Andragogy

This article discusses the history and application of the theory of andragogy, a teaching theory for adult learners in which the educator's role remains meaningful but less instructive, involving coaching, facilitating, and guiding. Today, the learner-centered assumptions and practices of andragogy have proven sufficiently effective to filter into many educational settings, including pedagogy, professional development, staff trainings, and service learning. Although it functions as a highly influential guide to practice, some educational theorists find that the claims of andragogy remain insufficiently verified in higher education.

Keywords Andragogy; Adult learning; Experiential learning; Inquiry-based learning; Pedagogy; Problem-based learning; Prior Learning assessment; Transformative Learning; Self-directed learning

Adult Education > Andragogy

Overview

In contrast with traditional pedagogy in which the teacher transmits knowledge to receptive but passive children, andragogy, or the "art and science of helping adults learn" (Knowles, 1970), offers an appropriate and viable alternative. Malcolm Knowles, andragogy's most famous proponent, argued that adults were self-directed, problem-solving learners whose life experience constituted a significant learning resource. Thus, instead of the traditional hierarchical relationship between the teacher and pupil, the adult learner participates fully in his or her education, influencing the curriculum and determining learning objectives.

Andragogy is perhaps most clearly understood, as Knowles has suggested, in contrast with pedagogy, a distinction that highlights the stark difference between a teacher-dominated form of education, long regarded as appropriate for children's learning, and a learner-centered one, now viewed as particularly relevant for non-traditional adult learners.

During the first half of the twentieth century, European wars and other disruptions prevented large numbers of students in eastern Europe from completing even a primary education. In peacetime, recovering industries were met with a large but uneducated labor supply. Demand grew for adult education — a new concept — and new teaching methods. Andragogy became an important field of both research and practice.

The history of this coined term as it moved from Eastern Europe to the United States is instructive. If pedagogy is the art and science of teaching children (from the Greek paid, meaning "child," and agogos meaning "leader of"), andragogy was intended as a parallel term with its root of the Greek aner (from the stem andra) meaning "man, not boy." In his writing about the workers' movement, the German educator Alexander Kapp coined the term (Andragogik) in 1833 to clarify Plato's educational approach. It reappeared in 1921 when German social scientist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy made use of the term to call attention to the need for special methods and teachers to be used with blue-collar workers. Then, Eduard Lindeman, a colleague of John Dewey who shared his commitment to progressive education, first introduced the term into English (1927), emphasizing the informal, experiential, and lifelong nature of the andragogical orientation. Lindeman had been studying the German Folk High School, a form of which continues today in Norway: it is a residential educational environment for adult learners whose instruction is a general civic education with no standard curriculum but a wide, free range of courses appropriate for adults. Soon after, Malcolm Knowles, who, like Lindeman, had worked with adult learners at the YMCA, was exposed to the term by the visiting Yugoslavian adult educator Dusan Savicevic.

Thus, Knowles, whose name dominates the field of andragogy in American education, is indebted to an Eastern European ancestry in its attention in the mid-twentieth century to the learning of the adult worker which, in turn, calls for an action-oriented, non-traditional education. Perhaps not coincidentally, Knowles' young adulthood too was devoted to working with adults as he moved from service in the National Youth Administration to become director of adult education for the YMCA of first Boston, and later Detroit and Chicago. Although ultimately Knowles earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and established a graduate program in adult education, his early years of working in informal and civic adult education, which avoided didactic lecturing in favor of a more democratic involvement with students to address their interests, formed a significant autobiographical foundation for his continued work.

His pragmatic, goal-oriented approach, so attractive to practitioners, may have in part accounted for his widespread success in promoting this field throughout the world, but may also have finally put him at odds with the academy, which still today questions whether his theory of andragogy is empirically valid. His character — service-oriented, admittedly imperfect, self-reflective, and pragmatic — seems at odds with an academic scientific approach in which a concept is carefully scrutinized, tested, and verified. Nonetheless, Knowles' influence remains profound, both in practice and in the academy.

When andragogy was effectively introduced by Malcolm Knowles to the American educational scene in 1968, it was welcomed as an appropriate counterpoint and necessary relief to the presumptions of pedagogy; moreover, it proved immediately successful. Previously, the focus on the child's learning was so dominant that few psychologists had considered that adults might be able to learn. The possibility that they might learn well but differently from children rested upon the then surprising notion that adults too continued to develop psychologically, intellectually, and emotionally in keeping with their age. This differentiation between adult learners and younger learners is crucial to andragogy, with its attention on the adult as a whole person with specific developmental needs.

Thus, in contrast to the passive child who is receptive to the teacher's transmission of knowledge, the adult learner was presumed to be self-directed and eager to initiate inquiry into knowledge that was particularly meaningful to him or her. In place of a one-directional communication from teacher to pupil, the andragogical model involved participatory learning with the adult assuming increasing responsibility.

