Heutagogy: A Child of Complexity Theory

Abstract

One of the great joys of being an academic is that you get to play in the world of ideas and words. It is like being invited to get into your favourite sandpit every day and fool around and see what happens. One of the problems with this, however, is that sometimes people ask you to explain the curious sand-castle you built or that odd looking shape in the corner. As those of you who have a psychological interest might know, the psychoanalytically minded in the profession make a lot of what we do in sand pits and the things we create. They are a very symbolically minded lot. We mention this because what follows is very much a child of our bias, world view, experience and, perhaps, deep unconscious. Chris is an educator, researcher and consultant known for his work in education and culture through his book, 'More than G'day'. Stewart is, variously, an academic, consultant, trainer, psychologist, and psychotherapist. Both of us had been interested for a while in complex adaptive systems and had played a lot with the systems thinking of Bertanafly (1950), Ackoff and Emery (1972), Fred Emery (1971–1986), and Emery and Trist (1965), for example. For the most part they conceptualised the differential nature of environments and how systems and environment could influence each other. Bertanafly, in particular, challenged the notion that systems are always seek-ing equilibrium and do in fact adapt to external change. Complexity Theory 112 Heutagogy seemed to us to be a natural progression to this theoretical development, in tune with the functioning of the modern world. More importantly, given our interest in learning, a number of complexity theorists had already pointed out its implications for learning (e.g., Davis and Sumara 1997; Doll 1989; Doolittle 2000). The notions of change or learning and bifurcation as being natural phenomena that result from stress on the system was particularly appealing. As educators, and me as a psychologist and psychotherapist, it had become obvious to us (and many constructivists around the globe I am sure) that people only change in response to a very clear need. This usually involves distress such as confusion, dissonance, and fear or a more positive motive such as intense desire. The satiated and the comfortable are less likely to make a behavioural change no matter what others may desire and we'll come back to this later in relation to teacher-centred approaches to learning. We also like to make the distinction between knowledge and skill acquisition and learning. We see these as quite different processes. Knowl-edge and skills or competencies can be acquired and even reproduced. But this is not learning at a deeper cognitive level. Learning is an integrative experience where a change in behaviour, knowledge, or understanding is incorporated into the person's existing repertoire of behaviour and schema (values, attitudes and beliefs). For example, it is possible to acquire a set of competencies that one can repeat in familiar or known circumstances. However, if learning has taken place, competencies can also be repeated and even adapted in unfamiliar, unanticipated situations. Against this background it appeared to us that there were some deficien-cies with the existing notions of pedagogy and andragogy. While Malcolm Knowles (Knowles 1970) contributed greatly to our understanding of the limitations of pedagogy when it came to adult learning by defining andra-gogy, we thought that andragogy did not go far enough. Any examination of learning experiences and curricula designed around andragogical principles certainly demonstrated the capacity for linking into the adult experience and recognised the advantages of self-directed learning. However, curricula were still very much teacher-centric with little opportunity for any real involve-ment at a micro or even macro level by the learner. So, over a bottle of a nice crisp white wine one cold Canberra evening, Chris and I described the notion of self-determined learning that best de-scribed an extension to pedagogy and andragogy. Chris eventually came up with the term heutagogy, which is derived from the ancient Greek for 'self' with some adjustments and the 'agogy' added. Heutagogy is concerned with learner-centred learning that sees the learner as the major agent in their own learning, which occurs as a result of personal experiences. The teacher might think that he or she can control the learning experience but