Navigating the liminal space between pedagogy and andragogy: Coordination and management of professor-student communication.

摘要

Malcolm Knowles used the term pedagogy to refer to the "art and science of teaching children," and argued that many of the existing pedagogical models did not apply to the different ways adults learn and ought to be taught. Alternatively, Knowles advocated andragogy, a prescriptive theory of adult education. While there is considerable literature on both pedagogy and andragogy, little has been explored regarding human development from one to the other; this project begins to fill that gap. I conceptualize the territory between pedagogy and andragogy with the help of Victor Turner's notion of liminal space, a "betwixt and between" region of growth and transformation. This was an exploratory, descriptive study designed to address the research question, "What are the patterns of communication enacted in dyadic conversations where professors are attempting to foster student development from pedagogy to andragogy?" Specifically, I researched conversations where there was an attempt to encourage students to be more personally responsible, more internally motivated, more self-directed, or to redefine the student-professor relationship as less authoritarian and more collaborative and mutual. I collected data from 9 participants who recalled the context and turns in such conversations, and then recruited their conversational partner to join this study. A total of 12 conversations were collected from 18 participants in paired interviews. The primary theoretical model framing this study and providing the data analysis heuristics was the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). In my interpretations and conclusions, I detail some of the interactional logics that seem to underlie andragogical and pedagogical positions, develop a vocabulary that begins to name and describe some of these conversational patterns, and then identify some of the strategies used to invite, accept, or resist student development toward more andragogical positions. Further, I begin to identify patterns of communication that may indicate conversational and relational turning points (or bifurcation points) and describe some of what is done by interlocutors in those moments to attempt to navigate through the liminal space between pedagogy and andragogy.;KEY WORDS: communication education, instructional communication, social construction, student development, higher education, social psychology.