Meaning, identity and ‘motivation’: expanding what matters in understanding learning in higher education?

It might be expected that the challenges and pressures currently affecting British higher education would be stimulating an atmosphere of analysis and debate in relation to the ‘official discourse’ of mainstream pedagogical theory in higher education. It seems, however, that the literature offers new university teachers a fairly narrow range of conceptual models, a large number of which are centred upon the ‘approaches to learning’/‘conceptions of learning’ model. This article does not seek to argue that this model is not useful. It does, however, argue for the need for a wider range of approaches to thinking about learning in higher education, and it attempts to begin an exploration in this direction. After first looking at some of the difficulties of trying to approach learning as a complex and situated phenomenon, an experimental analytical approach will be outlined which is based on an interpretation of one aspect of complexity theory. This approach will then be used to examine data from a set of interviews carried out with a group of Access students. Finally, some possible implications of this analysis for current framings of higher education learning will be discussed.