Chng, Huang Hoon

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education
Issue 27 Spring 2019
The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A
Perspective from Singapore
Huang Hoon Chng
National University of Singapore
Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe
Part of the Higher Education and Teaching Commons
Let us know how access to this document benefits you.
Recommended Citation
Chng, Huang Hoon "The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore," Teaching and Learning Together in
Higher Education: Iss. 27 (2019), https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss27/3
1 
 
THE POSSIBILITIES OF STUDENTS AS PARTNERS – A PERSPECTIVE FROM SINGAPORE 
 
Huang Hoon Chng, Associate Provost, National University of Singapore 
 
 
Prologue: Are students customers, clients, or pawns? 
 
In a deeply thought-provoking keynote lecture at the ICED-Atlanta Conference in June 2018, 
Peter Felten spoke about how we have viewed students as objects of the curriculum we 
deliver, as invisible/absent in our conversations about learning and teaching, even as a data 
point in our research projects, and then invited all of us to “[reimagine] the place of students 
in educational development” (Felten, 2018; also Felten et al., 2019). Though Felten’s 
invitation was situated within the domain of educational development, this challenge may 
easily be—and, I argue, should rightly be—broadened to a “reimagining the place of students 
in [higher education].” More specifically, instead of viewing students as objects, could we not 
think of students as partners? Can students be partners? Though I started out among the 
skeptics in the room who believed that long-entrenched power differentials between student 
and teacher and deep-seated cultural practices in specific contexts could not be so easily 
overcome to enable such partnerships, I have found myself increasingly entertaining the 
possibilities of students as partners, aided in part by a shift in the usage and meaning of the 
idea of ‘partnership.’ The caveat remains—it would not necessarily be an easy, 
unproblematic, uncontentious partnership—but I am now more optimistic that we can work 
to enable such partnerships to happen, even in Singapore, if only to a degree. 
 
As many of us know, there is a parallel debate on many campuses that considers whether 
students are consumers (of education), customers/clients (demanding a good degree/future 
job), or products of the education system (i.e. graduate output). In this debate, the absence of 
nomenclature like “agents,” “actors,” “learners,” or “partners” is stark. I recently participated 
in an informal discussion in my institution on the subject, “Are students customers, clients or 
pawns?” (cf. Tight, 2013), where my fellow discussants had offered the perspectives that in 
some contexts like in Business and Law School settings, students themselves may actually 
adopt the perspective of a client with certain entitlements, and who expect a Business or Law 
School degree to open doors to higher prospects in the marketplace. The Dean of NUS Law 
School argued, however, that whether students are customers in search of a good university 
education/experience or are products of university curriculum may depend on “how the 
mission of a university is defined” (Chesterman, 2018).  
 
Chesterman attempts to redefine the focus of the discussion when he writes, “I worry less 
about what students are and more about helping them work out what they will become. Then 
let them choose their own metaphors” (p. 5). I concur with Chesterman: facilitating students’ 
achievement of their own potential is more crucial than debating over metaphors. I also 
support the shift to the important reconsideration about university mission than to invest 
energy in unravelling the metaphors of clients, customers, and products. The point remains 
however, that what educators adopt as starting positions (and our choice of metaphor reveals 
those positions), how we choose to relate to students (as clients, or as partners etc.), can and 
will likely shape the way students view themselves in relation to their education pursuits, 
which can in turn limit that becoming which Chesterman spoke about.   
 
 
  
1
Chng: The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore
2 
 
Viewing Students as Partners   
 
Mick Healey and colleagues (2014) have pointed out that “engaging students and staff 
effectively as partners in learning and teaching is arguably one of the most important issues 
facing higher education in the 21st century” (p. 7, emphasis mine). The focus of my essay is 
on student (not staff) engagement, and I wish to provide a way to think about partnership in 
the Singapore context, a context that many (both insiders and outsiders) assume to be 
essentially authoritarian, culturally rigid, highly hierarchicized, and therefore, will admit of 
little or even no possibility of student partnership. As Healey has alerted me (p.c.), however, 
much depends on what we mean by ‘partnership’ (i.e. what we mean and how we use the 
term). After all, the concept of “the teacher” derives its meaning in contrast to “students,” and 
the cultural structures are in place in some locations to ensure that this dialectic is maintained. 
We may be well into the 21st century, but we should not be surprised that such deep-seated 
assumptions about who does what in a class will take more than just an introduction of new 
concepts to change—power structures are experienced even if largely unobserved, even in the 
most liberated learning spaces. 
 
