The Relational, Emotional and Social Contexts of Learning Five Lives of the 21st Century Student

Students attending university today are culturally and educationally diverse (Crosling, Thomas and Heagney, 2008). University tutors today face increasing numbers of these students and, as such, high-workloads. Often there is a disjuncture between students’ needs and tutors’ needs (Stephen, O’Connell and Hall, 2008). Tutors’ understanding of how students’ view the world is crucial to enhance students’ learning and their retention at university (Thomas, 2002). Student retention, with its implications for the financial stability of higher education institutions is high on universities’ strategic agendas (Crosling et al., 2008). This research seeks to understand what matters to university students today and how this plays-out in their learning. Five students wrote daily weblogs for two/three weeks. Findings illustrate the diversity of students’ lives and also the commonalities they share as students. By building-on students’ similarities, in terms of what matters to them all, it is argued that such priorities may unite them. Central to this idea is the fundamental importance of developing positive student-student and tutor-student relationships. The university environment needs to be viewed by students as important to them as their familial and other social networks. This is a mammoth task given the locale nature of all students in the study but crucial for their learning and staying-power at university