Week 5: What is andragogy, and how might it help to teach First Year Composition?

Andragogy is the practice of instructing adults. Adults learn in very different ways than children or teenagers, so teaching practices should be mindful of those differences. According to Malcolm Knowles’ Four Principles of Andragogy, adult learners need to be engaged in a teaching approach that considers that:

1. Adults need to be involved in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
2. Experience (including mistakes) provides the basis for the learning activities.
3. Adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life.
4. Adult learning is problem-centered rather than content-oriented.

Adults are either transitioning, or trying to transition, into a professional environment, and I think that strongly influences both how they learn and what they're interested in learning. Their motivation for learning is an internal motivation for personal success rather than the external motivation of "the teacher says so" that children often have. Adults also may be past the cognitive development stages to learn primarily through induction, so having a specific, real-world problem as context to apply course knowledge to can be an important learning tool. 

First Year Composition is a difficult thing to teach, especially because some students will respond better to pedagogy, and other students will respond better to andragogy. However, it's important that older students are labeled as "non-traditional" students, meaning that they fall outside of the needs of the general population of typical students. I really hate that my suggestion for integrating andragogy into FYC courses is so unoriginal, but problem-centered learning is a powerful tool that can appeal to older students' learning needs as well as helping younger students mature and acclimate to learning environments that closely mirror the real world. I've had several courses in the past that had students work together in groups to serve the needs of real clients in the community, and those were some of the most powerful learning experiences I've had. In a Web Publishing course, my group built a functional website to satisfy the needs of a local, non-profit organization, and that was an amazing learning experience. Because there was a genuine motivation with real consequences behind our learning and work ethic, we were much more driven, with a more personal learning motivation, to synthesize and apply course material. Albeit, our client was a nightmare client, and he never even hosted the website we built for him. Still, that was a valuable learning experience for what we might have to be prepared for in the professional world. Business projects don't always work out, and it's important to know what to expect when things fall through. We would never have learned that in a traditional approach to a Web Publishing course.