Proposal Type:	Symposium
Domain:	Higher Education
SIG:	Higher Education
Scheduling category:	Communities of learners
Type	Invited SIG Symposium
Title	Fostering Communities of Learners in Higher Education
Abstract	The purpose of this invited SIG symposium is to consider the overall theme of the EARLI conference in relation to higher education. The papers within the symposium draw on a rich array of qualitative and quantitative data from learners across Europe to consider what makes for effective communities of learners and how participation in these communities may shape students' learning. The Dysthe and Lillejord paper focuses on how to create productive writing communities, building on the recent emphasis in writing research on communal aspects of writing processes. In their paper, Dahlgren and Dahlgren make use of longitudinal qualitative data to discuss the transitions students experience between their learning communities at university and the world of work. The contribution from Richardson, Brennan and Edmunds draws on an extensive quantitative and qualitative data set to investigate the impact of different types of student communities on students' conceptions of learning and their development as learners. Finally, the paper by Anderson is a theoretically based contribution intended to complement the empirical papers by exploring some of the conceptual issues which arise when one looks at higher education through the lens of ‘fostering communities of learners’.
Equipment	Overhead projector Internet access (only if you need live access) Computer and data projector / beamer
Keywords	Higher education

Chairperson list
First Name	Last Name/Surname	Institution	Country	E-Mail	EARLI Number
Keith	Trigwell	University of Sydney	Australia	k.trigwell@usyd.edu.au

Organiser list
First Name	Last Name/Surname	Institution	Country	E-Mail	EARLI Number
Keith	Trigwell	University of Sydney	Australia	k.trigwell@usyd.edu.au

Discussant list
First Name	Last Name/Surname	Institution	Country	E-Mail	EARLI Number
Velda	McCune	University of Glasgow	United Kingdom	velda.mccune@ed.ac.uk

