Growing partnership communities: What experiences of an international institute suggest about developing student-staff partnership in higher education

This article explores the perceptions of participants following the first International Summer Institute (SI) on students as partners in higher education, a four-day professional development experience designed to foster student-staff partnerships. Approximately 9 months after the Institute, 10 participants were interviewed to understand their perceptions of student-staff partnership, and what role the SI played in supporting partnership working. We discuss the key themes that emerged from our interviews, and analyse these participant responses in comparison to responses collected during the 2016 SI. In evaluating our data, we consider the general efficacy of the SI and offer ideas for academic developers interested in supporting partnership work more generally

Mind the (gender) gap: engaging students as partners to promote gender equity in higher education

Gender inequity remains a critical issue in higher education. We explored the proposition that engaging students as partners (SaP), an increasingly adopted approach to student engagement, may present one approach to improving gender equity by fostering agency and leadership for women. First, we analyzed the gender distribution of authors of SaP scholarship spanning 202 articles published in six academic journals over the past five years. Women were more likely to author (70%) and lead (76%) SaP publications. Second, we used collaborative autoethnography to explore our experiences as three women SaP practitioners. Affirmative partnerships built our agency to assert our voices and empowered us to advocate for gender equity. These data indicate that SaP may present one approach to promoting gender equity by creating ‘brave spaces’ and ‘sites of resistance’ against gendered norms in academia

Reflecting gendered experiences of student-staff partnership: A student standpoint using poetic transcription

Debates in higher education problematise the role of students in student engagement. Resisting neoliberal values and language, scholars argue that students should be positioned as ‘partners’ or ‘change agents’ rather than ‘customers’ or ‘consumers,’ but the extent to which students are able to self-author their experiences as subjects rather than objects in mainstream publications is rare. Drawing on standpoint theory, we—three students from international contexts—argue that if students are to shape higher education discourses, then students’ work needs to be more prominently represented in mainstream academic publishing. We exemplify one approach to alternate forms of conducting and sharing student-led research by exploring and representing our own experiences of gender in partnership through poetic transcription. In doing so, we hope to disrupt some of the dominant assumptions around the positioning of students as objects in research and the validity of students’ self-authored voices in higher education

Engaging students and faculty in a summer institute on students as partners

‘Students as partners (SaP)’ has become a hot topic in higher education in the last five years. Perhaps unsurprisingly the term is often used loosely and its meaning is contested. Here we refer to student-staff partnership as “a collaborative, reciprocal process through which all participants have the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision-making, implementation, investigation, or analysis” (Cook-Sather, Bovill and Felten, 2014, p.6-7). This paper explores an international research project investigating the experience of students and staff participating in the first ‘International Summer Institute on SaP in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’, held at McMaster University in May 2016. The aim of the summer institute (SI) was to build the capacity and understanding of staff and students to develop, design and implement initiatives to promote the practice of students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. Over 100 delegates participated from seven countries in roughly equal numbers of students and staff. Participants engaged either in one or two 2-day workshops or in a 3-day Change Institute, at which seven teams of staff and students were supported to plan the implementation of a SaP initiative. The SI was facilitated by students and staff from Australia, Canada, UK and USA. Following the SI, we analysed the challenges participants ascribed to student-staff partnership, and the features of the SI they thought particularly useful in helping them to navigate them (Authors, in press). The findings point to potential features that may be helpful for supporting the development of approaches that engage SaP in research, curriculum design, and other teaching and learning initiatives. In this paper, we will report on follow-up research conducted approximately 9 months to 1 year after the SI to understand if, and how, participants’ experiences of partnership and their perceptions of features necessary to support it have developed. This research will explore the following research questions: How do 2016 SI participants currently understand and experience partnership, and how (if at all) has this changed since the SI? To what extent do they perceive their participation in the 2016 SI as supporting their ongoing partnership work in their home contexts? Particular emphasis will be placed on learning more about the extent to which the international component of the SI is perceived by participants to support their partnership work. A mixture of Skype and face-to-face semi-structured interviews will be undertaken to explore these questions in Spring 2017. These will be conducted by student co-researchers, working in partnership with staff from three countries. We will also draw on research into the experience of participants in the 2017 SI to see how that differs from those participating the previous year