world and to the people in it'' (p. 14). Folk pedagogy is then, by analogy, the account given by the culture of higher education of what makes students tick, how their minds work and how they react to the educational situations they meet. It is grounded in the cumulative experience of teachers, students and administrators, it underpins curriculum design and execution, and it changes according to the way in which the world of higher education changes. In the same vein, Bereiter and Scardemalia plead for an examination of the assumptions of folk psychology Ð which they describe as, `̀ simply the psychology a person acquires through growing up in a human society'' Ð if we are to move our everyday notions of learning more into line with strong theoretical understandings (Bereiter & Scardemalia, 1996, p. 486). From this perspective, the opening sentence of this paper might be rephrased: A shift towards a cultural change can be seen in the way that learning and teaching are being handled in higher education, away from transmissive assumptions and towards constructivist assumptions. Within the culture's own traditional account of pedagogy, what constitutes `good learning' has been largely based on success in examinations designed to test the quantity and the quality of what individual students have learned, in the sense of giving back, in an appropriate form, that which the teachers taught 170 SHIRLEY BOOTH