Intergenerational Communication among Faculty and Students in Higher Education

This research illustrated the dynamics of intergenerational communication between faculty and students in a Philippine university. Adopting a contextualized age-period-cohort model (APC), this multiple case study involves four cases of multigenerational faculty interactions with students. Faculty cases were first selected through purposeful maximal sampling before student participants were selected. Semi-structured individual interviews, online communication analysis, and qualitative surveys were used to obtain an in-depth understanding of the IG communication in each case, with emphasis on their purpose for communication, encoding, and decoding of the message. Within-case analyses provided rich description of each case and cross-case analysis generated lessons across cases. Findings show that age, cohort, and period, influence the online learning communications. Faculty and students are consciously adjusting their communication styles to what they perceive to be "acceptable" to convey meaning. However, perceptions of what is acceptable could be based on faulty assumptions. The paper recommends a shift from "student diversity" to "education diversity" to capture the full dynamics of generational diversity in the academe.