Academic Exchange Quarterly     ISSN 1096-1453    Volume 23, Issue 1    Spring 2019 Welcome to the Spring 2019 edition of Academic Exchange Quarterly Our article, Rethinking Pedagogy, Andragogy and Heutagogy (Winter 2018 issue), highlighted a shifting change in definition, philosophy and thought process around the more strident learning and cognition understandings that have been based within the understandings of pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy. Specifically, towards a rethinking around learner needs and knowledge base readiness. A simplistic framework through which to consider differentiated areas of consideration, amongst the three learning understandings, may be represented in the following tabular manner: The concepts around defining and differentiating the learning theories as styles of instructional design and instructionally facilitative engagement are worthy of consideration, specifically while considering that the normative expectations around learning theories alignment with age ranges may not necessarily be the most appropriate framework through which to design instructional efforts. Simply stated, for learners who do not have a developed knowledge base around the subject matter in focus, it would be an imprudent and irrational endeavor to design and implement instruction without first focusing upon developing a basic knowledge and understanding upon which a basis of basic knowledge and subject matter comprehension may develop. Based upon our article and the delineations between pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy as presented, it is appropriate to consider the subject matter engagement from levels of understanding and the ability to work with the subject matter knowledge as a perception and discernment of the subject matter is most appropriate towards the learner’s successful experience and engagement consideration. This was an especially intriguing topic to undertake, as our authors come from varied backgrounds and areas of expertise. One author comes from a professional background that is focused upon initial teacher education licensure and administrative leadership within the Pre-Kindergarten through high school instructional career paths. A second author is specifically focused upon adult learning experiences and subject matter engagement, within the area of software engineering. A third author is a mixture of both author colleagues, with a wide swath of experience from classroom teaching experience in the middle school and high school realms, shifting interests towards the higher education realm of adult learning, as well as the learning and development world of human resources talent development. From each of the author’s differentiated understandings and areas of expertise. We came together to recognize the intriguing similarities and differences amongst our instructional colleagues, the needs of our learners throughout their educational journey, as well as the professional standards and expectations inherent within the real world job market that marks their professional career successes. Each of the authors recognize, that the impact of our instructional design, efforts and modeling for our students, will clearly impact their current learning successes as well as future professional journey. As such, it is appropriate to offer an understanding of each author’s teaching experiences that led into our meeting of the minds. Author One’s Teaching Experiences Over the past few years the pedagogy used in my graduate-level engineering classes has varied greatly. The students have proved to be much more passive learners than what is needed for them to actually learn the material required. They require extensive sets of differing types of activities in order to push them to absorb the basics of the knowledge required of the curriculum. By passive learning I mean that, unless given a specific set of very prescribed and well thought out activities to perform both in the classroom and outside the classroom, on an extremely frequent basis (every class meeting), the student relies only on reading the minimum of the material provided at the last moment before any assignment or testing situation is required. The end result is a failure to understand almost any new concept as it requires much more than a passing casual read. As a response to this, I have changed my classroom from lecture based to almost entirely student activity-based engagement with the subject matter. One may suggest a flipped classroom style of engagement, wherein lecture support, knowledge-based readings and associated research and knowledge-focused engagement occur prior to attending face to face experiences that have shifted towards student activity-based experiences that highlight building upon progressive higher order thinking skills and information engagement (Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruikshank, Mayer, Pintrich, Raths & Wittrock, 2001; Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill & Krathwohl, 1956; Krathwohl, Bloom & Masia, 1964). For example, in each class meeting some form of in-class activity is given which requires the student to solve a simple problem, a problem that was provided in an earlier class to review and research. Alternatively, the student might be asked to answer 3-5 questions that test the student’s absorption and understanding of some key concepts that were discussed in the previous class, or that they were assigned to review conveying subject-focused concepts such as recorded lectures or podcasts on the subject. The classes are 3 hours long and 30 minutes are allowed for this. After the in-class activity, discussion and review of the topics takes place, engaging in re-learning while also offering knowledge-based enhancements that