The Theory Of Education And Constructivism - 1587 Words

Two of the more prevalent theoretical frameworks used in education are constructivism and andragogy. Savicevic (1991) points out that the popularity of andragogy has spread among practitioners and researchers in many countries, including Hungary, England, Finland, France, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, and Russia (as quoted in Chan, 2010, p. 28). Constructivism, on the other hand, has become, as O’Neil (1992) observes, â€Å"a new catchword† among educators (as quoted in Oxford, 1997, p. 37). This view of education has come to dominate educational literature, according to Fox (2001), at least in Anglo-Saxon countries (p. 23) and has become one of the leading theoretical positions in education (Alt, 2015, p. 50). The ubiquity of these†¦show more content†¦In fact, it can be asserted that the principal tenets of andragogy are certainly consonant with the theory of constructivism. Further, Buchanan and Smith (1998) go so far as to state unambiguously, â⠂¬Å"Andragogy, the Freirian approach, and Tennant and Pogson’s (1995) processes all advocate practices in university classrooms that would effectively model constructivism† (p. 63). Knowles (1973) encapsulates his beliefs about andragogy in quite constructivist terminology, â€Å"As an individual matures, his need and capacity to be self-directing, to utilize his experience in learning, to identify his own readinesses to !earn, and to organize his learning around life problems, increases steadily from infancy to pre-adolescence, and then increasingly rapidly during adolescence† (p. 43). Andragogy emphasizes that adult learners need to know the purpose for learning something and that the facilitator must be involved in boosting the awareness level of the learners by offering them actual or simulated experiences in which â€Å"learners discover for themselves the gaps between where they are now and where they want to be† (Knowles, Holton, Swanson, 2011, p. 63). This fits well with the constructivist view that posits teachers as facilitators of learning, rather than transmitters of data, who present the learner experiences that bring to light inconsistencies