By 1980, Knowles had refined his definition of andragogy and clarified its relation to pedagogy, formulating a distinctive set of assumptions about mature learners:

1. Their self-concept moves from dependency to independency or self-directedness. Although pedagogy may have made learners dependent, the adult educator (or andragogue) can help to move adults to self-directed learning in which they assume primary responsibility for their learning and its direction.
2. They accumulate "a growing reservoir of experiences" that can be used as a basis on which to build learning. The adult's life experience becomes an invaluable learning resource, as valid a mine of riches as an academic library.
3. Their readiness to learn becomes increasingly associated with the "developmental tasks of social roles." In other words, adults are not as motivated as children to learn due to external academic pressure; rather, they learn best in response to their own sense of what they need to know in order to grow.
4. Their time and curricular perspectives change from postponed to immediate application of knowledge and from subject-centeredness to problem-centeredness.
5. Their motivation to learn becomes internal.

The first two assumptions, which recognize that an adult is an independent individual with a fully formed, unique personality, are drawn from humanistic psychology, while the second two assumptions, which attend to an adult's readiness to learn, rely on a psychosocial development perspective. The final assumption regarding internal motivation was added later.

In his work entitled "Modern Practice of Adult Education" (1970) Knowles presented a practical "technology" of andragogy, which flows logically from these assumptions (although published earlier). In a seven-step process, adult educators should accomplish the following with their students:

1. Set a cooperative learning climate
2. Create mechanisms for mutual planning
3. Arrange for a diagnosis of learner needs and interests
4. Enable the formulation of learning objectives based on the diagnosed needs and interests
5. Design sequential activities for achieving the objectives
6. Execute the design by selecting methods, materials, and resources
7. Evaluate the quality of the learning experience while rediagnosing needs for further learning.

Understanding Knowles' assumptions in conjunction with his "technology" gives a clear sense of the core of his theory of andragogy. As evident and appropriate as these assumptions and practices may seem to us today, they pose profound implications, particularly in the areas of curriculum and the educator-learner relationship.

Implications

With the recognition of the adult learner's rich and varied life experience as a learning resource, the "curriculum" shifts from a pre-ordained set of truths collected and sustained by tradition to a process of inquiry initiated and directed by the learner. Instead of the learner beginning at point zero (the mind as a tabula rasa or "blank slate") to subsequently master a body of knowledge, the adult student can rely upon his or her experience and maturity to catapult him or her into a process of new learning. Lindeman, who protested that "too much of learning consists of vicarious substitution of someone else's experience and knowledge," enthusiastically described this "new process by which the adult begins to be aware of and evaluate his experience." Because the learner's experience largely (though not completely) substitutes for a pre-designed curriculum, education activities are especially designed to draw out that wealth of knowledge: prior knowledge learning, case studies, small group discussion, simulation or role playing exercises, and problem-solving. From the other end of the spectrum, Prior Learning Assessment (PLA), now common in higher education, recognizes that significant learning takes place throughout life and in various non-academic settings with the adult learner at the wheel: PLA assesses and credits the learner's experience as a substitute for academic courses.

With the learner directing the learning process founded upon his or her life experience, there is a significant shift from the acquisition or accumulation of knowledge as an appropriate outcome to the dynamic experience of self-directed inquiry as a goal appropriate in itself. True, there may be the additional component of problem-solving as a result of inquiry, but inquiry-based learning is also praised as the joyous, continuous action of meaningful, "lifewide" learning. Recently, inquiry-based learning has been used successfully with young children and children with learning disabilities to engage them in practicing this open-ended discovery process. And if the purpose of the curriculum shifts from being content-centered to support problem-solving (as Knowles suggested in his fourth assumption), this process may still include engagement with content, albeit from a pragmatic point of view.

Today, in disciplines such as science and social science, inquiry-based learning is aligned with problem-based learning in which the student initiates (or is challenged to initiate) a process of discovery and research in order to develop a solution or an answer. Its benefits, not surprisingly, are the deep learning and ownership that accompanies self-directed inquiry as well as the transfer of skills (e.g. goal-setting, cooperation, research, learning through trial and error, and self-evaluation) to other spheres. Contemporary education includes the presence of an instructor in problem-based learning, but this role may be prominent only at the beginning of the process, while during the inquiry itself, the teacher may function more as a coach or guide.

Indeed, the relationship between the educator and the learner is dramatically different in the andragogical model from the traditional pedagogical experience, for the authority figure whose expertise typically determines the curriculum has effectively descended from the hierarchic position of knowledge to share authority as well as responsibility for learning. In place of the transmission model of a mature adult teaching an ignorant child, we have a transactional encounter between two adults in which the learner is honored. The learner's life experience is honored and the learner's needs are addressed—a far cry from the traditional nineteenth and twentieth century pedagogical model, still witnessed today, in which students receive learning directives designed by distant experts which the learners then attempt to accomplish.