support the student’s scaffolding understanding towards an enhanced level of cognitive taxonomical engagement. This can take 30 minutes or longer depending on the topic. This in-class activity is graded, and enough weight is assigned to it to motivate students to take these activities seriously. In addition to this, I also require students to work in groups on an assigned software project. Each group is typically 2-3 students and class size has historically been 20-30 students. Smaller class size lend to much more attention to each group, but all groups learn and benefit from the each group discussion. Class time is taken up each meeting with a public, whole class participation and engaged review of the work that each team group has achieved on their project since the previous meeting. Students in each group must explain, in detail, their work to me and to the class and answer all manner of questions regarding the work. This review takes the form of an informal presentation in that much interruption and discussion takes place. Feedback to the student is a goal and is improving the student’s developing professionalism and ability to respond to critical formative development comments and the student’s ability to express technical information in a meaningful manner. In particular I point out what is lacking, weak in structure or execution, or illogical, as well as what is working well, what is promising, and what should be continued. I also give the group guidelines as to what they need to accomplish before the next review. This is an extremely exhausting exercise for me, as it requires an intense communication exchange that is quite involved and can feel, at times, like a stylistic form of interrogation; however, this exercise not only strengthens the strategic competencies inherent within real world professional standards of engagement, but supports the team group communicative experiences that naturally occur within software engineering fields. In addition, I know from experience that I will typically be required to answer the bulk of my own questions asked, as the students need significant developmental guidance towards modeling how to think through questions and appropriately viable responses to formative evaluative reviews, particularly in the beginning weeks. Such answers may require in-depth explanations. A formal presentation and review are required at the end of the semester where the end project is presented for a final grade; however, at this stage of instructional engagement, public evaluation and feedback is not offered. These activities form the bulk of the active learning portion of the class, taking upwards of 70% of the class time. The other 30% is passive instruction such as traditional lecture. This approach has resulted in significant improvement related to the course-based evaluations of course objective student attainment associated with the understanding of basic knowledge required of the class. I have found it extremely useful, and continue this process in each of my classes. Author Two’s Teaching ExperiencesIt is obvious that my instructional design is eclectic, having elements that adequately meet the needs of each student. My experience has demanded that I shift from instructor-focused to student-focused with discipline, consideration, and respect for course content, objectives, goals, and other instructional design engagement. Because of my personal dedication to teaching and learning, I expected my students to have that same enthusiasm. I was so focused on ensuring that I met all the objectives and that students understood each assignment in which they would apply what they had learned. The problem was that I made assumptions about how excited my students would be about the assignments, especially since I included a detailed rubric with specific assignment guidelines. After several rounds of disappointment about students’ attitudes toward the course and the assignments, I was forced to reflect, redirect, and regroup. Therefore, I became more flexible, less rigid, more relaxed, less scripted, and more approachable, and less tense. The transformation yielded better results and higher engagement. While incorporating and modifying meaningful, relevant assignments and class discussions/activities and maintaining the integrity of the course, I find that student-focused classroom settings: prompt students’ interests to engage with enthusiasm and determination; allow them to share their experience, which may lead to building their own confident levels; and, provides opportunities for them to reflect and build upon their experience while learning new content, building upon their prior knowledge and connecting what they know and what they have learned, which leads to higher level practices. Though, I have shifted to a student-centered style, I find that I have adopted realms from each theory of pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy that do not impede on my flexibility or approachability. In my own understandings around pedagogy and andragogy, I am instructor-directed and knowledge focused because it is important that I adhere to the course content and objective to facilitate students’ academic growth. To ensure that I remain student-focused, I allow students to connect their prior knowledge to what they have learned. I facilitate the process with students and allow them to take control of learning the content through innovative activities that combine both theory and practice. Both the students and I are self-directed, but we do it together so that we both enjoy the journey to learning and experiencing something new. In considerations towards heutagogy, I am determined to design, implement, modify, and re-implement activities and assignments that spark students’ interest and