The Salem Witches of ID OR Cancel culture has arrived in Instructional Design
Photo by Erica Marsland Huynh on Unsplash
What do the Salem witch trials and woke cancel culture have in common?
Both established rogue thoughts as truth.
I’m sorry to report that over the past few months, cancel culture has arrived in Instructional Design.
Personally, I’ve seen “Andragogy” and “Brain-Based Learning” attacked and discarded on public LinkedIn posts, threads, and some blog posts. I’ll be collecting them here below as I find them. However, if there get to be too many (and already collecting these was depressing and exhausting. In one case there were 30 replies and that was not even to me!) I’ll stop collecting.
It is as if a newer ID hears of brain-based learning, says to
themselves “huh, where else is learning supposed to happen?” and then
calls brain-based learning stupid because of the name.
I’ve
tried to point out that what’s happening is that less educated
Instructional Designers are approaching these concepts as words only or
with very little in-depth research and are tossing out the concept
entirely.
In
the case of Andragogy, I tried defending it. It’s an established
section of education with a depth of history of more than 50 years (in
popular Education studies, longer in lexicon). Attacking it, to me, is
the equivalent of attacking Black History. Why would you do this? It
makes no sense. The arguments against andragogy always seem to equate little children with adults.
For example:
- According to andragogy, adults want to know why.
- My child asks why.
- When doing so, my child behaves as an adult.
- My child is not an adult.
- Therefore, andragogy does not exist.
Rinse & repeat with a lot of cognitive elements (my child can do this, my child can do that…) Always exceptions. Piaget gets dragged into this (he does below). Perhaps then begin the “Well, if one part of false, then all parts are false” arguments…which themselves are logical fallacies. Duh.
It’s tough out there. Note in this first example, the author is the post is ALSO the author of the article hosting place called The Learning Scientists— which is a point that I make; that the OP is putting on a aura of authority that is, perhaps, inappropriately authoritative to the audience. Said another way, readers might not understand that the writing, all inclusive here, was opinion.
Andragogy