Paper Details

Paper type	Empirical
Title	Fostering productive writing practices in two masters programs
Abstract	The topic of this paper is the building of writing communities in two masters programs in education at a major Norwegian university. Increased emphasis on the production of articles, expectations of co-authorship and more engagement from peers and supervisors in the writing process is rapidly changing the perception of what it takes to produce academic texts. We focus on how a learning environment at this level can be structured in ways that create mutual engagement, shared practices and reciprocal support. We will document and discuss what it takes to make such communities productive in the sense that both students’ writing processes and written products are enhanced. Our theoretical perspective is informed by Bakhtin’s dialogism, Wenger’s communities of practice and recent discussions of the interrelation between individual and social learning. The overarching empirical question in our investigation is: What are crucial factors in the building of a productive writing community at masters level? Sub-questions include: What institutional infrastructures and organizational models afford or constrain community building? What are prerequisites for productive peer interactions and feedback in groups? How is a synergy effect created between supervisors’ feedback and peer feedback? What are commonalities and differences in a campus and web-based community of writers? We base our discussion on empirical material collected over a five year period in two parallel programs, one campus- and one web-based. Our data consists of documents, evaluations and interviews with students and teachers at both programs. Previous analyses are supplemented with new interview data from the last cohort of students. Although our data is restricted to one discipline, we will focus on affordances and constraints that cut across disciplines and provide common challenges in higher education.
Summary	Interest in research on writing in higher education has been growing over the last few decades. During the late 1970s and 80s, cognitive perspectives on learning placed the processes and problems of the individual writer at the centre of attention. From the mid 80s, however, sociocultural perspectives have demonstrated the significance of tools, relations and context to writing activities. Therefore, communal aspects of writing practices have come to the fore (Nystrand, 2006). In spite of this ‘social turn’ in writing research, surprisingly few studies show how students become enculturated into academic writing and how academic staff may contribute to the development of a ‘community of writers’. There is an obvious need for closer attention to practices related to student writing from an institutional, organizational and structural perspective. The question we will raise is how learning among peers, focusing on the writing process, may improve the individual texts. Masters programs in Norway have traditionally been conceptualized as training for independence and students have subsequently been expected to concentrate their time and effort on their own, individual project (Lee & Green, 1998). Increased emphasis on the production of articles, expectations on co-authorship and more engagement from peers and supervisors in the writing process is rapidly changing the perception of what it takes to produce academic texts. We focus on how a learning environment at this level can be structured in ways that create mutual engagement, shared practices and reciprocal support. Our intention is to document and discuss what it takes to make such communities productive (Lillejord and Dysthe, 2008). By ‘productive’ we mean the enhancement of students’ writing processes as well as their written products (project plans, drafts of chapters, final thesis). The overarching empirical question in our investigation is: What are crucial factors in the building of a productive writing community at masters level? Sub-questions include: What institutional infrastructures and organizational models afford or constrain community building? What are prerequisites for productive peer interactions and feedback in groups? How is a synergy effect created between supervisors’ feedback and peer feedback? What are commonalities and differences in a campus and a web-based community of writers? In addition we also want to raise theoretical questions relating to different