Extending Reflection into Action

Making Reflection more critical and scholarly: a current UK nationally-funded approach

There is much research into current learning and teaching environments in higher education. If you would like to follow this up, one interesting HEFCE-funded study is in progress. This is the SOMUL project (‘The Social and Organisational Mediation of University Learning’). Visit the project website

Briefly the project is ‘exploring sets of diversities that affect the processes and outcomes of learning in higher education…In posing fundamental questions of ‘what is learned’ and how this differs for different students in different places, the project seeks to provide a way of thinking about mass higher education in Britain which is empirically grounded and which may challenge conventional thinking about institutional subject and student differences'. (‘What is Really Learned at University?) The SOMUL Project: Conceptualisation and Design’)

The article gives a comprehensive account of the intellectual bases on which the project is based, a brief synopsis of some of the key texts in higher education pedagogy as it has influenced the UK agenda, and a statement of what it is hoped that the project will achieve.