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Researching policy and learning: perspectives on complexity

This special issue contains a stunningly good set of research papers. Even so, writing published commentaries on other people’s research is a problematic process. There are two major dangers, and one difficult choice. One danger is to use the space to be critical of parts of the work, knowing that I have the last word, and that the writers of the various papers in this special issue have nowhere to respond. The second linked danger is to use the paper to write more about my work than about the papers I have been asked to comment on. The choice is whether or not to comment on each paper separately, or to take the collection as a whole. Let me deal with the choice first. Because the set of papers here all come from one project, because of the degree of synergy between them, and because I have little but admiration for the detailed work in all of them, I have chosen to respond to the collection as a whole. In so doing, I have tried to avoid both dangers, though at times I have probably failed. However, what I cannot do is separate myself from the position from which I read these contributions. I was invited to write this because I was one of the directors of another large Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP)-funded project on learning in FE, the Transforming Learning Cultures in FE (TLC) project. Rather than work for a pretended neutral position, I have decided to focus on some of the ways in which the project reporting here is complementary to the work done in the TLC, upon some key similarities and differences between the two projects, and upon the tricky issue of integrating their respective findings. To help avoid the second danger, I have chosen not to reference the TLC materials or their further literature sources, in what follows.1