Role Identity in Professional Community College Tutors

‘Sometimes I wonder if our best really is our best’: Tutor reflections on the challenges of shifting to online tutoring during the pandemic

“…For example, research related to tutorial matters tend to be comparative, such as comparing student and tutor feedback practices (e.g., Hamer et al, 2014), comparing student and tutor grades (Bharuthram, 2018), comparing student and tutor perceptions of classroom interactions (e.g., Hardman, 2016), oracy skills (e.g., Heron et al, 2018), and reading lists (e.g., Stokes and Martin, 2008). Tutors, themselves, are often not the direct focus of research (Donaldson, 2022). Even during the surge in teaching and learning related research during the COVID-19 pandemic, tutor voices were largely silent, with only a few papers devoted to examining their perceptions of online learning (see, for example, Almahasees, Mohsin and Amin, 2021;Dodo-Balue, 2022).…”

“…Given the importance of tutorials for students' learning, engagement, and success (Faroa, 2017;Layton, 2016;Topping, 1996), especially in the South African context (McKay, 2016;Nyawo, 2021), we were particularly interested in how tutors experienced the pandemic-necessitated shift to online learning and teaching, given that this has yet to be widely explored in the existing literature. The paper uses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to focus on two main aims: Firstly, to specifically give voice to tutors' experiences during the pandemic, as the focus has largely been on students' and full-time academics' experiences, and secondly, more broadly, top open spaces for including tutors on learning and teaching-related discussions as they have generally been sidelined in the literature (Donaldson, 2022).…”