If motivating student learning is about creating the conditions for learning (Biggs, 1994), then 
reducing barriers to learning—such as, activating the empathetic in teachers towards students; 
reducing the distance or closing the gap between teacher and student; and fostering a less 
rule-bound/oppressive culture, a less disciplined (in the Foucauldian sense) and a more 
conducive learning environment that is defined by a learning enterprise that suggests 
collaboration and partnership (though not necessarily equal, because someone has to lead, at 
some moment or other)—should be a first starting point. To modify a sentiment offered by 
Roxå and Mårtensson (2017) about institutional practices and structures that could work, 
whether consciously or subconsciously, to suppress academic agency, I think we should be 
consciously liberating students through transforming praxis, specifically in the way we relate 
to our students as co-journeyers in the learning process. In short, we need to find ways to 
partner with students, to find opportunities for them to be our collaborators in education, as 
partners, to allow them agency and ownership in their own learning journeys. How can we do 
this?  
 
The happy news is: the “students as partners” literature is already filled with many good 
examples of creative partnerships, and there is no need for me to reinvent this wheel – this 
platform, Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education (TLTHE) is filled with 
examples of partnership, as are the many good works generated by lead practitioners in this 
domain (like Cathy Bovill, Alison Cook-Sather, Peter Felten, Mick Healey, and Kelly 
Matthews, to name just a few) who have already debated about the problematics and 
possibilities involved. 
 
Is it possible to enable partnership with students in the Singapore classroom? What do we 
need to reimagine in order to position students as agents in [the learning and teaching process] 
in this particular context?  
 
 
  
2
Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 27 [2019]
https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss27/3
3 
 
Considering the Possibility of Students as Partners in Singapore 
 
If indeed the Singapore context is as authoritarian and as hierarchical as many people assume  
it to be, it will take an active reconsideration of the teacher-student dialectic to enable 
partnership to occur. Rephrasing Felten’s point slightly, we will need to redefine the purpose 
and practice of education and reconsider curricular outcomes and graduate attributes. 
Importantly, we will need to review and allow for certain types of student identities to 
flourish on campus—the type of practice that Felten iterated in his Atlanta keynote lecture 
included holistic education, focus on well-being, inclusion, critical attention to power, 
building trust and community, and creating openness and connection. 
 
Much of everyday practice in Singapore classrooms is still teacher-centred to a large extent, 
even as the terms ‘active student engagement’ and ‘active learning’ are bandied around freely. 
Even though there are opportunities for project presentations (i.e. peer teaching supporting 
one another’s learning), role play (where students adopt the role of facilitators and peer 
reviewers), and student-led activities, many of these activities still originated from a teacher’s 
decision rather than from some kind of curricular negotiation prior to the design and final 
delivery. Very often, when asked why they would not allow students to have a voice in 
designing the curriculum, or to co-construct an assessment rubric, the response among many 
colleagues is, apart from time constraint, that students are novices, new to the discipline, and 
they ‘don’t know enough’ to be able to define their own learning and learning goals. Abbot 
and Gravett (2018) have, however, argued: “Indeed, there are times when the perspective of 
someone from the outside can offer a clearer reflection of one’s practice precisely because 
there is no content understanding or expertise coloring that reflection” (p. 13). I often wonder 
how much of this resistance is due to a teacher’s reluctance to relinquish his/her control in the 
classroom.  
 
Having said that, there can be other barriers to partnership. In addition to the perception that 
students are not ready to participate in co-creating their own learning, as both Seow and Sim 
have pointed out (this issue), there are contextual, cultural barriers like ‘face,’ trust, and 
power issues that need to be first overcome to ease the way for partnership in the Singapore 
classroom.  If we re-think all these issues, as Felten has invited us to do, I believe we could 
realize the possibility of partnership, even in ‘authoritarian’ sites like the Singapore 
classroom. 
 
There have been really good examples of partnership that have been undertaken by a number 
of Singapore colleagues. In the two examples described below, both faculty members have 
found ways to involve students more directly in their learning, and seem to have overcome 
obstacles discussed by Seow (about lack of trust and democracy in the classroom) and Sim 
(face issues). One such example is the NUS Young Educators in Science (YES) program that 
provides opportunities for undergraduates to develop outreach materials to excite and teach 
the public about Physics. These outreach activities were collected into “personalized 
portfolios” and presented to students when they graduate, and this has meant that each 
participating student has a document that tracks “their individual self-designed learning, 
science communication and service journeys” (Sow, 2018).  
 
