The forces of change that have so radically altered humankind's material conditions over the last several decades have not spared our social institutions. The nature and relationship of social institutions have been subject to widespread scrutiny and reform. The University system has not escaped these reformist impulses and Universities across the globe have responded to new demands from the market, the community, and the state over the previous decades with a variety of new programs, policies, and products. Reforms are unlikely to produce anticipated improvements in the quality and accountability of the University system, however, unless founded upon a clear conception of what the University does and how it does it. A recent book by John Bowden and Ference Marton entitled The University of Learning gives careful attention to the fundamental issue of the University's fundamental purpose and methods.
Bowden and Marton begin by articulating and defending their vision of the University's central purpose in society and proceed to delineate the implications for the University system.
The University of Learning
Although the primary functions of the University are most frequently captured under the categories of teaching, research, and service, Bowden and Marton argue that these are the means, not the aims, of the University system. Ultimately the object of the University system is to prepare the individual, the community, and society to face future problems and opportunities based on current knowledge. Thus the essential goal that underlies the multiple and diverse elements that today comprise any single university and that unite universities everywhere is learning or knowledge formation. Teaching, research, and service, they argue, is distinguished only by the duration and level at which learning' takes place: teaching serves to facilitate learning at the level of the individual student; service involves learning at the local level; and research contributes to knowledge formation on a society-wide basis.
The remainder of the book focuses primarily on the implications of redefining the University's purpose in terms of expected and actual learning outcomes rather than educational inputs. The major book divisions roughly correspond to several issues with logically follow from this redefinition. First, they address the questions of what constitutes learning' and how learning' takes place at the individual and collective levels? Second, they ask, what should be learned, what conditions facilitate learning,' and how do we assess the results at the individual and university levels? Finally, how should the university organize itself to better achieve its fundamental learning objectives?
Although fairly innocuous sounding, the shift of emphasis from educational inputs (i.e., substantive content, teaching methods) to outputs (i.e., learning) entails some rather radical implications. First and foremost, it suggests that the common custom of focusing on the substantive content of the course and the teaching methods of the instructor is misplaced if learning is the primary objective. Bowden and Marton argue that merely mastering a given body of knowledge does not constitute learning. Moreover, they continue, student "learning is not only, and probably not even mainly, a function of teaching" (4). Students receiving the same information from the same instructor will nevertheless understand the subject in vastly different ways depending upon how each student experiences the learning opportunity. This redefinition of the University's purpose from an emphasis on inputs to outputs effectively shifts attention away from the more familiar field of curriculum development and pedagogy to the largely unobservable and much less accessible process of 'learning.' Among Bowden and Marton's most important contributions is a theory of learning which highlights differences in the way that students experience learning opportunities to explain the different levels of learning that students demonstrate, even when exposed to the same information from the same instructor. Ultimately, they seek to develop a theory of learning powerful enough to account for the ways in which learning experiences may be designed so that[desired] learning outcomes are more likely to be achieved"(114).
Toward this end, Bowden and Marton review the learning research literature to define what learning entails and to discover the elusive qualities which account for the different levels of learning that students demonstrate. What students learn, they find, depends most importantly on how they experience learning opportunities. At one extreme the learner experiences a text or an experiment as merely a sequence of ideas or events, without understanding the relationship of the parts to one another or to the whole. Asked to explain something they have observed or experienced, these surface learners frequently list the sequence of events -- "this happened, then this happened, then this happened." 'Learning' involves moving from a more superficial to deeper levels of understanding. Deep learning consists of the ability to organize information in a hierarchical order in which themes, subthemes, and patterns are supported with evidence and examples. The learner "discerns the main theme,..discerns sub-themes within the whole and examples by means of which themes are illustrated or illuminated"(31). Moreover, they suggest, deep learning not only reflects a richer, more complex understanding of the subject matter, but also that the experience of deep learning better equips the learner to excel in future learning opportunities because the learner can discern both familiar patterns and critical variations in entirely new surface conditions. Thus, learning at both the individual and collective level involves coming to see familiar phenomena in new ways, "thereby widening the world we experience"(17), (i.e., widening the range of variables whose causal effects we understand and ultimately allowing us to imagine greater variability than we actually experience). The question obviously follows: how can students be induced to develop a deep learning'approach?
Learning Opportunities in the Classroom
Bowden and Marton's redefinition of the University's purpose logically necessitates a redefinition of its methods. To improve 'learning', they argue, curriculum, teaching, and assessment choices (inputs) must be designed with learning objectives (outputs) explicitly in mind. The experience of variation, they argue, is the critical prerequisite for promoting deep learning approaches. "When we encounter a new situation we gain meaning from it by reorganizing different aspects of the situation as values in dimensions of variation originating from our previous experiences" (36). Thus, 'learning' results from exposure to a wide variety of cases' within a given professional field and practice at distinguishing between critical variables that alter outcomes and normal variability across cases. Thus, they argue, that "for students to be able to cope with the unknown future on graduation, the curriculum would need to be designed so that students experienced variation and developed the capabilities to look at the situation, discern the relevant aspects, and address them simultaneously"(118).
