Andragogy is a teaching philosophy that focuses on educating adults and was developed in response to the failure of traditional pedagogy. Malcolm Knowles developed the basis for modern andragogy based on four fundamental ideas, including the importance of experiential education and relating the subject directly to the student’s life or work. Andragogy emphasizes the shift from the instructor as an authority figure to a facilitator in the learning process.
Andragogy is a teaching philosophy that focuses on educating adults, rather than children. It is seen as a different methodology from pedagogy, which focuses on ways to best educate children. It was developed in the early part of the 19th century, as a response to the failure of traditional pedagogy to best educate adults later in life.
The term originated with a German educator, Alexander Kapp, but it was American Malcolm Knowles who really came up with the idea and developed the basis for modern andragogy.
Knowles developed her system based on four fundamental ideas: first, that adults want to be fully involved in the development of their own education, that they have a strong sense of self-concept, and their motivation grows from this; second, that experiential education is the strongest form of adult education, which includes allowing students to make their own mistakes; third, for adults to have a true readiness to learn, they need to feel that what they are learning is directly relevant to their own lives; and, finally, that adults learn from the relationship by solving problems, rather than passively acquiring new content.
Even a quick look at these shows how andragogy differs drastically from many traditional forms of pedagogy, although it shares many elements with more modern forms of pedagogy. One of the most important ideas is that while children are in many ways seen as empty vessels with a strong innate desire to acquire new information in a wide variety of fields, embracing a love of learning for the sake of learning, the same is not necessarily true of adults. Adults are seen as already quite calcified in their ways of thinking, viewing their time, energy and mental capacity as limited resources. This leads them to be much more demanding in what they choose to pursue.
Consequently, one of the most important aspects of a strong andragogy practice is to relate the subject directly to the student’s life or work. Adults, Knowles argued, don’t want to learn in a vacuum, they want to see how information can help them. At the same time, learning must engage the adult learner at all levels, enabling them to use feedback devices to change their learning system. A sense of personal power is important in andragogy, whereas in traditional pedagogy children are assumed to be comfortable with an authority figure who dictates the curriculum entirely. Of course, in many modern pedagogical theories, some of these basic assumptions of children’s learning are also called into question, and more progressive forms of pedagogy begin to look much more like andragogy.
An important shift in andragogy is perceptual: the shift from the instructor seen as a position of absolute power to more of a facilitator in the learning process. This shift from a didactic model of education to a more collaborative one has played an important role in energizing adults to continue their education and continues to grow as a movement as more adults return to educational environments in later life.
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