Theoretical Frameworks and the Extended Curriculum Programme

Teaching and learning initiatives in foundation provision have the potential to more generally improve teaching practices across the university. The innovative practices are, however, not always underpinned by deeper theoretical understandings about how knowledge is structured, how pedagogies are enacted and how students learn new ideas. Such understandings matter as they support and strengthen the teaching initiatives. Theory, in some instances, enables practices to be lifted from their contexts so that they are more easily transferable to different subjects or levels, and, in other circumstances, to alert higher education teachers to the importance of including epistemology, ontology and ethics in their thinking. Furthermore, and importantly, theories help us to identify blindspots, dominant assumptions and common sense. There has recently been an upsurge in research into teaching and learning on foundation reported in the literature. The purpose of this article is, firstly, to present and synthesise more mainstream social realist theorisations of teaching and learning, as well as newer theoretical approaches which some articles in this special edition use, which are based on posthumanism, new materialism and non-representational theory, all of which are predicated on relational ontology and process philosophy.