Recommendations and Conclusion

1. Tertiary educators need to have an appreciation and, where appropriate, an understanding of a wider range of student behaviours (generational and otherwise) in order to fully engage students in learning.
2. Institutions should pay particular attention to the potential challenges that students face within the ‘context of learning’ and the ‘nature of curriculum content’. Additional levels of focused resourcing would enable educators to better support student learning.
3. Professional support for tertiary educators is needed for enhanced relational skills with students. These might include decision processes about when, where, how much and by whom pastoral care is provided.
4. Critical conversations about learner behaviour and cognitivity between tertiary educators need to be overtly valued by tertiary institutions. Professional supervision groups are a vehicle for this to occur.

Conclusion

Facilitating tertiary educators to work in co-inquiry groups opens communication at a critical level between academic peers and moves participants towards a community of practice. An outcome of this research has been a greater willingness to collectively seek a more enlightened understanding of professional practice challenges, rather than expending significant energy seeking to explain teaching and learning concerns, without a solution focus.

In this project, the co-inquiry groups have allowed tertiary eductors to openly talk about their teaching in a way that has far exceeded expectations. It has demystified much of the egocentric, isolated classroom behaviour of teachers.

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