Photograph taken in Honduras, CA and
Contributed by Fernando Carranza
The Road Less Traveled by:
The
Pedagogic Educator vs. the Andragogical Instructor
By Prof. Jonathan
Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
School of English
Faculty
of Social Sciences
Universidad
Latina de Costa Rica
Thursday, September 22,
2016
Post 295
At this point of my teaching 20-year-old
teaching career in higher education, I am still very uncertain of what it is
actually believed by many of my colleagues at the private university setting
where I have been working for the last 18 years of my faculty member life. Don’t
take me wrong since I am not saying that my partners are now knowledgeable of
what a pedagogic or Andragogical educator is and how they teach, but what is
not clear to me is how teaching, and in turn –learning-, is taking place in the
classrooms and in all courses, especially the ones at night, where the Working
adult learners abound? Are colleagues of mine still sticking to pedagogic
principles or walking the Andragogical less-traveled path in education?
Understanding that as instructors we
can find traditional students in class as well as working adult students
(WASs), professors must understand that both types of learners are coming with
different expectations to their classrooms. How content, success, learning
demands, dependence for learning, construction of learning, application of what
is learned, learning organization, and motivation manifest in the two types of
students needs to be carefully thought of and proper actions need to be chosen
to satisfy both types of learners in the construction of their knowledge,
skills, and competences. And when we faculty members analyze the principles of
horizontality and participation for WASs, we also need to make decisions to benefit
both kinds of students co-existing in our teaching scenarios as well.
Once, when talking about teaching
scenarios, Malcolm Knowles (1984) stated that the definitions of Andragogy,
pedagogy and Andragogy are not excluding one another:
"These
definitions do not imply that children should be taught pedagogically and
adults andragogically. Both terms only make a distinction between two sets of
concepts about the students; the educator who adopts one of these groups of
concepts will teach pedagogically, whether he/she works with children or with
adults; and the one who adopts the other group will do so andragogically,
whether the students are adults or children" (Knowles, 1984).
The
importance behind Knowles’s explanation is that comprehending that learners
such as WASs come to the classroom better equipped with lots of experience from
the marketplace and jobs than traditional learners. And though traditional
students may be lacking all this (workplace-related) schemata that can allow
them to see their learning differently and helping them go in different
directions while making them construct their own learning, they can also profit
from their WASs counterparts. Learning can be more engaging and fun if the
less-traveled road is walked by these two types of individuals.
To have a better understanding of both
teaching and learning scenarios, here you are presented with a chart that
typifies pedagogy, Andragogy, and where both educational theories overlap.
Several learning features are analyzed and hopefully you can come up with more
overlapping areas that can help you and peers see the importance of accepting
the challenge of teaching WASs along with traditional learners.
To
understand the principles of horizontality and participation in Andragogy and
directly linked to WASs, I would like to share –at this point- two different
situations I faced at work with a working adult students\, which I think are wonderful examples that can be used for
some good reflective teaching:
At
the higher institution where I work, I often have learners who have been
working as English teachers empirically for years. Last term I had this 45-year-old
gentleman who had been working for over 15 years as an educator. In class
discussions and during my lectures, his interventions went beyond the textbook
but into his experiences and his maturity as a seasoned language instructor who
was simply lacking his teaching degree. These are beyond any reasonable doubt
horizontality in action and its fullest expression. My student assumed his
learning process in a self-directed and self-controlled way; his maturity and
experience stood out in his construction of learning and how the new
information could be incorporated to his future teaching to better work in his
high school.
No
doubt my student demonstrated his horizontality predisposition in class, but
also showed his active and meaningful participation. His level of critical
thinking, active intervention, dialogue, interaction with peers and me, the
instructor, stood out from the crowd of neophytes intending to digest
information to become competent educators in the future. My male student showed
his horizontality and participation that increased his expectations for
learning beyond the course boundaries and the minimum requested in course
outlines at our university.
To sum up, having a good understanding
of what a WAS is can help any faculty member in many different ways as stated
in the chart shared in this blog post to travel the teaching road less traveled
by. There are overlapping areas where the traditional learner and the WAS have
a similar educational orientation, but there are other areas that are not the
same at all and deserve the instructor’s attention. And when one gets to the
horizontality and participation principles, these two kinds of learners can be
quite different and both need to be taken care in class to guide them towards
learning.
Reference
Knowles, M. (1984). The Adult Learner: A Neglected
Species (3rd Ed.). Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing.
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