Transitioning from teaching young students to adult learners can be tough for faculty. Here, Vincent Calvez and Stéphane Justeau from Essca School of Management explain the unique characteristics displayed by adult learners and propose a method for teaching them based on real-life cases and experimentation Learning over a lifetime
I t can be painful when a teacher transitions from teaching young students to adult learners, especially if they use the same methods or assume that the audiences are identical. The pain will also be felt by adults who don’t understand why they are being treated as younger students. Although they are learners, they may have been employees, or perhaps still are, just as they may have set up a company or taken over their family’s business. As a result, they have a lot to say, share and explain. Malcolm Knowles and the adult learner Since the 1970s, pedagogical literature has shown that a 20-year-old learner is not the same as a 45-year-old one. Malcolm Knowles, author of The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species , published in 1973, laid the foundations for the theory of andragogy (the art of helping adults to learn) by emphasising the specific characteristics of the adult learner. Throughout his career, Knowles devoted himself to adult education and sought to promote teaching and learning methods adapted to the specific needs of adults. He emphasised the autonomy of the adult learner and the meaning given to learning, as well as the integration and sharing of life experiences in the learning process. The Adult Learner: The Definitive Classic in Adult Education and Human Resource Development , published post-mortem in 1998, remains the definitive reference work on this subject. It has helped many teachers to design relevant and appropriate teaching activities. When we train teachers to teach adults we often hear: “Adults know what they have to learn and that’s enough”. But because learning is a highly strategic cost-benefit analysis that is often di cult to carry out, adults need to find meaning in what they are doing and in the tasks in which we ask them to participate.
12 | Ambition OCTOBER 2023
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