Abstract
The university faculty instructor is a curiously stealth yet dynamic pilar of academia. With the threefold expectations of teaching, research, and service responsibilities, one may imagine that the instruction may be less important than the other contractual obligations. As reflected through this study's findings, such assumptions would be far afield from the reality of hard work, focused effort, and time allocation that each faculty member focuses upon their instructional efforts. The findings respond to four areas of instructional impact: assessment, instructor-sustained emotional engagement, instructional shifts in expertise and generational intermixing, as well as potential recognition of a noble academic growing into their professorial strengths while the students retain their traditional as well as non-traditional age range in the classroom experience. Equally impactful is the university student perspective that encompasses a thoughtfully articulate and analytic stance.
TopBackground
As the generations shift, change, and maneuver into different ages and ways of living in society, the curiosity around the expanse of the Baby Boom Generation still actively engaged in academia directly supports as well as impacts later generations. So many generations have learned about the teaching and learning process through the modeling and mentorship of the Baby Boom Generation, that the slowly altered academic population has begun to reflect Generation X faculty and potentially differentiated perceptions, philosophies, and efforts associated with the teaching and learning process (Andrews et al., 2021; Crawford & Moffett, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022; Crawford et al., 2020; Crawford & White, 2021). Yet, how are generations articulated? This is dependent upon which author is tasked with articulating the labels of the generations and the year articulations. Cottrell (2023) offers the following articulation of generational labels that will be implemented throughout this study: The Silent Generation (1928-1945); Baby Boom Generation (1946-1964); Generation X (1965-1980); Millennial Generation or Generation Y (1981-1996); Generation Z or iGen (1997-2010); Generation Alpha (2000 and beyond). This is a point in time that reflects the pivot in impact for Generation X, slowly growing in numbers within the academic milieu.
Generations of people may be easily grouped by year of birth, yet there is a more fluid understanding of the intergenerational impact upon society and social nature (Vygotsky, 1933/1966, 1934/1987, 1935, 1962, 1978 1981), with differences in understanding and analysis developing different ways of thinking and being within instructional environments. One example of this differentiated shift in understanding may be viewed through the developing concept of implicit cognitive vulnerability as a theoretical construct (Crawford, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019; Crawford et al., 2019; Crawford & Semeniuk, 2016; Crawford & Smith, 2015). Further, collegial learning environments within the adult learning spaces equally support the concept of learning communities and learning in landscapes of practice (Wenger-Trayner, et al., 2014; Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015, Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2020), suggesting that,
…an understanding around value creation within the bounds of more socialized elearning spaces that are inherent within the hyperconnected world of the Internet, or the Web of Things (WoT) that has been embedded within the Digital Age’s immediacy of information and the socialization that occurs as inherent within the learning process. (Crawford et al., 2022b, p. 1)
Key Terms in this Chapter
University Course: The manner through which educated persons structure the opportunity to teach and to learn, with specific learning goals, objectives, and outcomes that enhance a learner’s knowledge base.
Strategic Planning: The approach towards tactically recognizing and working within specific parameters of real world being, towards desirable outcomes.
Intergeneration: The collaboration, the coming together, and the respectful recognition of the different strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities between persons of different generations.
Educational Planning: The effort associated with strategizing how to progress the educational process forward.
Intergenerational Relations: The ways that people from different time spans, articulated in a normally arbitrary manner yet evolving around a specific life event that shifts societal understandings, understand each other and can create the potential to work together through social or professional realms.
Course Experience: The collaborative as well as individual efforts and learning that occurs within a specified learning environment.
University: The societally and culturally created recognition of well-educated persons who come together with the express intent to share knowledge in meaningful ways with other citizens.