Andragogy and the single session lecture: A critical reflection on the planning and delivery of a standalone postgraduate teaching event

This paper focuses on a lecture delivered each year to postgraduates within the Department of Information Science at City University. The teaching context is outlined at personal, institutional and national levels through which the challenges facing a visiting lecturer are illustrated. The relevance of andragogy to this piece is then introduced. These andragogical principles provide a framework in which to examine how the challenge of student engagement was resolved or exacerbated by the single lecture format, and how planning and delivery may also have contributed to this challenge. Engagement in the postgraduate context can be seen to depend on how well each of these principles is supported by the teaching methods used, and so realistic alterations which could be made in the future to promote deeper engagement are also considered