Plus ca change …

Good morning from Zagreb.
It’s a nice place, the people are very friendly – we struggled at the bus station yesterday and a man came and sorted us out. In the market, people were quick to help with their English when someone else didn’t have the words.
After the beers and meeting with Ana and Martina last night, I got thinking about comparisons, and what is different.
Ana and Martina were fast with technology, iPhones and phones with internet access, Facebook users and so on, yet they don’t have a functioning learning technology system to support their courses.
In a way, they are where I was ten years ago, when we barely knew what a VLE was and those that were available were very expensive, and of course content was king.
But in a way they are not – in ten years we’ve moved from content to social networking, and to Web 2.0. For a moment I lost my way and it was very tempting (or too easy) to suggest a long pathway, and then I realised that I needed to leave ten years’ experience behind and suggest something different.
It’s back to the old question: what do they (their students) have to learn, and how could they best learn it. The tools are the things that make the difference. And there are so many web-based tools.
Off shopping with Ana today, and of course more talking and thinking. There will be an evening barbecue … I’m promised that the vegetables will be delicious!

Andragogy and Knowles: Another myth?

Very much like the debate about learning styles, the myth of ‘andragogy’ continues to gather legs and has ‘an unexamined life of its own’.

The fact that it still forms part of much of the accepted framework for teacher training in the lifelong-learning sector is concerning, since like the learning styles debate, there is little empirical evidence to support the assumptions that it brings with it. At worst it creates a simplistic labelling of a complex topic, and at best an illustration of a different set of approaches to teaching strategies.

Whilst Knowles is associated with the term andragogy, the first use of the term ‘andragogik’ was used in 1833 by a German grammar school teacher, Alexander Kapp. The term was used in 1921 by German social scientist Eugen Rosenstock, in 1951 by Heinrich Hanselmann (Swiss), in 1954 by Professor ten Have (Netherlands), in 1956 Ogrizovic (Yugoslav) and in 1957 by Franz Poggeler (German). Knowles’ first work was written in 1950 and looked at informal adult education, and it was only after meeting a Yugoslav educator (Savicevic) at a conference in 1967 that Knowles began to use the term. The problem with Knowles’ work is the notion of pedagogy and andragogy as a dichotomy. Knowles defines pedagogy as ‘literally means the art and science of teaching children’ (my emphasis) by breaking the word down into its Greek roots ‘paid’ – child and ‘agogu’ – leader of. (Knowles et al. 1998; 61). Knowles then compounds the problem by defining ‘adults’ using his psychological definition ‘as being when we arrive at a concept of being responsible for our own lives, or being self-directing’ (Knowles et.al., 1998; 64). Knowles leans heavily on education as a model designed for teaching children, who act in a submissive role, and that the ‘pedagogical model is an ideological model that excludes the andragogical assumptions. The andragogical model is a set of assumptions that includes that (sic) pedagogical assumptions’ (Knowles et.al. 1998; 72). Knowles does not appear to know of the work of Vygotsky and others and of the constructivist models of learning.

The current usage of the term ‘pedagogy’ embraces the science of teaching and makes no assumptions about the nature of the person being taught. Loughran (2007; 1) makes no distinction between any group of learners in his discourses on the pedagogy of teacher education, but talks of gaining ‘a deep understanding of practice through researching practice’ (Loughran, 2007). Entwhistle (1981) focuses on learning, rather than teaching, as does Biggs (2003) and Richardson (2000). Marton’s work (in Entwhistle and Tomlinson 2007) ‘Towards a Pedagogical Theory of Learning’, and Vermunt’s work on the influence of teaching and learning environments to influence student learning are far more illustrative, and all focus on the variation theory of learning, more specifically ‘ways of seeing things differently’ which is what all teachers and trainers are trying to do. What lies behind the problems that many of us have is time, funding and the problematic nature of the curriculum that we are forced to deliver.

Whilst Knowles’ work is problematic from the assumptions that he makes (much of his writing is a tautology since he relies too heavily on his previous writings) there is a lack of credible or empirical evidence to support his approach. The appealing nature of his work is that it makes simple a complex set of contradictory frameworks, and many teacher trainers have fallen into the trap of delivering these as a given to another generation of trainee teachers without challenging the assumptions. There is always something appealing about describing our own sector as being ‘different and needing a different approach’, but it would be more useful in looking at the needs of the learner and what it is they have to learn rather than categorising sectors into boxes. Models of teaching and learning are just as appropriate to young people as to adults and to say that children or adults can only be taught in one way is concentrating on teaching, rather than asking ‘how can I help them to learn better?’

References

Biggs, J., (2006) Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2nd EDN) The Society for Research into Higher Education & OU Press, Maidenhead.

Entwhistle, N., & Tomlinson, T., (Eds) (2007) Student learning and university teaching British Journal of Educational Psychology – Monograph series II, British Psycjhological Society, Leicester.

Knowles, M., Holton III, E., & Swanson, R. The Adult Learner: The definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development (6th Edn.) Elsevier, Burlington MA.

Richardson, J., (2003) Researching Student learning ) The Society for Research into Higher Education & OU Press, Maidenhead.

Russell, T., & Loughran, J., (2007) Enacting a Pedagogy of Teacher Education, Routledge, Oxford. Keywords: andragogy, Knowles, pedagogy

(first posted at http://eduspaces.net/trangwales/weblog/196773.html – September 22 2007)