catapult them to higher levels of performance. Likewise, students become determined to reach new levels of synthesizing, creating, and evaluating. Ironically, when my students are engaged and submit scholarly assignments, I become more reflective, excited and determined to work on my own style that keeps evolving to meet the needs and learning styles and interests of all students. Author Three’s Teaching Experiences I’ve found that my instructional design and style of teaching and facilitation shifts with the needs of the learners, yet I have values-laden expectations that persist throughout my own instructional efforts and experiences. First I will offer my values-laden expectations and philosophical beliefs around what I perceive as the teaching and learning process, then followed by a discussion around how I design and instruct within instructional environments. I find, as the years pass, that my style of instructional design and desire towards facilitative engagement is quite different from many of the colleagues with whom I work. This is not to suggest that my colleagues are in any way lacking or inferior; instead, I am merely quite different and apart in how I perceive the teaching and learning process of expectations. Perhaps this begins in my realization that I truly despised everything about the Industrial Age mandates associated with teaching and learning. Show up on time, sit in an assigned seat, raise one’s hand to hopefully have an opportunity to speak, and knowledge regurgitation were the ways of my learning experiences throughout the vast majority of my Pre-Kindergarten through high school years (I cannot claim through 12th grade senior year, because I couldn’t take it any longer and graduated after my 11th grade junior year) and my undergraduate higher education experiences. It was also during these experiences, that I realized all of my honors and gifted courses merely filled me full of knowledge, I was never taught the gifts nor skills associated with learning how to learn and this would haunt me for decades. It wasn’t until my master’s degree coursework that I was honored to learn from Dr. Jon Suter; not only was he the head university librarian whom I realized was a true font of fun and interesting knowledge, but his instructional style was actually engaging, interesting, and varied from lecture to real world engagement to thoughtful research that led to truly creative and expanding understandings of the subject matter. I finally found a reason to enjoy learning. As well, I realized that my professional journey would evolve into attempting to better understand the process of learning as an individualized endeavor. Not only towards better supporting the knowledge acquisition by learners so as to develop a base knowledge that would support enhanced engagement with the subject matter, but also towards better understanding the formation and support towards developing a viable learning environment that embraced the concepts of cognitive vulnerability (Crawford, 2015, 2016, 2018a; Crawford & Semeniuk, 2016; Crawford & Smith, 2015), conceptual frameworks of understanding (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, 1962, 1978) and learning in landscapes of practice (Wenger-Trayner, Fenton-O’Creevy, Hutchison, Kubiak, & Wenger-Trayner, 2014; Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). I began realizing that my understandings of the teaching and learning process were also significantly shifting. Although I had always recognized the linkage between what one learned and the real world usefulness of the information, I found that I was naturally embedding opportunities towards real world implementation of the subject matter within each unit of instruction, within each assignment, so as to embed an understanding of the information as not merely a need to know but also a must use from the point of immediacy. This belief also emphasized the importance of self-efficacy amongst the learners. Meaning, I was working towards the learner’s recognition of their own ability to work with the information while embedding real world community-based feedback as supporting the learner’s professional belief in their own abilities and strengths; this wouldn’t merely come from the instructor of record who was grading the work, but more importantly the formative feedback and positive insights were coming from the learner’s own world that existed beyond the four walls of the classroom environment. The importance of the real-world implementation of the subject matter has been integral and undergirding much of my current instructional efforts and study (Crawford, 2017, 2018b; Crawford & Michael, 2017), focusing the style of instruction throughout my courses upon not only knowledge base acquisition, but through the cognitive taxonomies of Bloom (Bloom, Englehart, Furst, Hill & Krathwohl, 1956; Krathwohl, Bloom & Masia, 1964) and the revised digital age cognitive taxonomies of Anderson and Krathwohl (Anderson, Krathwohl, Airasian, Cruikshank, Mayer, Pintrich, Raths & Wittrock, 2001). A surprising yet positive outcome of my own professional journey towards better understanding the teaching and learning processes, is the recognition that it’s not only the learners who are enjoying the course experience. I am also more fully engaged and enjoying the creativity, vulnerability, collegiality and trust that empower the learners to bond within the learning community … as well as far beyond the timeline experiences of our course session together. Final Thoughts Intriguing is the different reasons and understandings that each of the authors have brought forward, as we describe and attempt to define our own philosophies of learning, as based within our instructional design efforts, instructional facilitation, understandings