Heutagogy and Technology: A match made in heaven?

In late 2019, I was applying for a teaching award. The application process required me to explain my teaching approach. At the time, I had little theoretical awareness of pedagogy, and yet without that knowledge I described my approach as ‘student-centred’ and presented this diagram to explain its key features. 

Since drawing this up, I have been exposed to pedagogical research and engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning. And, not surprisingly, I find this diagram now mildly embarrassing. Despite its flaws, it is interesting to reflect on some of my instincts and teaching approach that emerged from trial and error. My improvised approach had elements of heutagogy and associated learning frameworks. For example, my focus on engaging students’ personal interests speaks to the development of learner agency (Blaschke, Bozkurt & Cormier, 2021). In addition, the feedback element underpinning my approach not only gave me opportunities to adjust course, but also engaged my students in metacognition. 

While some of this may have been instinctual and organic, in many ways my approach was dictated by the subject matter. (Maria Northcote [2021] explains the importance of heutology in researcher education.) And while I was only teaching research methodologies and methods at the undergraduate level, my goal was always to make undergraduate students think of themselves as apprentice researchers and independent thinkers. Through encouragement and individual time with students, I aimed to provide guidance while supporting students to drive their own learning by developing research ideas connected to their personal interests.  

Week 7 task in EDUC90970, which instructed us to create a virtual reality (VR) experience, made me ponder on the opportunities of rhizomatic learning as part of student-directed, heutological approach. I was particularly interested in the notion of learning from informal experiences (Bozkurt et al. 2016, 7) and the ways in which technology can facilitate this. Inspired by the British anthropologist and geographer, Prof David Harvey, whose starting point in teaching Marxist theory is asking students what they had for breakfast and where it came from, I used my Sunday grocery shopping to think about two different plant-based diets and the socio-economic relationships implicated in them. The result is these two low-fidelity and half-baked VR experiences. 

I would like to think of myself as an intrinsically motivated learner, which, I think, had something to do with heutagogy and technology making a perfect combination in my learning experience on this task. Technology provided the necessary scaffolding in a form of a clear process while my personal motivation drove me to engage with an unfamiliar technology through a familiar and informal experience. In some ways, I surprised myself that I found opportunities for learning and exploration in these mundane Sunday outings.  

References

Blaschke, L. M., Bozkurt, A., & Cormier, D. (2021). ‘Learner Agency and the Learner-Centred Theories for Online Networked Learning and Learning Ecologies’. In S. Hase &  L. M. Blaschke (Eds.), Unleashing the Power of Learner Agency. EdTech Books.

Bozkurt A. Honeychurch S. Caines A. Bali M. Koutropoulos A. & Cormier D. (2016). ‘Community Tracking in a cMOOC and Nomadic Learner Behavior Identification on a Connectivist Rhizomatic Learning Network’. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 17 (4), 4–30. 

Northcote, M. (2021). ‘Heutagogy and Researcher Education: Unleashing the Power of the Novice Researcher’s Agency’. In S. Hase & L. M. Blaschke (Eds.), Unleashing the Power of Learner Agency. EdTech Books.