Lifelong learning is now central to Europe's employment strategy and policies for social inclusion. One of six 'key messages' in the European Commission's Communication on lifelong learning (EC, 2001) is the need for 'innovative pedagogy', yet it has little to say about new approaches to teaching and learning. This has been a particular problem for post-school education in the last 25 years, as young people across Europe have disengaged from further education (FE) in large numbers (Evans and Niemeyer, 2004). There is a need for pedagogies which are effective both in equipping young people for worthwhile employment and in developing them as lifelong learners. Yet, in comparison with school and higher education, there is little research on further education, and even less on its pedagogical theories and practices. Two contemporary strands of thinking about FE pedagogy co- exist uneasily in England. On the one hand, practitioners embrace powerful discourses of FE as a remedial process for learners' deficits. An emancipatory, student-centred rhetoric cloaks a deep individualisation of learning, overlaid with a 'therapeutic' turn (Ecclestone, 2004). On the other, official accounts - in teacher training textbooks, prescriptive national training standards, and audit/inspection regimes - emphasise technicist aspects of teaching, and overlook the social and cultural aspects of learning. Both are inherently acquisitional views of learning. A different view - that of learning as social participation - has been taken in the project Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC), within the ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme. It comprises a four-year study in four FE colleges across England. Two core research aims are: to deepen understanding of the complexities of learning; and to investigate strategies for the improvement of learning opportunities. Its design includes the participation of FE tutors committed to introduce change in their own learning sites. Its theoretical rationale promotes a cultural perspective on learning. That is to say, learning as a social practice - and the culture of each particular learning site - has to be understood not only in terms of interactions between teachers and learners themselves, but also in relation to broader institutional, social, economic and political forces. In analysing the transformations which have taken place in the 17 learning sites studied, TLC has drawn on the sociological theory of Bourdieu (1986). This suggests that local transformations must be interpreted in relation to the overall trajectory of FE itself, both in the field of education, and in the wider field of power. Bourdieu's reflexive sociology prompts us to ask: " why - and how - has the improvement of teaching and learning in FE been constructed as a problem? " what are the underlying doxas and more public 'sacred stories' about it? " how can we map the social space through which transformations in FE take place? In this paper, we pursue these questions by tracing a 'genealogy' (Foucault, 1972, 1991) of improving teaching and learning in FE in England: a history of the 'problem' that seeks to establish not only its origins, but also the defining moments at which its meaning has changed in significant ways; and the covert and sometimes disciplinary effects of the discourses associated with it. Drawing upon case studies of English FE, this paper offers a generalisable theoretical approach and research agenda relevant to different European contexts. It demonstrates the significance of specific traditions of vocational education and training, and their assumptions about pedagogy, to the endeavour of improving teaching and learning for the future. It also suggests that, whatever the national context, a cultural perspective on learning may offer a deeper understanding of what we already do, and how it might be transformed for the better.