| Description |
Transitioning to the university environment is a milestone in an individual's life path. This milestone is often a symbol of a new beginning and change from controlled education at secondary school, where the responsibility for education is mainly in the hands of teachers, to a university environment, where the student is an active agent of his/her education (Vengřinová, 2022). A new environment can be confusing for beginning students (Hassel & Ridout, 2018; Kálmán, 2020), but simultaneously it brings the opportunity to explore the unknown, learn new things and become independent (Aristeidou, 2021; Parker et al., 2004). All this happens during the process of integration first described by Spady and Tinto in the 1970s. Tinto (1975) divided the integration of the higher education system into integration into two spheres: academic and social spheres. Both of these spheres are interconnected. In the last ten years, a large heterogeneous group of students (MSMT, n.d.) has been attending universities in the Czech Republic, symbolising the universal phase of Czech higher education (Prudky et al., 2010). Each student has a specific background: SES, culture capital, individual attributes, and family background;... Tinto (1975) says that integration into studies is influenced by three essential factors: pre-college schooling, individual attributes and family background. In the current research, the authors analyse the third factor and how family background influences the integration process. The result of the research is that first-generation students have more difficult entry into studies in terms of integration into the tertiary educational level than non-first-generation students (Dika & D'Amico, 2016; Ives & Montoya, 2020). First-generation students represent those students who are the first in their families to have a chance to earn a college degree (Petty, 2014), which means that they come to college from families with lower educational backgrounds (Gibbons & Woodvide, 2014). Members of these families are used to helping each other and have closer family ties. They, therefore, tend to increase the frequency of communication and control over the newcomer student. However, this leads to the fact that it is more challenging for the student to break away from the family culture and integrate into a new environment (Arch & Gilman, 2019). At a time when students of Czech colleges were forced to stay at home (due to the covid-19 pandemic) and study online, the possibility of social integration was limited. Social integration is necessary for academic integration, during which the student becomes familiar with the demands of going through the study, study engagement starts, and starts to accept his/her new social role: student. During the first semester of 2020/2021, when online teaching was mandated, beginning first-generation students could not turn to their peers when looking for help with questions related to the academic sphere because they did not know their peers. They also could not turn to their family members, with whom they spent most of their time, as they had no experience with the university environment. Therefore, their teachers became their crucial source of information. Research by Hassel and Ridout (2018) and Le et al. (2010) emphasise the importance of students' contact with college teachers and the role they play for beginning students in learning a new educational environment. This paper aims to answer the following questions: (1) How do beginning first-generation students describe the role of their teachers in the process of academic integration into online studies? (2) What beginning first-generation students perceive to have been (in)effective on the part of teachers towards their academic integration.
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