Dear Jeremy and Terry,
Right you are -- andragogy -- a word I did not know. I've found usages dating back to the late 1800s, but the Oxford English Dictionary has not yet caught up. You might send them some exemplars.
But it is not entirely the case that universities ignore the issues involved in how to teach adults. While we called it pedagogy at the Norwegian School of Management, the work we did was focused on teaching adult learners effectively to teach themselves. In Norway, we have two clearly different words, "elev" meaning "pupil," and "student" meaning "[adult] student." We used andragogy for students, though I will admit to using the vocabulary of the OED to do it.
Here at Swinburne, we also focus on the needs of adult learners. That's what Nicki Lee and the others work with. If we lack the term, we have not ignored the concept, and we engage in serious empirical research to ensure that we develop learning and teaching for adult learners. That is certainly what doctoral education requires.
Yours,
Ken
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Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
the word and field of study for the teaching of adults is andragogy, it is a field and universities summarily ignore its findings.
Terry Love wrote:
I agree.
Andragogy has been ignored - except in some areas on university education. Andragogical approaches have been/are well established in Youth and Community Work, technology transfer, fields influenced by Liberation Theology, appropriate technology and perhaps others? I use andragogical principles as the basis for supervision of Hons, Masters and PhD students. The educational basis of andragogy seems to work much better than conventional pedagogical perspectives. I first came across it in the UK in Further Education in the early 80s in engineering, maths, robotics, and community work training and the HNC/HND levels.
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