Creating an Andragogy for Adult Learning Advantage

Introduction

The great educator, E.L. Boyer (1997) in his Scholarship Reconsidered, provided a perspective on the goal of teaching that can serve to inform the goal of creating adult learning advantage. Boyer stated that teaching should, ‘‘…create a common ground of intellectual commitment...[and] stimulate active, not passive, learning and encourage students to be critical, creative thinkers, with the capacity to go on learning after their college days are over’’ (p. 24).

Adult learners tend to have different characteristics than traditional learners (Rabourn, BrckaLorenz & Shoup, 2018; Knowles, 1978, 1980). Adult learning advantage can be achieved if an institution adopts an educational philosophy that addresses these characteristics though the adoption of a model of learning that is student-centered and aims to produce student agency, that is, autonomous and self-determined learners. To achieve the greatest adult learning advantage, the ability to direct one’s own learning, it is important to deliver instruction in a way that integrates knowledge, cognitive and behavioral skills in active learning exercises. The design of learning activities for this type of adult learning requires a unique andragogy, a teaching philosophy and methodology with a sound theoretical foundation that addresses the unique characteristics of the adult learner.

The genesis of an andragogy for adult learning advantage must be nested in the deliberations of a school or department as it engages in reflection about the best way to educate its students. This is a process many institutions may go through for accreditation and the culmination of this exercise should produce a cohesive educational philosophy that defines and guides both instruction and assessment. It is the perspective of this chapter that the institutional educational philosophy needs to be focused on producing student agency in learning by addressing the unique features of adult learners as well as incorporating what is known about student learning from the learning sciences.

Once an institutional educational philosophy is created, the next phase of andragogy specification for agency involves translating the educational philosophy into a learning model that will integrate teaching and learning, assessment and student support. This chapter will aim to show how the process of defining an andragogy that supports adult learning agency requires the development of an integrated learning model that incorporates an understanding of adult student learning and how student support personnel, faculty and a learning management system (if one is used) will work in concert to promote student agency and success.

The lynchpin of efforts to produce adult student agency is a learning environment where student efforts to learn interact with the learning and assessment activities developed from the institutional educational philosophy. This learning environment, or educational interface, is the instantiation of the institution’s goal to produce students who are agentic, i.e., self-directed and intrinsically motivated to learn.

Figure 1 below is a basic schematic of a process for developing an educational interface that affords active learning and assessment activities that interact with adult student learning characteristics to produce student agency.

Figure 1.

Schematic of process for developing an andragogy for student agency

The process begins by translating the institutional educational philosophy into an integrated learning model that is comprised of a standard teaching methodology that addresses basic human needs thought to be critical to the development of agentic students and an integrated support system focused on student success. This integrated learning model is used to produce active learning and assessment activities that become the educational interface with which students interact in their efforts to learn. The interface of student-centered learning and assessment activities and adult learning characteristics produces affordances for students to develop agentic learning strategies which will serve them in all their learning endeavors.