What is andragogy, and how might the approach help in teaching FYC?

Andragogy is the theory and practice around teaching adult learners. It focuses more on student-driven learning and evaluation than traditional pedagogy. According to the principles of Malcolm Knowles, adults need to know why they are learning something. Relevance has more importance, according to him, in adult comprehension and retention than it does with child learners.

Personally, I am teaching a mixture of adults and “children,” though even the youngest among them seems to benefit from finding relevance and connection to the material. Legally, they are all adults, but in one section I have quite a few students who are well into their late 20s and up to 40. These students have different motivations (to improve their career prospects, to right some wrong, to truly learn a new craft) than my freshmen who are generally more angled toward having the “college experience.” In this way, the older students actively seek to understand why they are learning something. While the idea of relevance is helpful when teaching my younger students, they are still accustomed to learning-because-my-teacher-says-so. They are straddling the divide of secondary education, where grades were the goal over knowledge and even skill. But this doesn’t mean relevance is any less valuable in teaching them, only that the approach is different.

I’m interested, then, in how to bridge this gap. Traditionally, a classroom would not have such a broad range of ages. While their needs are the same, their methods of acquiring knowledge and patience with the material are vastly different. For example, this past week in class I showed a commercial involving a Brady Bunch reference. There was a big discrepancy in the analysis of the commercial based on the generational gap, and what I noticed was that my adult learners were interested in discussing the importance of time-relevant advertising and age-appropriate references, but my younger students would barely engage. Even the conversation about the conversation was not relevant to them. I noticed that the younger they are, the less they think age will come. Would this happen in a classroom of all freshmen? Or, conversely, of all people in their 40s? What connects students, age or stage of life (which are not the same thing)?

Andragogy certainly addresses the immediacy of non-traditional learning needs, the fact that adults have a different perspective on learning because they have a wider perspective on life. This is why it surprises me that much of the scholarship around andragogy focuses on the need for relevance, where I often think that adult learners are more able to see the scope of relevance as wider. They can find their connection to the material without quite so much guidance from the teacher.

Regardless of these inquiries, I’m definitely invested in the idea of student-driven learning. I think it’s one of the most important skills taught at the undergraduate level. One’s education becomes one’s own responsibility, and that’s invaluable at any age, in any classroom.