History

      Malcolm Knowles was born on August 24, 1913 in Livingston Montana. His parents were Dr. Albert Dixon and Marian Straton Knowles. Knowles graduate from West Palm Beach High school in West Palm Beach Florida. With a scholarship in hand, Knowles attended Harvard University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934. While attending Harvard, Knowles met Hulda Fornell whom he married in 1935 while working with the National Youth Administration in Massachusetts.

      Six years after Harvard, Knowles moved to Boston to become the Director of Adult Education for the YMCA. In 1943 he was drafted and he served in the US Navy for three years. In 1946, Knowles moved to Chicago to work with the YMCA in the same role he held in Boston. While working at the YMCA, Knowles began working on his Master degree. It was at this time, and with guidance from his advisor and a leader in adult education at the time Cyril O. Houle, Knowles began to discover the difference between being a teacher and being a facilitator of knowledge.

       After receiving his Master’s degree in 1949, Knowles continued his education at the University of Chicago in pursuit of his PhD. After receiving his PhD in 1959, Knowles accepted a tenured position with Boston University as an associate professor. Knowles stayed with Boston University for 14 years before becoming a Department of Education Faculty member with Carolina State University where he worked until retiring in 1974. However, after retiring, Knowles stayed busy in the education field into the 1990’s teaching at Fielding Graduate University and the University of Arkansas. On November 27, 1997, Knowles died from a stroke in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

 

Throughout Knowles’s career he wrote of 230 articles and 18 books including:

 

-Informal Adult Education: A Guide for Administrators, Leaders, and Teachers

-The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species, Self-Directed Learning: A Guide for Learners and Teachers

-The Adult Education Movement in the United States

-The Modern Practice of Adult Education: From Pedagogy to Andragogy

-Andragogy in Action: Applying Modern Principles of Adult Education

-Using Learning Contracts

-The Making of an Adult Educator: An Autobiographical Journey.

 

All of these books and articles continue to play a significant role in every Adult education programs today.

 

Theory

       Malcolm Knowles is best known as the father of andragogy in the United States. Andragogy is the art and science to help adults learn. Andragogy is based on six principles. The six principles are: the learner’s need to know, the self-concept of the learner, the prior experience of the learner, the learner’s readiness to learn, the learner’s orientation to learning, and the learner’s motivation to learn. As shown in the chart, there are factors that affect the learning in any giving situation causing the learner to behave more or less like the 6 principles.  

       Since the early 1970, when Knowles first introduced andragogy, andragogy has been extensively critiqued and analyzed to determine what it actually is. Is andragogy a set of guidelines, a philosophy, just a set of assumptions, or a theory? Regardless, andragogy is an attempt to change learning for adults from subject or teacher-centered learning to a learner-centered teaching style. Andragogy moves us from being teachers to facilitators of knowledge. According to Knowles (1990) “andragogy presents core principles of adult learning that in turn enable those designing and conducting adult learning to build more effective learning processes for adults”.  

       In addition to, or it may be more accurate to say in support of, andragogy, Knowles is known for the use of learning contracts. Learning contracts are designed to engage the learner in self-directed learning by taking charge of their learning and to effectively communicate their plan and goals to the facilitator. According to Knowles (1990), there are 8 steps to develop a learning contract. The 8 steps include:

1-Diagnose your learning needs – A learning need is defined by the gap between where the learner is and where the learner will be in the end.

 

2-Specify your learning objective – Each learning need will need to have a learning objective on what you will learn to fill the gap.

 

3-Specify learning resources and strategies – How will you accomplish your learning objective.

 

4-Specify evidence of accomplishment – how will you know that you accomplished your learning objective.

 

5-Specify how the evidence will be validated – specify the criteria that will be used to determine the evidence of the accomplishment is accurate.

 

6-Review your contract with consultants – Review with peers to for their reaction to the contract, get suggestions on what to change or keep.

 

7-Carry out the contract – Do what you said you would do. Keep in mind that as you work the contract may require changes.

 

8-Evaluate your learning – Assurance that you have in fact learned what you set out to learn.

 

Synthesis

       As I synthesize the above information, I think about the questions that drove me to begin my journey to get my Master’s degree in adult education. These questions where, what is the best way to teach adult, how can I tell if the training is being transferred, and what is the Learner’s responsibility during the learning? I use to teach the adult learners as children. I would plan the lesson around the information I had to give them. The exercises, if there were any, were heavily guided in that the learners were told what to do and were expected to follow the direction. When I was first introduced to Knowles, I immediately began to understand how I was to meet the learner’s needs.

The first step is creating the learning environment. One that is more informal and open to the learner’s past experiences. As a facilitator of knowledge, we must show respect for them and the experiences they bring with them. As the class progresses, we need to support them as they explore past experiences and link those experiences to the current learning. Additionally we need to be able to diagnose their learning needs. We can do this by involving them in the planning of their own learning and make learning a mutual responsibility between the learner and the facilitator. Finally, by using their experience we create problem areas to learn from and not subject areas to study.