Principles of Andragogy

               As teachers of adult learners who use online course templates as a primary way to interact with our students, we have a responsibility to create better environments within those templates so that students can actually use them to match their learning needs – we have a responsibility, that is, to create transactional learning models appropriate to the use of andragogical methods.    Adult learners have particular learning needs, according to Malcolm Knowles (1973),[3] whose work in adult-learning, based on the ideas of a Yugoslavian adult educator named Dusan Savicevic,[4] set the standard for andragogy in the United States.  “The andragogical model as conceived by Knowles is predicated on four basic assumptions about learners,” according to Hiemstra and Sisco, and these include

1. Their self-concept moves from dependency to independency or self-directedness.
2. They accumulate a reservoir of experiences that can be used as a basis on which to build learning.
3. Their readiness to learn becomes increasingly associated with the developmental tasks of social roles.
4. Their time and curricular perspectives change from postponed to immediacy of application and from subject-centeredness to performance-centeredness (1980, pp. 44-45).”[5]

In short, adult learning is highly self-directed, experiential, needs-based, and situationally-contexted.  Stephen Brookfield, in his book Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning (1986), moreover, points out a dozen features essential to andragogy, including a non-prescriptive attitude, an issue-centered curricula, problem posing, praxis, continuous negotiation, shared responsibility for learning, valuing process, dialogue, equality, openness, mutual respect, and integrated thinking and learning.[6]  Adult learners who are already embarked on some kind of career path have no desire for generalized learning outside the context of their immediate practical needs. 

While Knowles, Holton, and Swanson (1998) focused on six main points in their book The Adult Learner, which include a) the learner’s need to know, b) the learner’s self-concept, c) the role of the learner’s experience, d) the learner’s readiness to learn, e) the learner’s orientation to learning, and f) the learner’s motivation to learn,[7]  Hase and Kenyon (2000) extended this litany of learner-centeredness to what they believe is its natural conclusion – the irrelevance of the teacher.  We reside, they write, in a world in which “information is readily and easily accessible; where change is so rapid that traditional methods of training and education are totally inadequate; [where] discipline based knowledge is inappropriate to prepare for living in modern communities and workplaces; [where] learning is increasingly aligned with what we do; [where] modern organisational structures require flexible learning practices; and [where] there is a need for immediacy of learning.”  For that reason, they have advocated a new approach to teaching and learning called heutagogy, which “recognises the need to be flexible in the learning where the teacher provides resources but the learner designs the actual course he or she might take by negotiating the learning. Thus learners might read around critical issues or questions and determine what is of interest and relevance to them and then negotiate further reading and assessment tasks.”  They conclude that we as teachers “should concern ourselves with developing the learner’s capability not just embedding discipline based skills and knowledge.”[8]  The role of the learning institution becomes descriptive instead of prescriptive, institutional standards are replaced by commercial norms, and assessment activities are based on the functionality of design rather than on its theoretical underpinnings.  Heutagogy, therefore, is andragogy in the marketplace.

What heutagogy seeks to do is remove the teacher altogether after the teaching and learning environment is set up with the idea being that the teacher is creating a discourse rather than a paradigm in which the students might engage.  The difference between a discourse and a paradigm is that a discourse has the ability to extend beyond its borders, to double back on itself and question the strategies by which it operates, and even to contradict itself whereas a paradigm is an established and inflexible system that carries within itself an ability to discern which questions might be asked as long as those questions conform to the system that asks them.[9]  Naturally, given the opportunity for students to shift from working within a given paradigm to within the larger discourse of which that and many other like or unlike paradigms are a part, the freedom the students will have to pursue their own interests will be both liberatory and cathartic.  The boundaries to exploration removed, the learner is able to be driven by his or her own passions in whichever directions the winds of those passions might blow.  In essence, the single way in which heutagogy improves or extends the theory of andragogy, which is the removal of the teacher (or governing entity), is the very thing that makes the idea of heutagogy impractical.

Heutagogy, consequentially, is the great watchmaker theory, where the teacher sets in motion a universe and then stands back and watches it tick.  The problem with any watchmaker theory, though, is that the structural design of the clock is an indelible fingerprint of its creator.  By arguing for heutagogical release to be applied to andragogical initiatives, indeed for we teachers to “relinquish any power we deem ourselves to have,”  the great innovation on Knowles cannot be done without the discourse’s becoming something wholly other than the teacher intended in which case the teacher will no longer have the power even to assess the results as they will fall outside not only the paradigm within which the teacher is working but also the discourse the teacher has attempted to shape.  If the teacher is removed, then so should be the accrediting institution.  The best that heutagogy can hope for, as a result, is to establish a negotiated reality between the teacher and the learner where the teacher remains a vital part of helping the learner interpret his or her world but maintains a distance appropriate to encouraging the learner to actively engage in that world through the process of discovery as it relates to his or her own interests and needs.  In this, we are back to Knowles and the negotiated reality between the teacher, the student, and the course materials.  The use of andragogical principles in the teaching of adult learners justifies the existence of the teacher and the institution to which that teacher is attached in ways that heutagogy cannot, and this is why andragogy will remain a valuable teaching tool, or, in Knowles’ word, a valuable “technology” for the myriad of teaching and learning environments in higher education.