perspectives on writing, notions of ‘community’ and discuss a more basic understanding of the interrelation between the individual and the social as played out in our two sites (Hodkinson, Biesta and James, 2007). We base our discussion on empirical material collected over a five year period in two parallel programs, one campus- and one web-based. Our data consists of documents, evaluations and interviews with students and teachers in both programs. Previous analyses are supplemented with new interview data from the last cohort of students. Although our data is restricted to one discipline, we will focus on affordances and constraints that cut across disciplines and provide common challenges in higher education. Three perspectives on writing in higher education are often distinguished: ‘study skills’, ‘academic socialization’ and ‘academic literacy’ (Lea & Street, 2000). These may give rise to different approaches. Where the first one tend to treat writing as a set of skills that has to be learnt, the second focuses on how the teacher or tutor helps students adjust to expectations in the academic writing culture, while the third attends more to the diversities that exist within each disciplinary culture. We do not see these perspectives as mutually exclusive and want to investigate how community building can incorporate all of them. Underlying the ‘community’ metaphor is very often Lave and Wenger’s (1991) much cited concept ‘communities of practice’. We will discuss Wenger’s (1998) three dimensions of practice as the property of a community in relation to our empirical data: ‘mutual engagement’, ‘joint enterprise’ and ‘shared repertoire’. When each student has his or her individual research project, it is not obvious that the group of students share a joint enterprise. Therefore, intersubjective construction of knowledge through peer response and group discussions cannot be taken for granted. We will therefore introduce a perspective on participative feedback based on tension, disagreement and struggle that may have a greater potential for fostering productive thinking, collaboration and writing than just sharing (Bakhtin, 1986, Matusov, 1996). One of our major findings is the importance of a basic agreement among the academic staff involved in the study program of how to build a productive writing community and a commitment to strict structuring and strong involvement of students and staff in the early phases of the masters program. A major threat to community building is students’ beliefs that engaging with fellow students’ work is a waste of time. Creating mechanisms for how students can get acquainted with and engaged in each others’ projects is therefore crucial, as well as the building up of students’ feedback competence. Our discussion will focus primarily on the experiences and outcomes as reported by students and staff and how these findings have influenced practices and further developed our theoretical perspective. Bakhtin, M. (1986) Speech genres and other late essays. Austin: University of Austin Press. Hodkinson, Biesta & James (2007) Understanding learning culturally: Overcoming the dualism between social and individual views of learning. Vocations and Learning, 1: 27-47. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning. Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Lea, M. & Street, B. V. (2000) Student writing and staff feedback in higher education: An academic literacy approach. M. Lea & B. Stierer (eds.) Student writing in higher education. New contexts. SRHE. & Open University Press: 32-47. Lee, A. & Green, B. (Eds.) (1998) Postgraduate studies, Postgraduate pedagogy. Sydney: Centre for Language and Literacy, University Graduate School, University of Technology, Sydney. Lillejord, S. & Dysthe, O. (2008): Productive learning practice – a theoretical discussion based on two cases. Journal of Education and Work, Vol.21, 1: 75-89. Matusov, E. (2001) Intersubjectivity without agreement. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3 (1): 25-45. Nystrand, M. (2006) The social and historical context for writing research. S.A. MacArthur et al (eds.) Handbook of writing research, N.Y: Guildford Press: 11-28.
Keywords	Collaborative Learning Higher education Writing
Appendices

Authors
Name	Surname	Institution	Country	e-mail	EARLI Number	Presenting
Olga	Dysthe	University of Bergen	Norway	olga.dysthe@iuh.uib.no		*
Solvi	Lillejord	University of Bergen	Norway	solvi.lillejord@iuh.uib.no

