Universities are rarely structured to facilitate learning and when they are, it is often done so in a limited way.
This book looks at the theory and practice of learning and how universities can improve their quality and competence. It tackles the past failure of the quality and competence movements and advocates a move towards 'Universities of Learning'. The authors advocate an integration of elements that are often dealt with separately - theory and practice, teaching and research, and the levels of institution and individual - and handle these dimensions of integration in conjunction...

Classroom Discourse and the Space of Learning is about learning in schools and the central role of language in learning. The investigations of learning it reports are based on two premises: First, whatever you are trying to learn, there are certain necessary conditions for succeeding--although you cannot be sure that learning will take place when those conditions are met, you can be sure that no learning will occur if they are not. The limits of what is possible to learn is what the authors call "the space of learning." Second, language plays a central role in learning--it does not...

This book is about learning; not learning in all its shapes and forms but learning in a particular sense - learning as coming to experience the world, or aspects of the world, in particular ways. It stems from more than 25 years of systematic research into the experience of learning undertaken by a research team trying to account for the obvious differences between more or less successful instances of learning in educational insitutions. The book offers an answer in terms of the discovery of critical differences in the structure of the learner's awareness and critical differences in the...

Although more people speak Chinese than any other language on Earth, proficiency in Chinese is largely confined to the people who live in or adjacent to the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan, and to the ethnic Chinese inhabitants of the various "Chinatowns" in countries around the world. Despite its allure, many people find Chinese a hard language to learn, including a considerable number of children who learn it as mother tongue. The basic units of written Chinese are ideographic symbols called characters; and the meaning and pronunciation of each character is determined by the tone attached to...

Although more people speak Chinese than any other language on Earth, proficiency in Chinese is largely confined to the people who live in or adjacent to the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan, and to the ethnic Chinese inhabitants of the various "Chinatowns" in countries around the world. Despite its allure, many people find Chinese a hard language to learn, including a considerable number of children who learn it as mother tongue. The basic units of written Chinese are ideographic symbols called characters; and the meaning and pronunciation of each character is determined by the tone attached to...

Necessary Conditions of Learning presents a research approach (phenomenography) and a theory (the variation theory of learning) introduced and developed by Ference Marton and taken up by his wide and varied following around the world-together with their practical applications in educational contexts. Reflecting Marton's whole lifetime's work, the unique and significant contribution of this book is to offer an evidence-based answer to the questions How do we make novel meanings our own? and How do we learn to see things in more powerful ways? The presentation makes use of hundreds of empirical...