Another good example that puts students’ involvement in their own learning at the center is 
the use of podcasts to ‘make public’ student efforts in learning in a ‘Home’ module 
(McMorran, 2018). Most conventional student projects would have resulted in a written essay 
that is ‘shared’ only with the instructor. McMorran has moved away from this mode for 
3
Chng: The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore
4 
 
several years: by requiring his students to create a podcast to record their individual 
interpretations of what ‘home’ means; by filming their own chosen sites, overlaid with 
student commentary and self-sourced soundscapes; and subsequently sharing these with peers 
locally and globally through an online space, thus broadening the student ownership and 
impact of his/her learning (see https://blog.nus.edu.sg/homeonthedot/).  
It could be argued that in both examples that students were provided the space and an explicit 
role to step out of the conventional frame that is reenacted in many classrooms, and this overt 
pedagogical move has adjusted the conventional footing between the teacher and students, 
thus allowing issues of power and face to recede into the background. As Sim puts it (this 
issue):  
 
When students are given roles to perform, they are afforded the opportunity and space to 
step out of who they are, to assume a different identity, and to momentarily become 
someone else, all of which can reduce the intricate politics among students in a 
competitive culture and alter the ecology of the classroom. 
 
I would argue that the instructors in the YES program and in the ‘Home’ module have to 
some extent reimagined the purpose of teaching and learning in the Singapore context, by 
allowing students more active involvement in the decision-making process at the module 
(McMorran’s) and program (Sow’s) levels. They have created the space that enables student 
engagement. In the process, they have gotten students to show what they can do, from their 
perspectives, to scaffold the learning process rather than to prescribe a final product. In short, 
when the instructors took a step back, partnership as a pedagogical practice became 
possible—where there are instructors who actively redefine the roles that both teachers and 
learners assume in those contexts.  
 
However, to qualify as “partnership,” where “there is a collaboration between an 
institution/faculty/department and student, involving joint ownership and decision-making 
over both the process and outcome” (see Healey et al., p.16), there may need to be a more 
deliberate, consolidated effort that goes beyond the effort of individual colleagues, and 
extended beyond one activity, as an isolated practice. Though an ideal, collaboration and joint 
ownership in decision making from end-to-end will require a kind of openness and connected 
curriculum that are able to transcend the cultural specificities of particular contexts.  
 
 
Epilogue 
 
The Sow and McMorran examples discussed here are just two specific examples of ‘creative 
pedagogy.’ They have given me optimism that trust and democracy in the classroom can be 
realized. At the same time, these examples have showed that ‘face’ and power issues can be 
mitigated in favor of student agency, even if not fully overcome. This has not been an easy 
journey. As Seow and Sim have reported, even when instructors extend that trust to students, 
not all students will necessarily respond, or respond comfortably. The reality is that there is a 
much longer preset social climate that makes assumptions about roles in teaching and 
learning, and a politics surrounding classroom behavior that is already predefined culturally 
as norm, in places like Singapore, even as this climate is gradually shifting towards a more 
student-centric ecology. The competitive nature of the Singapore education is a very real 
phenomenon, and years of induction into a conventional way to teach and to learn will 
require a lot more work than a mere showcase of some good examples of practice.   
 
4
Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 27 [2019]
https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss27/3
5 
 
The world of the 21st century youth is said to be a ‘flatter’ world that is networked rather than 
hierarchical. If this is true and as the globally aware Singapore students themselves 
increasingly and confidently make demands to have an education experience that speaks to 
their own learning goals, as they find their own voice in their learning journey, it will not 
surprise me that the idea of partnership will evolve over time. In fact, I see a near future time 
when we will find ourselves engaged not in debates about the possibility of partnership, but 
in a different set of issues such as, what is the role of the teacher in light of partnership?; 
what pedagogy works to enable partnership, how, and for whom the partnership serves? 
When that day arrives, the debate about whether students are clients, customers, objects, 
products, or just learners with a view about their own learning will be superseded by the 
hows and whys of partnership, and importantly, will go on to focus on the role of the 
university. 
  
 
References 
 
Abbot, S. & Gravett, E. O. (2018). Querying the P(hD)ath to Educational Development in 
Higher Education. In C. Bossu  & N. Brown (Eds.), Professional and Support Staff in Higher 
Education (389-403). Singapore: Springer.    
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-981-10-6858-4_10.pdf 
 
Chesterman, S. (2018). Are University Students Products or Customers? The Straits Times, 
Singapore. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/are-university-students-products-or-
customers, accessed 27 September 2018. 
 
Felten, P. (2018). Reimagining the Place of Students in Educational Development. ICED-
Atlanta, June 2018.   
 
Felten, P., Abbot, S., Kirkwood, J., Long, A., Lubicz-Nawrocka, T., Mercer-Mapstone, L., & 
Verwoord, R. (2019). Reimagining the Place of Students in Academic Development. 
International Journal for Academic Development, 24:2. 
 
Healey, M., Flint, A., Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement Through Partnership: Students as 
Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. The Higher Education Academy. 
 
McMorran, C. (2018). Students as podcast co-producers: Transforming student research into 
a professional podcast at the National University of Singapore.” 
 
