Pedagogy, Andragogy, Heutagogy, Rhizome: Who Decides What You Learn

EveryEvery taught course answers a question it rarely states out loud: who decides what counts as worth learning, and how? Four educational theories give four different answers, developed across roughly a century and building directly on one another. Knowing the sequence is useful for its own sake, and it maps unusually well onto Personal Learning Maturity's CMMI-for-learners table already on this site — a second, independent way of naming the same underlying progression from "someone else runs my learning" to "I run it myself, together with other people."

Pedagogy: Someone Else Decides

PedagogyPedagogy — literally, from the Greek for "leading a child" — is the default assumption behind most compulsory schooling: a teacher decides what is worth knowing, in what order, and assesses whether it was learned. This isn't a criticism of the model; a ten-year-old genuinely doesn't yet have the background knowledge to judge what's worth learning next in mathematics, and a curriculum built entirely from a child's current interests would leave enormous gaps. The defining feature isn't that it's wrong for its context, but that the learner has essentially no say in the what, the how, or the pace.

Andragogy: The Adult Decides How

MalcolmMalcolm Knowles argued in 1970 that adult learners are different enough from children to need a different approach entirely, which he called andragogy¹. His argument rests on four assumptions about adults specifically: they bring a growing reservoir of experience that is itself a learning resource, not a blank slate to write on; their readiness to learn something is tied to the real social roles they're actually occupying, not an arbitrary syllabus sequence; they're oriented toward immediate application rather than learning for some distant future use; and their motivation to learn is internally generated — curiosity, self-esteem, the desire to solve a real problem — rather than driven by external reward or punishment.

What andragogy changes is how the material is taught and how much responsibility the learner carries for their own pace and process — self-directed study, drawing on personal experience, problem-centred rather than subject-centred design. It generally doesn't touch what the curriculum contains. A university module can be taught entirely andragogically — self-paced readings, problem-based seminars, credit given for relevant prior experience — while the syllabus itself, the list of topics a student is required to cover, stays exactly as fixed as it would be in a pedagogic classroom. That's worth being precise about, because it's the exact point where andragogy stops and the next stage starts.

Heutagogy: The Learner Decides What, Too

StewartStewart Hase and Chris Kenyon proposed heutagogy in 2000 as the next step past andragogy: not just self-directed learning of a given curriculum, but genuinely self-determined learning, where the learner also decides what is worth learning in the first place². The teacher's role shifts again, from designing content to designing an environment and a set of resources a learner can draw on to pursue goals they set themselves.

The distinction Hase and Kenyon draw between competency and capability is the load-bearing idea here. Competency is being able to perform a known task, under known conditions, that you've been shown how to do — reliable, but brittle the moment the situation changes even slightly. Capability is being able to take what you know and apply it confidently to a situation you haven't seen before, including generating new knowledge on the spot to close the gap. A syllabus can specify and test competency directly; it can only create the conditions under which capability might develop, because capability is, by definition, about handling what the syllabus didn't anticipate.

Rhizomatic Learning: The Community Decides, Together

DaveDave Cormier extended this line of thinking in 2008 with rhizomatic education, borrowing the botanical and philosophical concept of the rhizome — a root structure with no single origin point, spreading in every direction, any point connectable to any other — that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had developed as a general alternative to hierarchical, tree-like thinking³. Applying that structure to education is Cormier's own move, not Deleuze and Guattari's: his central claim is that in a field changing fast enough, "the community is the curriculum" — what's actually worth knowing is negotiated continuously by the people working in the field, not fixed once by whoever wrote the syllabus, and a learner's job includes learning how to navigate and contribute to that negotiation, not just absorb a stable body of content⁴.

Rhizomatic learning doesn't replace heutagogy so much as extend it outward: heutagogy is mostly about an individual learner determining their own path; rhizomatic learning is about a whole network of people doing that together, with no single node — including any individual instructor — holding a privileged, final answer about what the field currently is.

Mapping This Onto the Site's Own Maturity Table

ConnectingConnecting these four theories to Personal Learning Maturity's CMMI-for-learners levels is a reading offered here, not a comparison any of the four theorists themselves made. The shapes line up closely enough to be worth drawing out anyway:

This has a direct practical consequence: heutagogy and rhizomatic learning assume a learner who's already reasonably far along the maturity table. Handing a Level 1 learner full self-determination over what to study isn't heutagogy working well — it's pedagogy's structure removed before anything replaced it. The theories describe a genuine progression, and skipping stages doesn't work any better here than it does anywhere else on that table.

Working Within a Set Syllabus, Without Being Limited by It

AlmostAlmost every taught module a student encounters is run pedagogically or andragogically by design — a syllabus exists, learning outcomes are specified, assessment checks against them, and that structure isn't optional. That's a legitimate constraint, not an obstacle to route around: a required syllabus is doing real work, including protecting a learner who doesn't yet have the foundational competency heutagogy assumes. The practical question isn't how to escape the syllabus, but how to practise heutagogic and rhizomatic habits inside and alongside it.

• Convert one required topic per module into a self-set stretch question. After a lecture, ask what the session didn't have time to cover, and follow that thread independently for an hour. This is heutagogy applied narrowly and safely: the required content still gets covered; the self-determined layer sits on top of it, not instead of it.
• Log the self-directed exploration separately from the required work. The Learning Log Template's three-question format works well for this — a "Next" entry that says "followed up on X because the lecture only mentioned it in passing" makes the self-set thread visible and reviewable, rather than blurring into "did the reading."
• Deliberately join a network beyond the taught cohort. A subject-specific forum, a mailing list, an open-source project, a practitioner's conference talk or blog — treat what surfaces there as an unofficial extension of the curriculum. This is the rhizomatic move in miniature: the module becomes one node among several, rather than the entire map of what there is to know.
• Go looking for a disagreement, not just an answer. Finding two credible sources that genuinely conflict on a point the syllabus presents as settled is a concrete way to practise the "honest sense of the limits of what's known" that What a Bachelor's Degree Is Actually For lists as a formal graduate outcome, not just an abstract virtue.

Related Topics

• Personal Learning Maturity — the CMMI-for-learners table this page's four theories are mapped onto.
• What a Bachelor's Degree Is Actually For — the QAA's own description of the independent-learning outcomes heutagogic practice builds toward.
• Learning Log Template — the practical tool used above to keep self-directed exploration visible and distinct from required coursework.
• Navigating Uncertainty — the skill of working productively with an unsettled or ambiguous field, which rhizomatic learning treats as the normal condition rather than the exception.

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