By Carmel Tse/November, 2019
University of Maryland LDT 100 Project

In the 1990s, I was a news editor and subsequently systems integrator in news technology. The internet hadn’t exploded yet, but newspapers were losing readers and we sensed that the worst had yet to come. There were two schools: those who believed whoever owned the printing press would remain mighty; and my group who thought we were moribund unless something drastically happened.

Informal learning

To strive, we set out to learn everything new, mostly at the annual Nexpo convention organized by the Newspaper Association of America. It was a newspaperman’s theme park where vendors would teach everything new at pitching bouts and after-hour parties. Where alcohol flowed free, learning better be informal and they were. Foods and drinks were extrinsic learning motivations, although details were usually lost due to cognitive overload and high blood alcohol concentration. In reflection, it’s behaviorism in practice and Nexpo 2008 was the last in history.

Formal learning

Fast forward to 2015, I was learning to become a driver education instructor at Toronto’s Humber School of Transportation, a teacher’s college for the industry. Although as systems integrator, I had delivered corporate training at more than 20 daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, it was at Humber that I started to receive formal training on andragogy.

Professor William Pollock introduced to the class theories of rapport building, inclusions, rubrics and in particular leveraged on the different backgrounds of my cohorts. Pollock successfully took advantages of our diverse experiences and made us construct parts of a driver education curriculum using our previous knowledge.

In reflection, he connected his teaching and infused upon us, Malcom Knowles’s theories on the five assumptions of andragogy:

Self concept

Adult learning experience

Readiness to learn

Orientation to learning

Motivation to learn

References:

Pappas, C. (2017, July 20). The Adult Learning Theory - Andragogy - of Malcolm Knowles. https://elearningindustry.com/the-adult-learning-theory-andragogy-of-malcolm-knowles Retrieved 2019, Nov. 4