Professor Ference Marton's visit to the Centre for Staff Development

We have just had the stimulating and challenging experience of having Professor Ference Marton from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden visit us at the Centre for Staff Development as part of the Distinguished Visitors' Programme. Professor Marton is well known for his seminal work on deep and surface approaches to learning and for the contribution he has made to the development of qualitative approaches to the study of student learning. He presented his current theoretical position on student learning through a busy schedule of formal and informal meetings. The following is a selection of some of the ideas he discussed which seem particularly relevant to an understanding of teaching and learning processes and hence to curriculum design and course development.

Most views of learning assume a dualistic split between the learner and the world, whereas Professor Marton suggests that we need to dissolve the split by seeing the learner and the world as related, i.e. the world the learner sees is not independent of the learner. The world we see is an experienced real world for us. From this perspective, learning can be seen as being about changing relationships between the person and the world. To learn is to experience the world differently. Being 'expert' is "being capable of experiencing something in a certain way". The issue for the teacher is how to assist in changing this relationship to the world for the student. The danger is that too often the teacher assumes that her or his experience in the teaching/learning situation is the same as that experienced by the students. The experience of the teacher and the student observing phenomena in a laboratory will be significantly different. It is all too easy for the 'expert' to assume that the other has seen the same phenomena and thus had the same experience. The bubbling chemicals in the test tube are experienced differently. What is 'seen' down the microscope is not a replicated experience for teacher and student.

Two important points arise from this. One is that in order to learn that the world I see is actually the world I experience and that others will experience it differently, my own way of experiencing it needs to be revealed to me and this can only be done if I am exposed to a variety of other ways of seeing the world. The second point is that the acquisition of knowledge and skills needs to be seen as the consequence of the development in the learner of a capacity to experience the world as it is experienced by the experts in that field. Thus "ways of seeing" becomes the most fundamental category of learning.

Research by Professor Marton and his colleagues suggests that whatever phenomena (a tree, a text, an engineering problem) people encounter, one can identify a limited number of qualitatively different ways in which the phenomena are encountered. These differences are seen as critical in learning, as each way of seeing (conception) will affect both the approach to learning and the outcome of learning. The key question for the teacher is thus "How do my learners experience what I am teaching?" One way to reveal this is to present learners with novel, non-technical questions which they are likely to respond to using their taken-for-granted understanding rather than by applying newly acquired knowledge. Their answer is then likely to reveal their conceptions of the particular phenomena involved. The making explicit of these conceptions helps the teacher to see where to focus their teaching. The sharing and discussion of these different conceptions between learners and teachers can crucially contribute to the learner's clarification of their own way of seeing the phenomena and of the development of alternative ways of seeing it. The process thus not only aids teaching but also learning.