Motivation, relevance, prior experiences, need for a more knowledgeable other to facilitate learners in their ZPD all these are independent of age of learners. I have facilitated learners from ages 3 upto 60 in their learning. I have seen a 3 years old motivated, curious and self directed and a 60 year old who needed scaffolding. For me pedagogy has always been about how people learn not how kids/students learn. I believe that what is important while designing experiences is, to put efforts in getting to know your learners.

Kent, thanks for engaging. What you’re talking about is the curriculum, not the pedagogy. Kids need skills too: not just all those elements, but also how and when to apply them. Further, kids will learn better when it’s active, meaningful, etc. That’s what makes a foundation that sticks so it’s available as adults. Kids need knowledge and skills, and adults need knowledge and skills. Yes, there are knowledge differences, but how our brains develop these doesn’t fundamentally change as we age.

A basic kid curriculum is filled with large chunks of memorization and practice of basics: alphabets, numbers, spelling lists, parts of speech, times tables, trigonometric formulas, parts of a plant, taxonomy of mammals, addition and subtraction practice sets, handwriting (or key-boarding), and much, much more. Designing learning for kids that skips these foundations has quite disappointing results.

Once kids are adults, and have the broad foundational knowledge that should result from a well-rounded K-12 curriculum, (or remnants of it, and know how to find what they don’t remember), then learning activities can focus more on exploration and practicing the objective knowledge or skills.

Yes, humans all share common cognitive and emotional characteristics, but children and adults are different.

You’re right that in many ways pedagogy and andragogy can be construed as the same. But it’s worth noting that andragogy is a brand name, Knowles’ brand name for his theory of adult education. Andragogy is to adult education what Xerox is to photocopiers and Hoover is to vacuums.

Knowles wasn’t interested in how pedagogy and andragogy were alike. Quite the opposite. He made effort to emphasize the differences. In these ways he was as much a marketer as he was an educationist.

Though andragogy, and the whole field of adult education, is ideology Knowles called it a technology. The irony is that technology means applied science and there is no science to the field of adult education or andragogy. Since at least the days of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow adult education has been imbued with humanistic ideals. There’s a characteristic lexicon that threads through the literature of andragogy and the broader adult education field: words like independent, empowerment, voluntary, agency, respect, self-directing, self-evaluating, etc., are common punctuations. If andragogues and adult educators a US political stripe they would be progressive Democrats. In Canada they would be the New Democratic Party. In music they’d be Pete Seeger.

Pedagogy also isn’t known for its strong inclinations as a field of science. There’s much more art and craft to the field than science. In that way andragogy +AE and pedagogy are similar. But pedagogy is much less driven by global ideological ideas.

I think that pedagogy is only remotely similar to instructional design (I hate the term learning design). Talk to a middle or secondary school teacher and most won’t understand how it’s possible to ‘design’ for a subject that they don’t have some academic expertise in. They don’t grasp the idea of subject matter experts.

Secondary teacher education programs require students to have teachable subjects. They subscribe to the view that effective teaching practices necessarily lie within the structures of the subject matter. Hence they offer what are known as disciplinary methods courses. In other words, to teach science, mathematics, history etc you must learn the domain-specific methods. Thus you get people who do masters and PhD degrees in mathematics, science and English literature education. That view of education hasn’t translated to instructional design.

Part of the problem with andragogy is that it’s forever tied to Malcolm Knowles. The brand owner is long dead.

True that I didn’t cite him directly, I was pointing to specific things mentioned in an article. Also, the principles I cited were five of six he’s linked to. In addition, he ultimately changed to say both, but if he didn’t intend them to be different, why did he create a separate term instead of just suggesting what good learning is?