Andragogy
Andragogy is the theory and practice of facilitating adult learning, emphasizing learners’ experience, autonomy, readiness, and goals.
Self-directed learning: A learning process in which people take initiative in diagnosing needs, setting goals, choosing resources, and evaluating outcomes. Andragogy treats learners’ growing capacity to direct their own learning as a central assumption.
Problem-based learning: An instructional approach in which learners develop knowledge by investigating complex, authentic problems. Real problems let adults connect new learning to needs they recognize in work and life.
Alexander Kapp: A German educator who used the term “andragogy” in an 1833 book about Plato’s educational ideas. Kapp’s early use gives the term a nineteenth-century origin before its later American revival.
Pedagogy: The theory and practice of teaching, historically associated with the education of children. The contrast with pedagogy shaped andragogy’s claim that adult learning calls for distinct assumptions.
Adult education: Organized learning undertaken by adults outside or alongside initial schooling. Andragogy informs the design and facilitation of many adult-education programs.
Experiential learning: Learning through reflection on direct experience, often organized as a cycle of action, reflection, conceptualization, and testing. Adults’ accumulated experience supplies material for learning and can be examined through reflection.
Project-based learning: An instructional approach organized around sustained inquiry and the creation of a meaningful product or presentation. Projects give adult learners a concrete purpose for applying knowledge and exercising autonomy.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy: A German thinker who promoted the term “andragogy” in adult education during the 1920s. His work helped bring the term into discussions of organized adult education.
Heutagogy: An approach to learning that emphasizes learners’ capacity to determine both what and how they learn. Heutagogy pushes learner autonomy further than many versions of andragogy.
Workplace learning: Learning that occurs through or in connection with work, including formal training and informal practice. Workplace learning often addresses immediate adult goals and draws on existing job experience.