How Adults and Children Learn (Andragogy v. Pedagogy)

Rodney Dangerfield goes Back to School (1986)

     Children, it seems, are coming full circle.  Before the fifteenth century, as Philippe Aries argued in his 1962 Centuries of Childhood,  children were thought of as small adults, less capable, perhaps;  but they dressed the same as adults, were little shielded, and began working as soon and as hard as they were able. While many of his points (such as the notion that medieval parents were detached from their young children since the children were so likely to die) have since been refuted, his central idea - that childhood is a social construct that has changed over time - is generally accepted.  Moreover, neuroscience has since provided evidence that children's brains function differently from those of adults, and that, consequently, they have different ways of learning and different learning needs (although what those ways and needs consist of is often avidly contested).  All this is taking place even as some children, at least, are imputed to have the same responsibility, autonomy, and moral capacity as adults.

     I raise these points in returning to look at assignment for the first week of the course Adult Learning, in which our class members were asked to post an image which to us embodies the differences in learning between adults and children (my semi-tongue-in-cheek contribution is above).

     There is by no means universal agreement on what the differences between adults and children as learners might be.  Malcolm Knowles, who first codified (some say popularized) the idea of specific attributes of adult learners from the 1950s on in the United States, remains influential in adult education and training circles, although he modified his ideas in the 1980s and allowed the differences might not be as strict as he once supposed.  

     One might argue that some of the differences he points out are related more to the structures of children's formal education, and to a particular kind of teaching style then prevalent, than to innate characteristics of children or adults as learners.  For example, Knowles's contention that adults choose what they will learn based on their own needs and goals, while children acceptingly learn whatever they are taught, may be true when children are enrolled in traditional schools.  But the unschooling movement has argued that children are naturally independent, self-directed learners when freed from the structures (or strictures) that characterize(d) most formal K-12 educational milieux. 

     This sets the context for "Teaching Adults:  Is is Different?" , Susan Imel's 1989 article that synthesizes several studies from the 1980s on the topic of adult learning.  While scholarship and research on adult learning have advanced since then, it is still a useful place to start.  

Imel examines some of adult learning theorist Malcolm Knowles’ assumptions, and concludes,

“Is teaching adults different? Based on the literature discussed here, the answer is both yes and no. Although teachers perceive adults as being different, these perceptions do not automatically translate into differences in approaches to teaching."

The author then turns the question on its head:

"Perhaps a better way to frame the question is to ask 'Should teaching adults be different?' "

She continues, "According to Darkenwald and Beder (1982), 'the real issue is not whether learner-centered methods are universally applied by teachers of adults, but rather for what purposes and under what conditions such methods, and others are most appropriate and effective and in fact used by teachers (p. 153).'"

     I'm not sure I agree with that assessment of what the "real" issue is.  The author never really answers the question, focusing instead on whether or not teachers teach adults differently than children in different situations, rather than whether or not they should.  The author does note, however, that “master” teachers tend to be less directive and more student-centered,  regardless of whether they teach adults or children.

      Imel maintains, “The andragogical or learner-centered approach is not appropriate in all adult education settings (Feuer and Geber 1988). The decision about which approach to use is contextual and is based upon such things as the goals of the learners, the material to be covered, and so forth..." and also notes that teachers may not have had training or the opportunity to practice learner-centered teaching.

     Imel thus focuses on whether or not teachers teach adults differently than they teach children, and ultimately sidesteps the question of whether adults and children have distinctive characteristics as learners.  At the time, the author may not have been able to gather conclusive evidence in the literature on whether adults learn differently from children.  

     In any case, what we now know about brain functioning (for example, this 2009 Stanford University study) leads us to conclude that there may well be significant differences in how children learn compared to how adults learn; but the move toward learner-centered approaches has also shown us that children can be a lot more proactive about their own learning than may have been believed in the recent past.

 

Are You Experienced? Prior Experience in Adult Learners (Attribute 3)

Adult learners are not a blank slate.  According to Malcolm Knowles, the godfather of Adult Learning theory, adults arrive at a learning situation with a wealth of experience from their work and personal lives and from the education (both informal and formal) they've received up to that point.

While adults sometimes have the reputation of being set in their ways and unwilling to try new things, this stereotype does not describe the majority of adult learners, especially when they are learning voluntarily.  And many adults have a lot of experience learning knew things - they have learned to learn.  Experienced learners can and often do share their valuable talents and experience with others in their learning situation, and everyone is enriched. One of the best things about teaching adults is the wealth of resources adult learners bring with them to the learning situation.

In a recent presentation on experience, I was struck by the phrase, "remembering that prior learning experiences may not have all been positive."   I've seen a lot of this in my encounters with young adults I taught in Camden, NJ.  They had often had problematic experiences with formal schooling - everything from indifferent teachers to, in one alternative school, physical abuse and restraints by the staff.  While these are extreme situations and the coping strategies the young adults had developed to survive them brought predictable difficulties when they entered training programs, even the common experience of garden-variety classroom humiliations and boredom can pose significant barriers when an adult returns to the classroom.

In the youth development organization I worked for, we chose a strategy of making the technology and academic instruction as un-school-like as possible so that we would not trigger negative responses in the youth.  Even so, people were ambivalent about instruction.  While they bridled at the authoritarian structures they had experienced in traditional schools, those same structures and top-down classrooms had made them dependent learners who were often initially lost or even angry when expected to take an active role in their own learning.  A large part of my work there was helping people "learn to learn."

But I've also seen a problematic attitude toward learning among the people from whom you would least expect: teachers.  Surely we can assume that the majority of those who choose teaching as a profession are good at classroom learning and "get" what school and learning is all about.

Yet during the mandatory continuing education seminars at a school where I taught, some of my fellow faculty were overheard to say "these things are a waste of time."  They brought their eye-rolling, arm-crossing attitude with them into the seminar, twiddling their cell phones, grading on the sly, and waiting for the presenter to prove to them that this one would be different.  Some participated in activities minimally and with obvious reluctance.  So here, the negative prior experience with teacher training became a barrier to their own learning, since they expected the worst from the new learning situation.

In this video, Charles Jennings boils down many theories about adult learning and explains the role of experience in adult learning using the 70-20-10 model. 

Something Is Rotten on the Internet

Have you checked your lynx?

You click in anticipation, latte at your elbow, ready to check out that sweet snowboard or finally read that tax info that's been on your to-do list all week.  But instead, you get "404 Page Not Found."  Just like that, your morning is ruined. Your smooth-functioning cosmos is disturbed, the latte goes cold, and worst of all, the website you were intending to read is now in your bad graces.  It's called link rot, and the Internet is riddled with it.

This week my Adult Learning class was asked to post links to metasites that list useful Web 2.0 tools.  (A metasite is a site that directs users to other sites.)  One of the criteria was that the metasites not be more than two years old.  Our instructor specified this partly because, at the hyperspace pace of the web, tools seem to come and go at warp speed.  But also, it's rare that even well-maintained sites can keep all their links current.  The longer the site is up, the greater the chance it will experience "link rot," or the presence of links that return a 404 error or otherwise no longer reach their intended target.

How serious is the problem? National Public Radio's Stopping Link Rot notes that "half of the links were dead already in Supreme Court opinions." They report that for the Harvard Law Review, 70 percent of the links were dead. The content the links go to can also be changed, which might mislead users who click on the links.  This could have serious consequences not only for law, but for fields like medicine.

The situation is equally grave in the sciences:  According to the website Journalists' Resource, one study showed the average lifespan of a hyperlink in scientific articles was 9. 3 years, yet only 63 percent of the articles had been archived.  

How do you combat this insidious rot that turns away users and lessons the value of your page?  "The Growing Problem of Internet "Link Rot" and Best Practices for Online and Media Publishers"  gives extensive guidelines for preventing link rot.  On their own site, which has over 10,000 links, Journalists' Resource says 10 or more links a week break.  Links for academic articles fare no better. 

A casual blogger is not likely to run a plug-in, WordPress extension or other bad-link-detecting aid, but we can still adopt some of the best practices that Journalists' Resource recommends:

1.  Add only essential links.  The fewer links you have, the less likely they are to break.
2. Keep links clearly visible, linking text of two to five words and distinguishing them by color and style.  Avoid linking longer and one-word texts.
3. Make sure the text you are linking clearly indicates what the user will find if she clicks.  Don't use URLs, or words like "this link," "click here" and so on.  Don't "stack" links, placing them one after another in a sentence with no break in between.   Consider using hover text that appears when readers mouse over, but do it consistently if you opt for this method.
4. Whenever possible, link to stable URLs and link to reliable sites that are not likely to change.  Established databases at universities and government agencies, academic papers with DOI (digital object identifier) numbers, perma.cc (a service that archives content and assures link stability) WebCite (an on-demand archiving service) and permalinks rather than shortlinks are good choices.
5. Journalists' Resource recommends whenever possible linking to web pages rather than pdfs.
6. Try to look for a "clean" URL that is stable with no extra characters.  URLS with ?, % and other symbols can be problematic, and the longer the URL the greater the chance it will go bad.
7. Avoid link shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl) unless you are tweeting.
8. Don't link through paywalls or in ways that could violate copyright.
9. Check your links after you post and again from time to time.  If you publish on the web a lot, use plug-ins, extensions, or other tools that check links automatically.
10. Prevent your website from contributing to link rot by using URLs with safe characters, creating landing pages for .pdfs that you post, and set up redirect pages when you change the organization of your site.
    (See more tips and details at Journalists' Resource's best practices article.)

Taking the health of your links seriously is one of the steps toward taking your own content seriously.  Be considerate of people who visit your site, and protect your reputation, by ensuring the content you link to will be available for users who may depend on it.

Tips for Online Students Working on Group Projects | Drexel Online

Since Adult Learning is my first all-online asynchronous class, I thought I'd post some tips provided courtesy of Drexel University in Philadelphia.  Apart from the obvious ones, like identifying what project activities you need to do and setting deadlines for them, or dividing up the work according to the group members' strengths, there are some not-so-obvious ones - like "choose group members with similar schedules or time zones."  I think the tips about scheduling and how to save time are particularly germane to the challenges faced by adult learners.
I've provided the link to the infographic below for your edification:

Tips for Online Students Working on Group Projects | Drexel Online

Roots of the term Andragogy in the U.S.

(images from Andragogy.net)
Researching the history of the concept of andragogy, or principles of adult education, for an assignment for a course in Adult Education I'm taking in the MAIT program at Richard Stockton College of NJ,  I came across the German website Andragogy.net, which published images of what may be the first use of the term, in 1833 by the German teacher Alexander Kapp, whose book Platon’s Erziehungslehre (Plato’s Educational Ideas) I have reproduced above.  

I wanted to try to trace the use of the term in English and go into a little more detail than our assignment requires here in this blog.  Remarkably, "andragogy" does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, although it has been in use in print in English at least since 1968 and became more widely known in 1970 with the publication of Knowles's The Modern Practice of Adult Education: Andragogy vs. Pedagogy (New York: Association Press).

Digging a bit further, the earliest work I was able to find by Knowles is his 1950 Informal Adult Education; A Guide for Administrators, Leaders, and Teachers (Association Press), which is available online.  An electronic search of the text shows that Knowles appears not to have used the term in his 1950 publication.  However, according to Jost Reichmann, creator of the Andragogy.net website, Knowles himself recounts how he met Yugoslavian educator Dusan Savicevic at a conference in 1967.  Savicevic introduced Knowles to the term, and according to Reichmann, Knowles first published the term in his 1968 article, "Andragogy vs. Pedagogy."  We can learn more about the development of Knowles's thought in his 1989 autobiography, The Making of an Adult Educator:  An Autobiographical Journey (Jossey-Bass).

In any case, according to Reichmann, the term first appeared in German in 1833, reappeared in Germany in the 1920s, and then again in the 1950s in Switzerland, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and Germany before Knowles spread its use in the English-speaking world.

"If I Told You Once, I Told You a Thousand Times" - Turnitin Buys Automated Writing Feedback Company Lightside Labs

Sisyphus, detail of Tartarus [Tantalus],
Abraham Dircksz Santvoort, 1668
Etching.  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.collect.170486

Anyone who's had to grade student papers in any subject has had the experience, new each semester (or in the worst case, new each assignment) of repeating the same writing pointers and making the same corrections over and over.  It can make you feel like Sisyphus, the king of Greek mythology condemned to roll a boulder uphill over and over, forever.

Over (and over) the years I've tried various timesavers - group instruction given ahead of time, seeding writing pointers into the assignment instructions, videos, posting info on the web, going over paper drafts ex post facto with the whole class or individually.  I've constructed a word file of my greatest hits and checked the ones that applied to the paper at hand. I've sung, I've danced, I've threatened, I've assigned The Elements of Style, but the boulder keeps rolling back down.

The online grading and anti-plagiarism giant  Turnitin.com recognized the Sisyphean quality of grading papers when it introduced its Grademark tool, which provides a pre-loaded set of comments addressing the most common issues in student writing, and allowing instructors to add their own favorites.

But what about an ounce of prevention?  What if students could get feedback on that stuff and leave me free to edit for structure, concept, logic, flow, or, God help us, content?

Enter LightSide Labs, Turnitin.com's recent acquisition.  Lightside Labs' Revision Assistant, like other tools such as Pearson Writer, and Turnitin's own Writecheck for students, provides automated feedback on student writing.  According to Turnintin.com, the recently-founded (2013) Lightside bears an impressive pedigree.

"The company has been supported by grants and contracts from major organizations in education, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. LightSide [is] based on machine learning and natural language processing research from Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute."

 How good is it? Can it really work? According to Turnitin, "This feedback is trained on the behavior of real instructors and provides personalized, positive, and constructive support for student writers." Of course this begs several questions, one of which is, which instructors? What behavior?
More to come as I investigate over the next week or so....