This deep respect for and trust in the learner to sense what he or she needs to learn has had a profound effect on the practitioners of andragogy. An andragogue (the teacher of adults) is willing to forego the traditional seat of authority to become a colleague who contributes to the learner's self-esteem and sense of accomplishment. Thus, the transactional, mutually respectful relationship between the facilitator and the learner ("the education of equals" (Jarvis, 1985) becomes crucial in andragogy, not unlike Carl Rogers' humanistic clinical psychology. If the learner's self-actualization is the ultimate goal of andragogy, then the facilitator's role is not unlike that of a coach who creates an environment and provides resources to help the adult realize his or her full potential and move toward fully independent learning.

Today, a few tools exist to help teaching faculty identify their practice along an andragogical-pedagogical continuum. In the "Educational Orientation Questionnaire" a teacher may be categorized as either a mentor or a master teacher. Faculty who consider themselves mentors believe their students should be empowered for self-education, determining course content and self-evaluation, with the faculty member acting as facilitator and coach. Similarly, in the "Principles of Adult Learning Scale," educators evaluate their teaching styles by identifying their comfort with specific practices in seven areas: “learner-centered activities, personalizing instruction, relating to experience, assessing student needs, climate building, participation in the learning process, and flexibility for personal development.” The high-scoring adult educator sustains a student-centered classroom by promoting problem-solving curriculum designed by students, self-paced instruction, and risk taking. This facilitator raises student consciousness while acknowledging life experience, and builds a democratic, flexible, and personally supportive climate.

Andragogy experienced a resurgence with the rise of distance learning. Autonomous, self-determined students found a perfect vehicle in the internet for providing online classrooms and open university courses. Particularly after the introduction of Web 2.0, a host of tools and resources became available for developing learner-generated content and pathways to discovery. One species of andragogy that evolved in this rich new context was heutagogy, an andragogolical method aimed at fostering a capacity to self-train in a highly complex and evolving technological workplace. Hussain (2013) found a high degree of satisfaction among users of distance tutoring. When Brandman University, an adult college within California's Chapman University system, spun off to become its own accredited institution, the particular needs of adult students were reviewed, and a transition away from physical classrooms and face-to-face interaction with a professor and toward a more flexible, Web-enabled instruction model was developed. Brandman was part of a trend, and blended or fully online courses became common in higher education. Much of the push for online university classes, however, came from budgetary rather than andragogical concerns. The andragogical model seemed to offer a cost-efficient alternative to the old — and costly — pedagogical approach to university education.

Therein, perhaps, lies the rub between traditional university education and andragogy. If adult education means a kind of democratic and guided interaction managed by the adult educator, the expertise, research, and intellectual rigor at the heart of a university education may easily suffer. The professoriate, those highly trained experts who profess the significance of their field, may be relegated to a support position on the sidelines with the adult learner assuming primary responsibility. Although one cannot overlook the continued effectiveness of the andragogical methodology, its critics have expressed a variety of significant concerns.

Viewpoints

Critics, particularly academics, have objected to the slippery or ambiguous terminology used by Knowles. Indeed, is andragogy correctly termed an "art" or a "science"? When he alludes to the "technology of … " does he more accurately mean "methodology?" Is andragogy a valid, unified theory of learning, or merely practice, or the application of a theory? Is the theory accurately focused on learning or on teaching? While these persistent questions imply the unsystematic character of Knowles' thought, the most serious criticism is implicit in the charge that no empirical testing has sufficiently verified Knowles' claims for andragogy. Appropriate research into its efficacy is needed.

In addition, a number of readers have noted Knowles' oversimplified and mistaken focus on the age of the learner rather than on the learning context itself. The generic and ideal use of "adult" implies that all learners of a certain chronological maturity are indeed self-directed and internally motivated, a notion that has been called a "myth." Similarly, the lived experience which substitutes for a designed curriculum can be problematic and perhaps not easily transformed into an exemplum for learning.

Knowles himself acknowledged that his original dichotomy of pedagogy and andragogy was facile; he later identified them as alternative ends of a learning continuum. But some critics do not accept even the notion of a meaningful difference between child and adult learning, noting that the learning context or social setting is far more influential than the chronological age of the learner. For children, too, may be self-directed and voluntary learners, and in an unfamiliar learning situation, an adult may be a dependent but highly motivated learner. Polson posed the question: "Is the 'adult learner' a recognizable, single entity for whom there is one best way to teach, or for whom there is one best way to learn? No."