and beliefs about the learners, as well as engagement with the subject matter. The authors have highlighted aspects of each journey that have deeply impacted basic understandings around engaging with the subject matter while also engaging with the learners in meaningful ways, always with the ultimate goals focused upon achieving learning objectives, engaging with the subject matter in real world and meaningful manners of understanding, self-efficacy of the learners, and additional considerations that directly support each learner’s cognitive development. Each journey towards the differentiation between pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy supports the realization and recognition of differentiated learner needs, understandings and support structures towards better understanding the teaching and learning process associated with talent development. Rethinking the teaching and learning engagement endeavors towards differentiated understandings around a shifting change in definition, philosophy and thought process associated with pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy theories. As the cooler weather of winter’s restful respite begins to shift towards spring’s warmer breezes and the welcomed rebirth of the land’s blessings, may you also find rejuvenation in the exploration of this spring issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly. The presentation of creativity, innovation and expertise throughout these pages may offer an enveloping of warmth and like-minded collegiality. As well, we hope that prior AEQ issues will also continue to stir excitement for the renewing and rejuvenation of our own professional endeavors. References Anderson, L.W. (Ed.), Krathwohl, D.R. (Ed.), Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.E., Pintrich, P.R., Raths, J., &       Wittrock, M.C. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational       Objectives. White Plains, NY: Longman. Bloom, B.S. (Ed.), Engelhart, M.D., Furst, E.J., Hill, W.H., & Krathwohl, D.R. (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives:       The classification of educational goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain. New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green. Crawford, C. (2015). Vulnerability in learning. In J. Spector (Ed.), The SAGE encyclopedia of educational technology.       (pp. 832-835). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483346397.n338 Crawford, C. M. (2016). Instructor immediacy and authenticity: Engaging in cognitive vulnerability within the online       instructional environment. In Steven D’Agustino (Ed.), Creating Teacher Immediacy in Online Learning       Environments. pp. 15-36. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Crawford, C.M. (2017). Shifting Classroom Teacher Perceptions of Learning Technologies through a Community of Practice       and Community-Embedded Approach. In Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education       International Conference 2017 (pp. 356-361). Chesapeake, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing       in Education (AACE). Crawford, C. M. (2018a). Implicit cognitive vulnerability. In M. Khosrow-Pour (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Information Science       and Technology (4th Edition), pp. 5149-5157. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Crawford, C. M. (2018b). Instructional real world community engagement. In M. Khosrow-Pour (Ed.) Encyclopedia of       Information Science and Technology (4th Edition), pp. 1474-1486. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Crawford, C. M., & Michael, T. B. (2017, Fall). Real world engagement: Collegial community impact. Academic       Exchange Quarterly 21(3), 44-50. Crawford, C.M. & Semeniuk, M. (2016). Metaphoric Representations of Cognitive Understanding via a Stairway Approach:       Implicit Cognitive Vulnerability Theory through a Progressive Cognitive Taxonomical Approach. In Proceedings of Society       for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2016 (pp. 1383-1393). Chesapeake, VA:       Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Crawford, C. M., & Smith, M. S. (2014). Rethinking Bloom’s Taxonomy: Implicit Cognitive Vulnerability as an Impetus       towards Higher Order Thinking Skills. In J. Zing (Ed.), Exploring Implicit Cognition: Learning, Memory, and       Social-Cognitive Processes, pp. 86-103. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference (an imprint of IGI Global).       DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-6599-6.ch004 Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B.S., & Masia, B.B. (1964). Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational       goals. Handbook II: The affective domain. New York: David McKay. Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA:       Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1934/1987). Thinking and speech. In R.W. Rieber & A.S. Carton (Eds.), The collected works of L.S.       Vygotsky, Volume 1: Problems of general psychology (pp. 39–285). New York: Plenum Press. Wenger-Trayner, E., Fenton-O’Creevy, M., Hutchison, S., Kubiak, C., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (Eds.). (2014). Learning in       Landscapes of Practice: Bounaries, Identity, and Knowledgeability in Practice-Based Learning. London: Routledge. Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015, April 15). Communities of Practice: A Brief Introduction.       Retrieved from http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/07-Brief-introduction-to-communities-of-practice.pdf Caroline M. Crawford, University of Houston-Clear Lake, TX Sharon A. White, University of Houston-Clear Lake, TX Jennifer Young Wallace, Jackson State University, MS