Paper type	Empirical
Title	Communities of learning in higher education and the transition to work-life in psychology, political science and mechanical engineering
Abstract	This longitudinal study focuses on the transition from higher education (HE) to working life. This paper presents Swedish data from the Journeymen project, a comparative study involving four European universities in Sweden, Norway, Poland, and Germany, addressing the feasibility of higher education in relation to the demands of work life. In the project, students in higher education are viewed as “journeymen” be¬tween the cultures of higher education and working life. The aim of this paper is to further examine and compare the learning communities in three different study programmes at Linkoping University; psychology, political science and mechanical engineering respectively, with a particular focus on the transition from higher education to working life. First year students, senior students and later graduates in psychology, political science and mechanical engineering participated in the study. Data were obtained by semi-structured interviews, which were subjected to a multi-layered qualitative analysis. The organisation of the content in the three respective programmes could be described as sequential, parallel, and thematic, which shaped different communities of learning. The typical process of transition from education to worklife in the three programmes could be described as a process of continuity, transformation and discontinuity. At the most abstract level, the relationship between higher education and worklife can be described using the constructs of ‘rational’ and ‘ritual’.
Summary	The Journeymen EU-project was undertaken between 2001 and 2004 at Linkoping University, Sweden, the University of Oslo, Norway, the University of Gdansk, Poland and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The project aimed to address the problems of adequacy of educational institutions to the demands of working life from the viewpoint of the people involved in the learning and working – the first-year and senior students and the novice professionals themselves. The transition from higher education to working life is viewed as a trajectory from one community within the academia with a particular set of boundaries and traditions to another community of practice within worklife with a different location and different boundaries, activities and traditions (Wenger 1998). Through their educational programmes, students are in the process of becoming members of particular academic and professional cultures. The aim of this paper is to further examine and compare the learning communities in three different study programmes at Linkoping University, psychology, political science and mechanical engineering respectively, with a particular view at the transition from higher education to working life. Methodology/research design The study programmes were chosen, building on the assumption that their characteristics as communities of practice such as educational design, expectations of knowledge formation and identity building in students will vary among the programmes. Similarly, it is our assumption that the graduates will enter different sectors of work life, with different demands on them as novices in working life that do not necessarily correspond with the presupposed outcome of the study programme. The subjects were interviewed on two occasions, the first time during their last year of studies (early 2002) and the second time after approximately 15-18 months of professional work (mid-2003). Findings The organisation of the content in the three respective programmes could be described as sequential, parallel, and thematic. The political science programme has a typical academic focus; the sequential organisation is driven by the internal logic of the discipline, which maintains the idea of learning basic facts about political systems in various countries before analysis, comparison or application. This also contains the idea of stepwise progression in small parts leading to an eventual and gradual understanding of the field of knowledge and the development of generic academic skills. The mechanical engineering programme resembles the political science programme in the sense of an academic focus. This focus is, however, blurred by the parallel organisation of courses. For both groups, the contextualisation of knowledge to working life occurs, if at all, late in the programme or is left to the novices to handle individually. The thematic organisation of the psychology programme, on the other hand, integrates the academic and professional foci. The potential for contextualisation seems to be enhanced through the use of real-life scenarios as the point of departure for learning. At the most abstract level, the relationship between higher education and work life is described using the constructs of ‘rational’ and ‘ritual’. Educational programmes often include knowledge and skills that are ritual in character – whose reason for inclusion is opaque to students (and maybe not even understood by novice professionals). At the same time, they also include aspects that are rational in character with regard to future professional work –yielding either substantive or generic skills. Substantive skills are based on a specific disciplinary knowledge base, while generic skills are transferable to and transformed in different contexts. Different disciplines combine these aspects in different proportions: for instance, the mechanical engineering programme at Linkoping University stressed the ritual aspects, e.g. a high emphasis on heavy courses on mathematics at the very beginning of the programme, of which the students could not see any relevance for their coming profession, though including rational generic aspects like emphasising general problem solving skills as a hallmark of the professional engineer, while the psychology programme focused on rational aspects – both generic and substantive – and the political science programme stressed the rational generic aspects. Theoretical and educational significance of the research The differences between the programmes as regards design, i.e. the parallel, sequential and thematic structure may be seen as reflecting the notions of professional preparedness embedded in the various discourses of higher education. The engineering and political science programmes instead expose different academic notions about what is characteristic of communities of practice encountered by professionals in their respective fields. The psychology programme, on the other hand, represents an attempt at depicting the professional community of practice in the academic context. Previous research about the relationship between higher education and working life has often focused on the match between the output of higher education and the societal demands for academically trained manpower, or studies on the expediency of higher education as assessed retroactively by professional novices. Work in qualified positions in contemporary working life requires a perspective on competence that, in addition to specific knowledge and skills, also includes abilities of independent learning. In a time with major reshaping of educational institutions and workplaces, and with a lack of stable forecasts about the nature of future tasks in working-life and qualifications, research about the impact of learning communities in higher education and how graduates construe themselves as professionals can provide information significant for the educational design of higher education.
Keywords	Higher education
Appendices

