What is Heutagogy?
Education has traditionally been seen as a pedagogic relationship between the teacher and
the learner. It was always the teacher who decided what the learner needed to know, and
indeed, how the knowledge and skills should be taught. In the past thirty years or so
there has been quite a revolution in education through research into how people learn,
and resulting from that, further work on how teaching could and should be provided.
While andragogy (Knowles, 1970) provided many useful approaches for improving
educational methodology, and indeed has been accepted almost universally, it still has
connotations of a teacher-learner relationship. It may be argued that the rapid rate of
change in society, and the so-called information explosion, suggest that we should now
be looking at an educational approach where it is the learner himself who determines
what and how learning should take place. Heutagogy, the study of self-determined
learning, may be viewed as a natural progression from earlier educational methodologies - in particular from capability development
- and may well provide the optimal approach to learning in the twenty-first century
Rogers (1951) also suggests that learning is natural “like breathing” and that it is an
internal process controlled by the learner.
http://epubs.scu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1147&context=gcm_pubs
The world is no place for the inflexible, the unprepared, and the ostrich with head in
sand, and this applies to organisations as well as individuals. Capable people are more
likely to be able to deal effectively with the turbulent environment in which they live by
possessing an ‘all round’ capacity centred on self-efficacy, knowing how to learn,
creativity, the ability to use competencies in novel as well as familiar situations and
working with others.
Topic Author