Teaching, then, also requires redefinition to emphasize to emphasize the learning effects rather than the delivery methods of instruction. Teaching, they argue, "is not about transferring the teacher's understanding of a phenomenon to the student but rather it is about assisting the student to develop their way of seeing phenomenon in a way that is more powerful for them....Teaching should therefore aim at developing students' capabilities of seeing certain situations in certain ways. Being capable of seeing something in a certain way amounts to being capable of discerning certain critical aspects and focusing on them simultaneously"(132, 159). The task facing teachers in a specific field is to define 'learning' objectives within their field of expertise and to design learning opportunities that expose students to a variety of problematic cases which requires them to identify and manipulate the critical variables to produce desired outcomes.
It follows that assessment methods, in turn, should contribute to and reflect learning objectives and assessment tools should discriminate between students who demonstrate mastery over the concepts and skills the course seeks to promote. Assessment should measure not only what students have learned but also the quality of their 'learning'(167) since this, they argue, is the most reliable measure of their future effectiveness.Bowden and Marton argue further "for using assessment to define learning aims, for revealing student's capability for discerning critical aspects of certain classes of situations and to find out what students have learned"(175). Finally, they suggest, the assessment of students should also serve as the teachers mechanism for self-assessment: do students demonstrate a deep learning approach? How can the learning environment be redesigned to help students see' the subject in more complex terms?
The University Learning Environment
The shift from an input-oriented educational approach to a learning-focused approach requires not only that academics develop new approaches and skills but also requires Universities to reorganize themselves. Bowden and Marton devote the last several chapters to the university-wide implications which follow from adopting a learning-oriented perspective. "The shift for universities for organizing their policies and activities with teaching as the focus to policies and activities centered around learning is not just a semantic shift because it will result in quite different policies and activities from those in place at the moment"(250). The authors advocate a variety of organizational reforms that might optimize the university's capacity to promote learning' on an individual, local and society-wide basis.
Among the more notable organizational innovations, Bowden and Marton promote a network model of organization for the University in which members of a variety of departments interact in program teams' to offer students the combination of programmatic differentiation and integration that will better prepare them for the unpredictable challenges future. The network model of organization offers particular advantages to the 'learning' university, they maintain, because unlike the other models, "networks include multiple links between units in the organization and the communication is content-related, i.e. it is about the work that people carry out together with mutual support"(274) including students, faculty, the administration, and presumably the larger community as well.
Ultimately, Bowden and Marton argue, reorganizing the University to enhance learning' represents not only the most productive method of enhancing university education but also of responding to growing demands for quality assurance and accountability. If public demands for quality assurance and accountability from Universities are to play a constructive role in education, they too should be specifically designed to improve learning outcomes. "While quality assurance in education necessarily comprises both improvement and accountability aspects, [Bowden and Marton] suggest that for successful quality assurance of teaching and learning in educational activities, the focus needs to be on improvement. If improvement is addressed properly, evidence for accountability will be developed automatically. The reverse is not necessarily the case. Focus on accountability in quality improvements in teaching and learning and research" (227-228).
Conclusions
Bowden and Marton hope that their initial efforts to redefine the Universities primary purpose, methods, and organization to emphasize educational outputs rather than inputs will inspire others to further elaborate upon these themes within particular disciplines. Certainly they provide ample food for thought. Indeed, to improve the learning environment they aspire to no less than a complete reorientation and reorganization of the university system.
Bowden and Marton hope that their initial efforts to redefine the university's primary purpose, methods, and organization to emphasize educational outputs rather than inputs will inspire others to further elaborate upon these themes within particular disciplines. Certainly they provide ample food for thought. Indeed, to improve the learning environment they aspire to no less than a complete reorientation and reorganization of the university system. Unfortunately, the sheer scope of the undertaking leads them to promise more than they can reasonably deliver in a single book. Bowden and Marton's observations are by far the most insightful, persuasive, and expansive regarding individual student learning in the University system. Unfortunately, the coherence and focus of their argument suffers from the effort to extend their investigation to include the research and organization of the university as well. As a result, the book reads more like a series of loosely related articles representing the genealogy of the author's thinking and research in each of these areas rather than a single coherent argument that leads the reader inexorably from premises to conclusions. Nonetheless, this book represents a welcome effort to think systematically about the university's relationship to individuals, the community, and society; to draw out the implications for teaching, learning, and assessment; and to use their insights to suggest reforms more likely to produce real learning' benefits.
Linda Cornett.
UNC Asheville