Authors
Name	Surname	Institution	Country	e-mail	EARLI Number	Presenting
Madeleine	Abrandt Dahlgren	Linkoping University	Sweden	madeleine.abrandt.dahlgren@liu.se		*
Lars Owe	Dahlgren	Linkoping University	Sweden	lars-ove.dahlgren@liu.se

Paper type	Empirical
Title	Commonality and diversity in the student experience of higher education
Abstract	What is the impact of fostering communities of learners on the student experience? Students in higher education are known to vary in their conceptions of learning, their approaches to studying, and the personal development and personal change that result. This study aimed to investigate the effect of the social context on these aspects of the student experience. The participants were students in the first year and the final year of undergraduate programmes at 15 departments at UK universities, five offering each of three subjects: bioscience, business studies, and sociology. They completed a questionnaire that included separate scales designed to measure their conceptions of learning, their approaches to studying, their personal and educational development, and their personal change. They were given a similar questionnaire roughly two years later (when the entering students were in their third year, and when the exiting students were in their second year after graduation). The departments were classified into three categories: in Type A, a socially diverse group of students shared a largely common experience; in Type B, broadly similar kinds of students shared a largely common experience; in Type C, students had only limited contact with their peers, and so they had a largely individualised experience. Students in Type C departments were more likely to hold conceptions of learning that focused on the reproduction and application of what is learned rather than one that focuses on understanding; they also reported less social development than students in Type A or B departments. Students in Type A departments reported greater development of their cognitive skills but less development of their mathematical skills than students in Type B or C departments. In other words, fostering communities of learners affects both students’ conceptions of learning and their personal development, although the effects were generally small.
Summary	In principle, academic departments can provide three different kinds of context for the student experience. In Type A departments, a socially diverse group of students share a largely common experience. In Type B departments, broadly similar kinds of students share a largely common experience. In Type C departments, students have only limited contact with their peers (for instance, because of personal commitments such as their families or jobs), and so they have a largely individualised experience and the diversity of the group is relatively unimportant. We classified the departments that had participated in a large-scale longitudinal project in terms of this typology. Social diversity was variously defined in different contexts in terms of age, ethnicity, and social class. The participants were students in the first year and the final year of the undergraduate programmes in 15 departments at UK universities, five offering each of three subjects: bioscience, business studies, and sociology. They completed a questionnaire that included four separate scales. One scale was intended to measure their conceptions of learning and was adapted from the Mental Models scale of the Inventory of Learning Styles (Vermetten, Vermunt, & Lodewijks, 1999); this contained three subscales that measured conceptions of learning as the construction of knowledge, the intake of knowledge, and the use of knowledge. The second scale measured the use of deep and surface approaches to studying and was adapted from an unpublished instrument from the University of Edinburgh (http://www.etl.tla.ed.ac.uk/publications.html). The third scale was adapted from the Personal and Educational Development Inventory devised by Lawless and Richardson (2004); this measured the development of the students’ cognitive skills, mathematical skills, self-organisation skills, and social skills. Finally, a new scale was devised to measure broader aspects of personal change while at university; this yielded three subscales measuring change in terms of academic identity, confidence, and social networks. The participants were given a similar questionnaire roughly two years later (when the entering students were in their third year, and when the exiting students were in their second year after graduation). The questionnaire data were supplemented by interviews and focus groups carried out with samples of students from each cohort at each institution. The data were analysed using multivariate analyses of variance that incorporated the covariates of age and gender and the independent variables of cohort and department. The latter variable was nested under the independent variables of departmental type and subject. This made it possible to identify variations across the three departmental types while controlling for possible confounded variations due to age, gender, subject, and cohort. There were significant differences among the three types of department on five of the 12 subscales. First, students in Type C departments tended to obtain higher scores than those in Type A or Type B departments on the scales concerned with the intake of knowledge and the use of knowledge. This suggests that students in Type C departments are more likely to hold conceptions of learning that focus on the reproduction and application of what is learned rather than one that focuses on understanding. Consistent with this idea, interviews and focus groups with students from the relevant cohorts suggested a greater instrumentality among such students and a greater emphasis on credentials and meeting course requirements. There were no significant differences in the students’ use of either a deep approach or a surface approach to studying. However, students in Type C departments tended also to obtain lower scores than those in Type A or Type B departments in terms of personal change through social networks. It is hardly surprising that students whose experience of higher education is shared with others report more social development than their counterparts whose experience is individualised. Students in Type A departments tended to obtain higher scores than those in Type B departments in terms of the development of their cognitive skills. This suggests that learning among a heterogeneous student population is conducive to a student’s cognitive development. This is consistent with the evidence (primarily from the United States and primarily concerned with ethnic diversity) that heterogeneity in the student population is conducive to students’ cognitive development (e.g. Chang, Denson, Saenz, & Misa, 2006; Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002). Curiously, however, students in Type A departments tended to obtain lower scores than those in Type B departments in terms of the development of their mathematical skills. This suggests that learning in a heterogeneous student population is somewhat less conducive to the development of a student’s understanding and use of mathematics. In both respects, students in Type C departments obtained scores that were similar to those obtained by students in Type B departments and significantly different from those obtained by students in Type A departments. In other words, students learning in an individualised setting showed a similar pattern to those learning with broadly similar kinds of students in a shared setting. These results show that fostering communities of learners affects both students’ conceptions of learning and their personal development. It should, however, be acknowledged that the magnitude of the effects in question was generally quite small, and this suggests that other factors are potentially more important in determining the student experience of higher education. This research was carried out as part of a project on “The social and organisational mediation of university learning” that was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under its Teaching and Learning Research Programme. References Chang, M.J., Denson, N., Saenz, V. and Misa, K. (2006) ‘The educational benefits of sustaining cross-racial interaction among undergraduates’, Journal of Higher Education, 77: 430–55. Gurin, P., Dey, E.L., Hurtado, S. and Gurin, G. (2002) ‘Diversity and higher education: theory and impact on educational outcomes’, Harvard Educational Review, 72: 330–66. Lawless, C.J. and Richardson, J.T.E. (2004) ‘Monitoring the experiences of graduates in distance education’, Studies in Higher Education, 29: 353–74. Vermetten, Y.J., Vermunt, J.D. and Lodewijks, H.G. (1999) ‘A longitudinal perspective on learning strategies in higher education: different viewpoints towards development’ British Journal of Educational Psychology, 69: 221–42.
Keywords	Higher education
Appendices

