Potential Community Members aren’t Children - My thoughts on engagement and informing.

Any chance to inform people of a new community, be it an informative blog, comment or a video are basically teaching opportunity's so it worth noting the difference between Pedagogy (approach to learning, mostly aimed at children) and Andragogy (adult learning approaches) to ensure aid in approaching potential community members like adults and not children:

Treating potential community members like adult learners will attract and hold their interest while ensuring they engage with the process and ultimately our communities.

Treating potential community members like children learners will disinterest them, ensure they lose focus and result in disengagement from the process… and us!

Pedagogy – 5 key points

1. You take full responsibility for making all the decisions about what should be learned, how and when it should be learned, and whether it has been learned – Non-inclusive approach that doesn't take on feedback cues during the discussion.
2. You assume the potential community members have little or no experience that is of value and only your experience counts – Assuming hive members have ignorance on the subject
3. You prescribe the sequence and flow of information and only give prescribed subject matter content – not being flexible in the order in which you talk about information with interested potential members
4. You assume potential community members are motivated by external pressures – Don’t fall into the trap of assuming external motivators is the main driver
5. You assume potential community members are ready and eager to learn to get to a end goal – potential community members may not want or feel they need to learn from you, may not have a clear goal in mind when they start to engage

Andragogy – 5 key points

1. Potential community members need to self-direct their learning – Allow the potential community members to direct the flow of conversation
2. Potential community members will often have a great volume of, and a different quality of, experiences that will be valuable to the conversation – Acknowledge, uncover and utilise this knowledge in your discussion
3. Potential community members need to know why they would want to learn something before they will invest time and attention in a subject – Clearly articulate the problem before launching into the solution
4. Potential community members want to know more than the subject content, they want to learn how to makes their life better – Clearly match your solution to something that makes their life easier, or less painful!
5. While potential community members may respond to external motivators, the most potent motivators are internal – Discover what drives the people you are talking to i.e. want to do a better job, recognition, better quality of life, self-actualization, have a voice

Photo is my own