The Student-Professor Relationship

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The student-professor interaction topic has been object of discussion for a long time. Bales (1950), one of the early researches on this field, defined this concept as the outcome of an overt behaviour which two or more persons maintain towards one another in a way that both can develop a distinct mutual perception that eventually leads to a reaction. Therefore, the positive or negative outcomes of the interaction do not only depend on professors as the service providers, but also on the students, who play an important role in influencing the end result as in any other personal service. Besides, students and professors continuously create mutual perceptions and not only at the university facilities or during the lectures, i.e. their interaction …show more content…

This point of view is used given that students expect to achieve a double objective during their stay at the university: successfully complete the academic tasks along with acquiring capabilities that contribute to their personal development and to the relevance of their future job (Díaz-Méndez & Gummesson, 2012). Thus, those practical capabilities will strongly influence the students long-term satisfaction with the their overall academic experience, since the graduates will be able to evaluate whether the knowledge they acquired and the experience gained meet the utility expectations of their professional life.
Analysing this topic, several constraints seem to hinder the process of dialogue between students and professors. Firstly, nowadays interaction between students and teachers stands at a low level and they communicate ineffectively. Students are only passive participants so the classes pass by without substantial input. Furthermore, large classes make it very difficult for teachers to encourage more interaction. Thus students usually sit at lectures where they get presented the teachers’ understanding about a particular topic and are expected to learn this perspective by …show more content…

As part of the entrepreneurial style, teachers along with students should show a higher level of engagement, hence the learning becomes a more active process and more specialized, connected to the previous knowledge, interests and talents of the students. The aim of education should be thus to create an environment which focuses on the learners’ own