Authors
Name	Surname	Institution	Country	e-mail	EARLI Number	Presenting
John T. E.	Richardson	Open University	United Kingdom	j.t.e.richardson@open.ac.uk		*
Rob	Edmunds	Open University	United Kingdom	r.edmunds@open.ac.uk
John L.	Brennan	Open University	United Kingdom	j.l.brennan@open.ac.uk

Paper type	Theoretical
Title	Fostering meaning: fostering community
Abstract	This presentation is designed to complement the other empirically-based contributions to this symposium by exploring a number of the conceptual issues which arise when one looks at higher education through the lens of ‘fostering communities of learners’. While there is a need for ‘caution in depicting undergraduate courses as disciplinary ‘communities of practice’’ (Anderson and Hounsell, 2007, 468), the aim of this presentation is not to deconstruct the idea of communities of learners, but to construct an account that points up both the possibilities for, and the complexities of, fostering such communities within higher education, employing illustrations where appropriate from the other papers in this symposium. Attention centres on three, interconnected areas of analysis. First, drawing on Barnett’s recent work (Barnett, 2007; Barnett and Coate, 2005), there is an examination of the types of commitments that may be required of both students and staff if a learning community is to be engendered. The focus then moves to the question of how best to conceptualise the knowledge practices that characterise learning communities in higher education and the orientations towards knowledge that are expected of students. This leads in turn to an examination of the nature of communication and the creation of meaning within learning communities which is guided by Rommetveit’s subtle account of how commonality of reference can be achieved to a degree (e.g. Rommetveit, 1992) against the background of ‘a world we assume to be multifaceted, only partially shared’ (Rommetveit, 1974, 340). A concluding section builds on this consideration of Rommetveit’s work, to explore how Law’s (2004, 62) advocacy of an ontology of the ‘in-between’, of partial connection, may be an appropriate way in which to frame our understanding of the challenges that university lecturers face in fostering communities of learners.
Summary	This presentation is designed to complement the other empirically-based contributions to this symposium by exploring a number of the conceptual issues which arise when one looks at higher education through the lens of ‘fostering communities of learners’. As well as making an independent contribution to the symposium, it aims to present an integrative discussion of themes that are raised in the other papers. While there is a need for ‘caution in depicting undergraduate courses as disciplinary ‘communities of practice’’ (Anderson and Hounsell, 2007, 468), the aim of this presentation is not to deconstruct the idea of communities of learners, but to construct an account that points up both the possibilities for, and the complexities of, fostering such communities within higher education, employing illustrations where appropriate from the other papers in this symposium. The paper commences by revisiting Wenger’s (1998) intricate depiction of ‘communities of practice’ and the conditions that allow such communities to flourish or languish, in order to highlight aspects of his theorising that have received less attention in the literature. Consideration is given to how the other papers in the symposium employ the term community and to pointing up features of communities that may be particularly salient in higher education. A rationale is then provided for focusing attention in this paper on three, interconnected areas of analysis: • the commitments and intentions displayed by the participants, • the knowledge practices around which these communities centre and • the conceptualisation of the nature of communication and the creation of meaning within learning communities. • First, drawing on Barnett’s recent work (Barnett, 2007; Barnett and Coate, 2005), there is an examination of the types of commitments that may be required of both students and staff if a learning community is to be engendered, followed by a consideration of the forms of being that may be demanded of students in such a community. The paper also addresses the question of how communities may be fostered in ways that assist students to engage with the demands of ‘knowing, acting and being’ (Barnett and Coate, 2005) posed by higher education curricula. The focus then moves to the question of how best to conceptualise the knowledge practices that characterise learning communities in higher education and the orientations towards knowledge, (and towards discussions concerning knowledge), that are expected of students. This leads in turn to an examination of the nature of communication and the creation of meaning within learning communities which is guided by Rommetveit’s subtle account of how commonality of reference can be achieved to a degree (e.g. Rommetveit, 1992) against the background of ‘a world we assume to be multifaceted, only partially shared’ (Rommetveit, 1974, 34). The paper brings out how, according to Rommetveit, a crucial matter for the coordination of attention and intention, is the sufficient sharing of perspectives on the matter that is under discussion (Rommetveit, 1974, 1990; Graumann, 1995). Implications of this emphasis on perspectivity for the fostering of learning communities are drawn out. Issues surrounding the relative power and authority of interactants, including their capacity to set the perspectives under which topics will be viewed, are introduced within this part of the paper. This section on the conceptualisation of the creation of meaning within learning communities also marks up points that resonate with certain of the themes in the paper by Olga Dysthe and Solvi Lillejord. A concluding section builds on this consideration of Rommetveit’s work, to explore how Law’s (2004, 62) advocacy of an ontology of the ‘in-between’, of partial connection, may be an appropriate way in which to frame our understanding of the challenges that university lecturers face in fostering communities of learners. References Anderson, C. and Hounsell, D. (2007) Knowledge practices: ‘doing the subject’ in undergraduate courses. The Curriculum Journal, 18, (4), 463-478. Barnett, R. (2007) A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty. Maidenhead: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. Barnett, R. and Coate, K. (2005) Engaging the curriculum in higher education. Buckingham: The Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. Graumann, C. F. (1995) Commonality, mutuality, reciprocity: a conceptual introduction. In I. Markova, C. Graumann and K. Foppa (eds.) Mutualities in Dialogue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Law, J. (2004) After Method: mess in social science research. Abingdon: Routledge. Rommetveit, R. (1974) On Message Structure: A framework for the study of language and communication. London: John Wiley and Sons. Rommetveit, R. (1990) On axiomatic features of a dialogical approach to language and mind. In I. Markova and K. Foppa (eds.) The Dynamics of Dialogue. New York/London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Rommetveit, R. (1992) Outlines of a dialogically based social-cognitive approach to human cognition and communication. In A. H. Wold (ed.) The Dialogical Alternative: Towards a Theory of Language and Mind. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Keywords	Higher education
Appendices

Authors
Name	Surname	Institution	Country	e-mail	EARLI Number	Presenting
Charles	Anderson	University of Edinburgh	United Kingdom	C.D.B.Anderson@ed.ac.uk		*