Learning to Learn, Learning to Trust

“Don’t be afraid to ask for help.” The trainee looks at me skeptically. He’s applying a CSS stylesheet to a five-page website, the penultimate assignment of his technology training.
“You can ask me, or someone else- there are lots of resources!” I say.

He’s bright. His work is good. But he’s frustrated, staring at the screen, clenching his fists. He’s building a tricky page, so I suggest we consult the web department about the best strategy for coding it. He rejects this. “I’ll figure it out.”

For days he refuses help, goes it alone. It seems simple enough – just ask! Yet he doesn’t. Finally, standing in the Hopeworks kitchen over a slice of fresh-baked bread, he confesses, “I don’t want them to think I can’t do it by myself.” He’s worried if he asks for help, he won’t be considered for an internship. He’s afraid of being seen as weak.

At Hopeworks, one of the most important skills Camden youth develop is “Learning To Learn.” That is, we believe any trainee can learn to learn and grow on their own. Hopeworks teaches and nurtures initiative, active ownership of learning, and resourcefulness. Part of this is knowing when to ask for help, and this is especially difficult for many of our youth.

Why is it so hard? We all know elderly folks who fall trying to do their own painting or cleaning, young people who refuse to ask for assistance until it’s too late. But a more revealing question is, “What happened?” If we stop asking “Why won’t you ask?” and instead ask “What happened to you that not asking for help makes sense?” we begin to see that for many people – the ones we label “stubborn,” “proud,” or even “fiercely independent” — there is a deeper, more troubling possibility: attachment avoidance.

Attachment avoidant individuals make up a fairly high percentage (approximately 30%) of people with intrafamilial violence or other serious trauma. They have experienced a deep, traumatic violation of trust or traumatic loss, often during childhood. Some of their defensive patterns include:

• Relying on deactivation of attachment as strategy to cope with attachment-related distress
• Shifting attention away from events or feelings that would trigger the attachment system or painful emotions and memories of attachment figures (such as childhood loss of a parent or sibling through death, divorce or incarceration)
• Idealizing even undeserving parents or other caregivers as a way of preserving a positive perception of them
• “Minimizing emotional meaning of traumatic events and their long-term implications” using a variety of strategies such as glossing over, claiming a happy ending (“I was OK in the end”), talking around the traumatic event, intellectualizing it (“It made me stronger”), or focusing on other important issues (such as an upcoming exam or conflict with a girlfriend) as a way of diverting attention from attachment-related issues and the unmanageable emotions that accompany them.
• Being compulsively or insistently self-reliant, often stemming from a worldview that others are unreliable. Hyper-invested in presenting themselves as strong, independent, competent and normal, attachment avoidant individuals have great difficulty acknowledging the need for help and asking for help. (They can be like the trainee described above, who could not risk asking for help even in a learning environment where it was encouraged.)
• Cutting off relationships temporarily or permanently as a way of managing difficult emotions and, paradoxically, preserving the relationship (We often see this several weeks into training when sometimes trainees disappear or show sporadic attendance after a strong start – “just as it is getting good.”)

(Based on Robert T. Muller, Trauma and the Avoidant Client)

In the training room some of the effects of trauma our youth endure as residents of a violent, impoverished city emerge as this reluctance to ask for assistance. So often they say, “I’ll do it on my own.” When I first came to Hopeworks it felt like rejection. Why wasn’t I connecting with them? Was I not accessible enough? Was I approaching them the wrong way?

But after I started to get a sense of their environment — the harsh street where any sign of weakness (particularly for young men) can mean violence or death; the poverty, multiple traumas, neglect, adverse childhood events, and losses so many Camden youth experience — I started to see that, for our youth, asking for help means taking a big risk. Asking for help can mean opening oneself to remembering a time when others would not or could not help, where one was left vulnerable by those who should have helped and protected. For many youth, asking for help can feel like exposing weakness. It can make them feel vulnerable. And yet, this vulnerable space is the space of opportunity and the opening for change and growth. At Hopeworks it is our job to make a space where youth can safely experience their own vulnerability as they take risks to learn.

Studying avoidant attachment in our staff study group has opened my eyes and led me to interpret youth’s rejection of help not as a reflection on my training style but rather as an aspect of the experience of living and working in Camden. I’m starting to understand what a risk it represents for so many of our youth to make the leap and ask for help. I’m seeing how essential it is to provide a place – and to build a community – where they can feel safe to do so. This means we must engage the emotions that are evoked when people engage in learning. These emotions can be powerful and can make learning, and the change that comes from it, feel unsafe. So in a real way, for Hopeworks youth, learning to learn means learning to trust.

How does it make you feel to ask for help?

This post was originally published in the Hopeworks 'n Camden blog.  Hopeworks is a youth development organization that uses technology training and employment opportunities to partner with young men and women to achieve their dreams.