What's Andagogy Got to Do With It?

Andragogy is technically defined as adult education, so one might think of a night school of sorts for adults. However, the idea of andragogy could be extended to a college course. We may refer to teaching college students as pedagogy, but the truth is these college students are all technically adults and will wanted to be treated as such. The best way, then, to treat college students as adults would be to think of a first-year writing pedagogy as an andragogy of sorts. Teaching college may be considered pedagogy, but pedagogy is just the manner of teaching in general. So in relation to contact zones, andragogy is more of a narrower focus on a broad subject like pedagogy. The perception of teaching a first-year composition course as a andragogy gives you a better view on how to handle your college class instead of just using pedagogy as this general class that will no doubt feel bland to the college student. You have to give your pedagogy a type of brand, or else you’ll risk making your teaching not really matter to any of these 18 and up learners who feel almost above the bland pedagogy they view as being the same level as high school. Besides, using andragogy to these college students, some of which will probably be 30 and older, so they in particular mind being treated like any child learner under a vague pedagogy. Treating your first-year writing class like a andragogy, then, will develop this relationship between you the teacher and your first-year students that as a more solid center than a broad and vague pedagogy ever would.

            Sommers’s article on the revision strategies of student writers and experienced adult writers raises an important reason for why treating your first-year writing pedagogy like an andragogy will have a more lasting effect on your students in the long run. In the end, you want any student writers to become experienced adult writers at the end of the class. By teaching them nothing but basic readings and brief assignments from a website, you aren’t really helping them with their writing experience so much as regurgitating the same pedagogical practices in the students’ mouths in a matter not unlike a bird feeding her babies. The student writers that Sommers interviewed for her article basically view their writing as more of an assignment, taking out words and replacing them with what they call better words or words that are like another well-known writer’s words. Compare those ideas to those of the experienced writers that Sommers covered, where they consider rewriting and revising not as taking out and replacing words but instead as re-writing ways of conveying their arguments, thinking about what and how they’ve written those concepts, and deconstructing the ideas as they appear in their essays. A type of andragogy, then, would be to teach these students to view their papers in the same fashion that an experienced adult writer in the field. If a student uses this one source that he or she thinks would spice up his or her paper, he or she needs to learn from the composition course how he or she can reconstruct the paper around this source while considering how the source relates to the base argument instead of cramming the source into her basic paper. The main reason why andragogy is important for first-year composition students is because students need to not have their work treated as student works but as the works of experienced adult writers. If we drill into their heads to be experienced writers who constantly evaluate their works, then students will eventually become the experienced adult writers mentioned by Sommers instead of her definition of student writers.