A number of educational theorists have posited more inclusive "gogies," objecting to the separatist focus of both pedagogy and andragogy. The terms "humanagogy" (Knudson),"anthropogogy" (Svicevic), and the African "ubuntugogy" (Bangura) intend to convey a humanitarian, all-encompassing educational methodology. On the other hand, "gerogogy" (Lebel), "gerontagogy" and "eldergogy" (Yeo) call attention to Knowles' failure to notice the unique needs of the elder learner. Finally, Mohring proposes "teliagogy," a gender-inclusive term referring to the learning of all adults.

At the same time, many educational philosophers have stood on Knowles' shoulders to create their rich and unique renditions of various elements of adult teaching and learning. Two have made particularly significant and creative contributions to this field. Brookfield (1995), an articulate proponent of the power of critical reflection, particularly important for practicing teachers, notes the danger of leaving the expertise to others. At the same time, revering the lived experience of the adult student cannot be an uncritical, unexamined activity: "Of all the ideas that can be identified as quintessentially adult educational, the emphasis on honoring, while at the same time critically analyzing, people's experience has the strongest intellectual lineage." And Mezirow (1978) goes further in attesting to the power of critical reflection when he posits that truly transformative learning arises out of a "disorienting dilemma," a clash between the adult's unexamined assumptions and a powerful new truth. In a safe environment with other adult learners, the disoriented adult thinker can reflect, analyze, reevaluate, and after such significant "perspective taking," ultimately integrate the challenging idea that had earlier been earlier rejected.

On the practical level, trainers' guides, workbooks, and literature based on andragogical principles are directed to specific audiences: for example, those in the health professions, social sciences such as criminal justice, as well as industrial and church settings. Any number of fields that require staff training are eager for successful tools which engage and privilege their adult learners.

Thus, in practice, Malcolm Knowles' teachings and writings on andragogy remain powerfully influential and inspiring in both national and international spheres to those who train or teach adult learners. His critic Professor Rachal has expressed the hope that "as much of the spirit of andragogy as possible should infuse adult learning situations" while also urging careful empirical research that will allow it to become "more than [merely] a beloved article of faith underlying much present practice."

Terms & Concepts

Adult Learning: An identified learning style of those who bring significant lived experience to their learning, as well as clear and pragmatic goals. Adult learning is characterized by self-direction, application, and an egalitarian relationship with the instructor.

Adult Learners: Typically those non-traditional, mature adults who choose their education for immediate application of knowledge. Because of their age and experience, they call for a style of instruction that values their leadership of their own learning process.

Andragogy: Adult learning theory, particularly as identified by Malcolm Knowles, and its counterpart, the instruction of adult learners.

Disorienting Dilemma: A state of disequilibrium stimulated by a crisis or a new situation that challenges an adult's presuppositions. If critical reflection ensues, ultimately the dilemma can result in transformative learning.

Experiential learning: Whether informal or structured, experiential learning involves an iterative process of at least two stages (and often more): action followed by reflection.

Inquiry-based learning: An open-ended learning process that begins with a question to be answered or a field of interest to be explored, whether self-determined by the learner or provided by curriculum or instructor. The inductive process, which includes critical thinking and examination of data, fosters an exciting sense of discovery of what has been unknown. Also known as guided inquiry, inquiry-guided learning, discovery learning.

Pedagogy: The art or science of learning by children; in general, the field of learning and instruction.

Prior Learning Assessment (PLA): The granting of recognition or academic credit by a university to the documented life learning accomplished by an adult.

Problem-based learning (PBL): A learning process in which students, often working in teams, are confronted with a problem to be solved, whether real or instructor-designed. Students define the problem, conduct the research, assess various solutions, and evaluate their success.

Self-actualization: The fifth and highest level of human needs identified by Abraham Maslow. This is the intrinsic need of a healthy individual to be fully developed.

Self-directed learning: Learning initiated and owned by the learner and typically occurring as part of one's every day life. A related term, "lifewide learning" refers to that systematic, daily, widespread learning that depends neither upon an instructor nor a classroom.

Transformative Learning: Because the learning process involves questioning one's assumptions, beliefs, and values as well as considering alternative perspectives, the learner is significantly changed emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and politically. Reflective learning becomes transformative when the previously held assumptions are found to be inauthentic or invalid.

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Suggested Reading

Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass.

Galbraith, M.W. (2004). Adult learning methods: A guide for effective instruction. Malabar, Florida: Krieger.

Henschke, J.A. (2011). Considerations regarding the future of andragogy. Adult Learning, 22, 34-37. Retrieved November 15, 2013, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Complete.

Knowles, M. S. (1970, 2nd ed. 1980). Modern practice of adult education: Andragogy vs. pedagogy. Chicago: Follett.

Knowles, M. S. (1990). The adult learner: A neglected species. (4th ed.) Houston: Gulf.

Knowles, M. S. (1989). The making of an adult educator: An autobiographical journey. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass.