Beyond andragogy: postgraduate students’ experiences of self-determined learning in higher education: a heutagogical perspective

Abstract

Although heutagogy is widely advocated for postgraduate education, students’ actual practices of self-determined learning in higher education institutions remain little explored, particularly in African settings. This study examined the lived experiences of postgraduate students, what enables and constrains those experiences, and how they relate to andragogical assumptions, using the conceptual lens of heutagogy. An interpretive phenomenological design was used. Nine postgraduate students from the University of Business and Integrated Development Studies and other public universities in Ghana were purposively selected as information-rich cases: learners already demonstrably engaged in autonomous, self-directed, or self-determined practice. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews, four-week reflective journals, and learning artefacts, and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Triangulation, member checks, audit trails and reflexive journaling supported credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability. Five group experiential themes emerged: becoming the author of one's own learning; redefining the destination rather than the route; inhabiting two curricula (the visible syllabus and a parallel learning track); the fragility of agency; and crossing the Heutagogical threshold. Participants described a reorientation of learner identity, authorship of learning goals, a parallel learning track supported by digital tools and peer networks, and contextual pivoting of academic content toward the communities they served. Among these information-rich cases, practices exceeded andragogical assumptions: participants authored their own goals, reflected on disciplinary assumptions, learned in parallel, pivoted in context, and cultivated capability rather than competency. Rather than a linear movement beyond andragogy, however, the accounts reveal an oscillation between andragogical scaffolding and Heutagogical authorship, conditioned by confidence, supervisory stances, workload, family responsibilities, and access to resources. Self-determined learning emerged less because institutions supported it than because participants constructed alternative learning ecologies alongside, beyond, and sometimes in partial resistance to formal curricular structures. Given the small, single-country, largely single-institution sample of already-disposed learners, the findings are interpretive claims about information-rich cases rather than generalisations about postgraduate students. The study contributes to the heutagogy literature from an African higher education context and has implications for postgraduate curriculum design, supervisor practice, and institutional recognition of self-determined learning.