Introduction

Learning contracts, unlike legal contracts, imply involvement in a negotiative process. For the majority of students entering higher education and, indeed, those involved in learning at any stage of their lives, the expectation surrounding the process of teaching and learning is, from important historical antecedents, governed by the practice of pedagogy. A pedagogical model implies that the teacher takes a primary role in ownership and control of the educative process and, thereby, responsibility for it. The androgogical model, by contrast implies a more cooperative, dialectical learning process encouraging experiential and autonomous learning and the empowerment of the learner. The growth of current techniques in higher education which explicitly require students to engage in processes which enable them to plan, monitor and review learning progress and accepting more autonomy, as Knowles (1981) has observed, is unfamiliar territory for many staff:

There is an urgent need for all programmes of higher education… to be geared (from the start) to developing the skills of autonomous learning… (with subsequent units being) designed as self-directed learning activities. This is to say that the new emphasis in higher education must be on the process of learning, with the acquisition of content (rather than the transmission of content) being a natural (but not pre-programmed) result.

To re-orientate higher education…in this direction would be a tremendous challenge. It is a concept foreign to most educators. It has not been part of their training. … It requires a redefinition of their role away from that of transmitter and controller of instruction to that of facilitator and resource person to self-directed learners. It is frightening. They do not know how to do it.

(p. 8)