The Future of Education

This proposal is based on an empirical research promoted by the University of Turin, aimed at addressing the research question about what synergies exist between the institutional missions of teaching, research and Third Mission within the lives of academic staff [1; 2]. In compliance with an exploratory sequential mixed design [4], a first qualitative study was conducted through interviews, subjected to software-assisted content analysis using NVivo [3]. The synergy of cross-fertilization between different academic roles during Third Mission was recognized, thanks to collaborative interaction between people in various academic positions, such as professors, tenured and non-tenured researchers, research technicians, postdoctoral fellows, PhD students [5]. Some faculty members put informally acquired resources and know-how to the service of Third Mission activities. By the respondents’ account, interaction between colleagues in different roles – particularly those with generational gaps – and between teachers and students during Third Mission has allowed a two-way exchange. For teachers, it has resulted in the acquisition of extra-academic knowledge, which has proven to be useful in planning new educational experiences, and for junior academics as a formative space in view of faculty life. For students, the active learning prompted by Third Mission initiatives was identified as a synergy between teaching and Third Mission: the respondents found, in their experience, that the participation of students in Third Mission initiatives provided effective learning opportunities, beneficial to better achieving pre-established learning objectives.