“It took me about 10 years to work out how to pronounce pedagogy. So when I discovered there were lots of different gogy’s my heart sank. Would my career last long enough to master saying all of them?”
That was my first thought as I read Colin Jones “How to teach entrepreneurship”. My second thought was, “wow, this is brilliant, why haven’t I seen this before”.
Colin’s framing suggests a transition in the way that we, as educators, approach the student’s learning. In Pedagogy the educator (or at school level a higher body) sets the learning objectives and creates the resources for the student learning, through lectures, set readings and other activities. Therefore, the student is not required to be self-actuated in their approach, they just need to follow the process, or attend the lectures (or a subset if the assessment is designed to test a subset of the knowledge). With Andragogy the educator sets the learning objectives, but the way to achieve these is defined by the student, which allows them to have greater autonomy around how they learn.
Colin Jones’s book is on entrepreneurship – and to be a successful entrepreneur you also need to define your own outcomes. For one entrepreneur success may be growing a single company to 100 people, and running it sustainably until you retire. For another it may be setting up and selling companies on, and then starting again, each time creating a new business, in a new area, success maybe in the breadth of learning that comes with each new initiative. For a third it maybe about creating companies that are “for good” and approaching this in different ways may be the purpose, from running B-Corps to community companies. To prepare students for this world of agency and negotiated success education needs to go beyond defining success and asking students to plot their own course to it, but instead define their own learning objectives as well. This form of thinking is defined as Heutagogy.
My own teaching had embraced elements of Andragogy. Checking back through my own learning materials I discovered this page from my 2017 Timber unit, the one that became “The Office”. It shows how I expect students to develop in their approach to learning. But what I love about Colin’s approach is how it goes beyond Andragogy and into Heutagogy and then makes a case for Academagogy, which blends the gogy’s and- I suspect- transitions the student through them so that as they leave University they are not only able to approach a wide range of problems, but that they are able to set the success criteria for a situation. For example, the first job they do may not be their dream job, in fact often people don’t have a dream job, but it may give them the chance to learn the skills they want, develop the network that they can utilise later, whilst also being enjoyable. Or they may set other success criteria, around flexible working (my brother-in-law recently posted on LinkedIn that setting up his own company has enabled him to surf more than ever, which it has!), community impact, salary, learning about a topic they are interested in. The list goes on.
Whilst it is easy to see how important this approach is in entrepreneurship, in a space like engineering it can feel challenging. Do we really want students setting the learning objectives? Don’t we, as lecturers and experienced engineers, know better what they need? What about professional accreditation? This is certainly a view I have held in the past, but as we will see next week, the world is changing, industry has not caught up, so we need future engineers who can redefine success, the outcomes we are working towards, and the shape of our industry. And of course, as students will cover all the gogy they still have to learn the necessary skills and attributes set out by our accrediting bodies, but they also need to know how to redefine the requirements of engineering accrediting bodies in the future, as they catch up with the world our current students are creating.
