RoundTable: Why Heutagogy is the Future of Education
Curated Conversation 50 Words (presentation)
Individual Contributions
Fred Garnett: Humans developed the capability of “social learning” over millennia before settlements enabled the development of “civilisation”. We then invented education formalising what we had previously learnt informally. Heutagogy, or self-determined learning, allows us to re-orient education back to the shared transmission of the cultural values we develop communally.
Stewart Hase: Heutagogy is an educational approach that fosters learner agency: the confident, lifelong ability to take control of one’s learning. It promotes capabilities such as collaboration, assessing information, understanding local and global contexts, creative problem-solving, challenging assumptions, reflection, and personal responsibility by using evidence-based and innate, social learning techniques.
Nigel Ecclesfield: With its focus on learning, learner agency and learner self-determination, heutagogy offers a clear focus on learning for all those engaged with education and an opportunity to overcome the limitations of education based on curricula and teaching methods determined through the actions of political and/or economically discriminatory institutions.
Ronan O’Beirne: A walk, a wonder through learning, getting lost by intent or by accident. Sifting and sieving through serendipity, gathering the riches of experience, creating a bricolage of possibly useful artefacts that will shed light on the journey. Synthesising concepts and opening the mind to consider new vistas of discovery.
Emma O’Brian: In an uncertain, complex society the future of education will not be concerned with what we know but how we can learn. Heutagogy empowers all citizens to collaboratively learn to cope with change and complexity with the collective good in mind through self and societal awareness.
Fernando Mendes: Heutagogy serves better a new world of learners avid to learn but disliking being taught. Hacking education has transformed each one of us into knowledge agents. We believe that the key to building new learning strategies must come from each individual agent acting in distributed and self-determined learning modes.
Traian Bruma: I grew up with a group of friends, creating our own university. I can’t imagine a future where it is acceptable that learning processes – individual or collective – are owned and determined by anyone else but the learners themselves. Inch by inch, people will take this freedom back from institutions.
Thomas Cochrane: Focusing upon the principles of Heutagogy: developing creativity, collaboration, open educational research and practice and building authentic learning communities, education would:
• Build student capabilities to navigate the unknown
• Enable Academics to become change agents modelling openness to facilitate student-centred learning rather than delivery and control of learning content and environments
Lisa-Marie Blashke: Heutagogy creates learners for a sustainable tomorrow. Heutagogy gives control of learning to the student, supports discovery and exploration in the learning experience, builds critical thinking and reflection skills, and promotes democracy of learning and social justice, entrepreneurialism, and community engagement. Heutagogic learners learn across disciplines. They think for themselves.
Bridget McKenzie: Education in an Earth crisis must develop capacities for the wellbeing of people, places and planet, to include: multi-solving of problems; bio-empathy & ecological literacy; compassion & forgiveness; systemic intelligence; boundless imagination. For these capacities, learners must work on sustained, situated, experiential projects, including collaborative encounters with diverse kinds of people.
Violeta Serbu: Self-directed learning helped me reinvent myself and switch careers in my mid thirties (as big as transitioning from non-formal education to basic neuroscience research). I perceive SDL as a way of designing healthy societies, helping individuals to thrive by making them more aware of the inner (and outer) workings of human learning and the transformative power it provides. Hope our planet will benefit from this too.
Vijaya Bhanu Kote Try observing an infant. Try observing its growth mode. You will understand that it is through Heutagogy that the infant learns everything. We can say that Self-determined learning is an authentic attitude every child possesses. Trust the child, localize Heutagogy and try training parents and teachers on how to trust the child and encourage Heutagogical learning. It is the future of education.
Aras Bozkurt: Heutagogy, from the perspective of learners, is taking the agency to design our own learning journey to navigate and traverse across the learning networks by centering the learners own learning needs. They shape and design their own learning processes and, in turn, create their own learning ecologies
Ilene Dawn Alexander: A social-justice-oriented heutagogy seeks to enact learning-centered frameworks that
• build sustainable and humane interpersonal interactions
• address complex problem-posing and solution-seeking cooperatively
• understand multiple practices of inclusion and diversity
• create accessible physical, economic, and cultural environments
• sustain natural and built environments prioritising bio-diversity over kleptocratic corporate gain
Phil Ecclesfield: Heutogogy is the future of education because it’s intrinsic for the development of individual knowledge and development without artificial constraints. The very young want to learn and explore about learning to learn. We stifle this natural predisposition in formal education, but heutogogy engages with learners own predispositions to learn
Matt Crosslin: Is heutagogy the future of education? No one can really know. But if education is going to take social justice and equity seriously, learners in heutagogical environments would be able to create their own unique sociocultural pathway of different and familiar voices, experiences, intersections, connections, and interactions
Fred Garnett‘s full 1000 word statement for UNESCO Future of Education