Reading response: I like Candy

What drew me this week to Philip Candy's work was previous exposure: I had run across his work for a class on Adult Education. What I really liked about that (and this chapter as well) is the way he conceptualizes ideas about different types of learning. Rather than seeing self-direction and autonomy as an either/or thing, he views it instead as a spectrum, with an inversely proportional relationship between teacher direction and learner control (more of one means less of the other). In this particular chapter, he expands on this concept by proposing two different areas that overlap: the instructional domain, which consists of teacher direction and learner control, and the autodidactic domain which consists of assisted autodidaxy and autodidaxy. The two areas overlap, or as the author puts it, they are "laminated or layered" (Candy, p. 18). The result is a spectrum that stretches across both domains and ranges from a learner in a teacher-controlled environment, to a completely independent learner pursuing their own interests.

One of the most valuable things I got out of this chapter was an outline of the distinctly different learning phenomena to which the term "self-directed" is often applied. Candy summarizes it thusly: "These four phenomena are self-direction as a valued philosophical ideal (i.e., personal autonomy), self-direction as the ability and willingness to guide and direct one's own learning, self-direction as the independent pursuit of learning opportunities without instructional support or affiliation (i.e., autodidaxy), and self-direction as the acceptance of responsibility for valued instructional fucntions in formal education contexts (i.e., learner-control) (Candy, 1987)" (Candy, p. 38).

This summary provides insight into the issues that are tied to the area of self-directed learning. There seems to be a regular relationship between SDL and adult learning, as it is often adults who pursue learning in a more self-directed manner. The notion of motivation also plays a huge role in SDL, as this is what drives learners to be self-directed. It looks like this particular subject area is bigger than I thought it was.

This chapter serves as an overview of the field, and makes recommendations about research methods and directions. Most of all, the author argues for "the acceptance of the person-in-context as the main unit of analysis" (Candy, p. 40). Candy talks quite a bit about perspective, and calls attention to the importance of knowing whose perspective (the learner, the teacher, the helper, or the researcher) is being represented when it comes to self-directed learning. His views seem to draw a lot upon Constructivist ideas: learners and teachers construct conceptions of learning and knowledge, and these perceptions have a huge impact on the learning process.


References:
Candy, Philip C. (1988). The Transition from Learner-Control to Autodidaxy: More than Meets the Eye. In Long, H. B., Advances in Research and Practice in Self-Directed Learning (pp. 9-46). Norman: Oklahoma Research Center for Continuing Professional and Higher Education.