Andragogy – a forgotten science or useful principles of adult education?

The concept of one profession for life is no longer relevant: it is being replaced by lifelong learning – lifelong learning. What is andragogy and how it helps in its implementation – in the material Trends

The world has changed faster in the past 15 years than it did in the previous 100 years.

By 2010, it had created 1,5 zettabytes of information in its entire history, which is equal to 34 billion smartphones with the largest amount of memory. Based on the dynamics, by 2025 we will create 175 zettabytes of information, and this figure is difficult to express in terms of values ​​that the human brain understands.

The speed of creation and accumulation of information and its availability are changing the traditional attitude towards knowledge and learning.

There is a need to develop skills of a different order – meta-skills, who help to synthesize knowledge from different sources, connecting them with their experience and creating their own unique knowledge base as a result.

A recent conversation about andragogy in the podcast “Everything is complicated” began with the host’s question “Andra – what?”. And it’s true, it’s amazing – we all heard about pedagogy and imagine what it is, and we didn’t hear anything about the section of andragogy, this concept itself is unknown to many. Although these sciences and approaches to personality development were born at the same time. Why is that?

Traditionally, the emphasis has always been on human development, the acquisition of skills in childhood and adolescence, that is, on pedagogy. Professional development, the development of direct skills took place either through workshops and workshops for workers, or at universities for exact and humanitarian specialties, to which only selected segments of the population had access until the middle of the 1980th century. The profession, as a rule, was received at a young age and for life. In this regard, andragogy as an approach and science was not in demand until the XNUMXs.

In the 1980s, and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world went global. Companies began to enter the global market, and a huge number of people had the opportunity to enter the global labor market. The rapid development of technology has forced enterprises to change production methods, automate them, and transfer them to countries with cheaper labor. Millions of people, especially in developed countries, for the first time in their lives, are faced with instability and the need to change their activities, set of competencies and even profession in the middle of a career path. There was a need to relearn – quickly, effectively, based on practice, not theory. At this point, andragogy was born. At the same time, the American scientist Malcolm Knowles published his fundamental work “Modern practice of adult education. Andragogy versus Pedagogy”, in which he formulated the basic principles of adult education.

Now mechanical labor is increasingly performed by robots with the help of modern technologies. Одновременно с этим растет спрос в креативных областях, где нужны другие навыки и отношение к организации работы — больше самостоятельности, свободы и инноваций. Активно развиваются маркетплейсы фрилансеров: один человек часто может одновременно выполнять проекты для разных компаний, больше не связывая свою жизнь с одной организацией. Этот тренд будет развиваться и дальше.

There is a big demand from business and states for innovation and technological development in all spheres of society. All this is not done mechanically, it is creativity, discoveries, ideas, communication between specialists from different fields. In innovation, the unified actions of a large number of people will not lead to a result, but the creativity and individuality of each person matters. Более важную роль начинает играть сотрудник как субъект, его личность и индивидуальность, а не коллектив и институт.

Features of adult education

How to teach new things and retrain adults, taking into account their individuality, rich life and practical experience, attitudes, different life goals, social restrictions (little free time for study, family and work)? Modern andragogy answers these questions.

Forget how you learned in school – adults learn differently.

When we talk about learning, the key difference between adults and children is a special attitude to the past, present and future. Adults have experiences through which new information is filtered. An adult has a special attitude to the present with a number of restrictions – unlike a child, an adult needs to earn money on his own, take care of loved ones, cook food, etc. An adult makes plans differently from a child: as a rule, he has a specific vision of his future, with which he correlates any training. Accordingly, his program should be built taking into account these three components.

The learning patterns and methods you used in high school and university most likely won’t let you study successfully now. In order to build your strategy, as well as to develop harmoniously and consciously as an adult, you need to understand the key principles of andragogy.

The advantage of this science is that, having mastered its approaches, a student adult can independently build his own educational strategy and adjust it throughout his life.

How to create a learning environment that’s right for you

The first thing to understand is how you learn. To do this, you need to do the following exercises.

• Remember all your educational experience and choose from it the moments when you felt most confident, learned with pleasure and felt useful. Something that will make you want to go back there.

It is also worth remembering your negative experience and sorting it out – why was it uncomfortable to study? Why did the study fail? Evaluate not so much the content, but the formats, pace, channels through which the information was given (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). Was it more comfortable in group work or in mixed, in discussions or in an individual format, first practice, and then theory, or vice versa? Search and find some pattern.

Tip: pay attention not only to the process, but also to the events in life that you were experiencing at that moment. Was there sports in your life at that time? Which? Try to evaluate whether they have had an impact on your educational experience.

• Write down all the positive elements of the learning experience—this is your ideal learning environment. Try to recreate it. In a separate column, write down all the negative components of the educational experience – this is your worst learning environment.

Tip: if it is not possible to recreate all elements, use at least some. Think about how you can transform a negative experience into a positive one.

• Organize feedback. Knowledge is collective, but man is social. New knowledge and practices are learned only if you can discuss your progress with others.

Tip: feedback can be organized in the family, work team. You can find like-minded people on the Internet: blog, get feedback from readers or listeners, write an article or take part in a podcast, share the results on social networks. You can write to industry experts, meet someone in person at a specialized conference or business event.

• Listen to yourself and start exploring your individual characteristics.

Tip: both self-reflection practices and various available tests will help you with this.

How to define learning objectives

One of the training methods that will help you aim correctly is the Dilts Pyramid. It includes six levels of goal setting: environment, behavior, abilities, beliefs/values, identity, mission. Determine the problem you want to solve and the level in the pyramid it corresponds to. The solution to the problem is usually one or two levels higher. For example, in order to change your behavior, you need to pay attention to changes in beliefs and values.

You can read more about the method here.

Goal setting should become one of your regular practices and cause only positive emotions.

How to motivate yourself to complete the course

Motivation is the driving force behind the educational process in adults. If children can be forced to learn through discipline and instruction, then the whip method is unlikely to work with adults.

The gingerbread method is also not entirely reliable. If an adult goes through a program just to, for example, get a nice annual bonus, and does not focus on it, then it will be of little use. The carrot and stick method refers to extrinsic motivation. In the androgogical approach, it is important to be able to reveal your resource of internal motivation, use and manage it.

Motivation in learning in an adult consists of two components:

Reflect on each of these points. Ask yourself questions: what do I get from the learning process? What development area is currently in my focus? What can I share and who can I get feedback from?

How to learn to notice negative attitudes and overcome them

Cognitive attitudes are positive and negative and formed as a response to external experience. They protect the psyche from unnecessary irritations and offer ready-made thinking schemes that are guaranteed not to allow a negative experience to be repeated or, on the contrary, allow a positive one to be repeated.

For example, for many, the negative attitude “I have no predisposition to languages, so I cannot learn English” is relevant. Pay attention to how it manifests itself in behavior, notice the limitations, rephrase in a positive way.

How to enjoy the learning process

In pedagogy, great importance is attached to the results of the educational process and its assessment – remember all kinds of exams, tests, tests, tests. Surely, you sometimes had the feeling that you were studying not for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of an exam, after which everything was safely forgotten.

One of the most important principles of andragogy is to pay equal attention to both the results and the process, as well as enjoying it and tracking changes in attitudes, attitudes and values ​​in real time, and not after the completion of training.

This will allow you to instantly correlate the educational experience with real life, correct the process and receive positive emotions that positively affect the memorization and comprehension of information.

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