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What happened to andragogy? January 16, 2008

Posted by kieslinger in : Uncategorized,andragogy , trackback

I am just coming back from a meeting where a number of people doing research in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) were discussing what might be some of the core research topics in TEL for the next few years.

What stroke me in one of the discussions is that quite many people think about teaching kids and young people when we talk about pedagogy. And of course if we take the Greek root of the term “pedagogy” it means “child-leading”.

However in TEL we also deal a lot with settings of Life Long Learning, workplace learning, vocational training, etc. where we are confronted with an adult learner perspective. Now some of us also use the term pedagogy in that context as the term has somewhat been extended to “guiding and leading” all sorts of target groups.

But there has been the term and concept of “andragogy” (“adult-leading”) around for many years now. I was just wandering why this term has not really found its way into the TEL community yet? Or is it around and I have just missed it?

It was mainly Malcom Knowles, who defined some theory around this term in order to describe some of the main differences between guiding children in their learning processes and guiding adults. Knowles came up with 4 basic principles:

  1. Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction (Self-concept and Motivation to learn).
  2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for learning activities (Experience).
  3. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance to their job or personal life (Readiness to learn).
  4. Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented (Orientation to learning).

Although I suppose that quite a lot of researchers in TEL do consider at least part of these 4 principles I have come across this term very rarely. It makes us aware that when we are dealing with adult learners the challenges for designing learning activities are very different from pedagogical scenarios for children.

So why not use the term more widely again?

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