Learning relationships in community-based further education

This article offers a new perspective on pedagogy and learning culture by emphasizing the key role played by learning relationships. The first part of the paper describes the theoretical background in the work of Bordieu, and Lave & Wenger, and considers how, through the role of identity, individual relationships reflect the influence of community. The article then looks more closely at learning relationships in the empirical setting of community-based further education, explored through the methodology of interpretative phenomenological analysis. The discussion considers the generality of the concept of learning relationships, adopts a tentative typology, and argues that adopting this perspective encourages an approach to pedagogy based on the development of a learner’s identity, mediated through the influence of others, in a variety of roles.