Roxå, T and Mårtensson, K. (2017). Agency and Structure in Academic Development 
Practices: Are We Liberating Academic Teachers or Are We Part of a Machinery 
Suppressing Them? International Journal for Academic Development, 95-105. 
 
Seow, Y. (2019, this issue). Taking a Small Step towards Partnership. 
 
Sim, J. (2019, this issue). The ‘Face’ Barriers to Partnership. 
 
Sow, CH. (2018).Undergraduates are involved in Science outreach via Young Educators in 
Science Programme, National University of Singapore.” 
http://www.science.nus.edu.sg/studentlife/student-development/yes 
 
5
Chng: The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore
6 
 
Tight, M. (2013). Students: Customers, clients or pawns? Higher Education Policy, 26 (291 – 
307), International Association of Universities, Palgrave. 
 
 
 
 
6
Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 27 [2019]
https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss27/3


The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore

Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College | Bryn Mawr College Research

Teaching and Learning Together in Higher EducationIssue 27 Spring 2019The Possibilities of Students as Partners – APerspective from SingaporeHuang Hoon ChngNational University of SingaporeFollow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthePart of the Higher Education and Teaching CommonsLet us know how access to this document benefits you.Recommended CitationChng, Huang Hoon "The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore," Teaching and Learning Together inHigher Education: Iss. 27 (2019), https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss27/31  THE POSSIBILITIES OF STUDENTS AS PARTNERS – A PERSPECTIVE FROM SINGAPORE  Huang Hoon Chng, Associate Provost, National University of Singapore   Prologue: Are students customers, clients, or pawns?  In a deeply thought-provoking keynote lecture at the ICED-Atlanta Conference in June 2018, Peter Felten spoke about how we have viewed students as objects of the curriculum we deliver, as invisible/absent in our conversations about learning and teaching, even as a data point in our research projects, and then invited all of us to “[reimagine] the place of students in educational development” (Felten, 2018; also Felten et al., 2019). Though Felten’s invitation was situated within the domain of educational development, this challenge may easily be—and, I argue, should rightly be—broadened to a “reimagining the place of students in [higher education].” More specifically, instead of viewing students as objects, could we not think of students as partners? Can students be partners? Though I started out among the skeptics in the room who believed that long-entrenched power differentials between student and teacher and deep-seated cultural practices in specific contexts could not be so easily overcome to enable such partnerships, I have found myself increasingly entertaining the possibilities of students as partners, aided in part by a shift in the usage and meaning of the idea of ‘partnership.’ The caveat remains—it would not necessarily be an easy, unproblematic, uncontentious partnership—but I am now more optimistic that we can work to enable such partnerships to happen, even in Singapore, if only to a degree.  As many of us know, there is a parallel debate on many campuses that considers whether students are consumers (of education), customers/clients (demanding a good degree/future job), or products of the education system (i.e. graduate output). In this debate, the absence of nomenclature like “agents,” “actors,” “learners,” or “partners” is stark. I recently participated in an informal discussion in my institution on the subject, “Are students customers, clients or pawns?” (cf. Tight, 2013), where my fellow discussants had offered the perspectives that in some contexts like in Business and Law School settings, students themselves may actually adopt the perspective of a client with certain entitlements, and who expect a Business or Law School degree to open doors to higher prospects in the marketplace. The Dean of NUS Law School argued, however, that whether students are customers in search of a good university education/experience or are products of university curriculum may depend on “how the mission of a university is defined” (Chesterman, 2018).   Chesterman attempts to redefine the focus of the discussion when he writes, “I worry less about what students are and more about helping them work out what they will become. Then let them choose their own metaphors” (p. 5). I concur with Chesterman: facilitating students’ achievement of their own potential is more crucial than debating over metaphors. I also support the shift to the important reconsideration about university mission than to invest energy in unravelling the metaphors of clients, customers, and products. The point remains however, that what educators adopt as starting positions (and our choice of metaphor reveals those positions), how we choose to relate to students (as clients, or as partners etc.), can and will likely shape the way students view themselves in relation to their education pursuits, which can in turn limit that becoming which Chesterman spoke about.       1Chng: The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore2  Viewing Students as Partners    Mick Healey and colleagues (2014) have pointed out that “engaging students and staff effectively as partners in learning and teaching is arguably one of the most important issues facing higher education in the 21st century” (p. 7, emphasis mine). The focus of my essay is on student (not staff) engagement, and I wish to provide a way to think about partnership in the Singapore context, a context that many (both insiders and outsiders) assume to be essentially authoritarian, culturally rigid, highly hierarchicized, and therefore, will admit of little or even no possibility of student partnership. As Healey has alerted me (p.c.), however, much depends on what we mean by ‘partnership’ (i.e. what we mean and how we use the term). After all, the concept of “the teacher” derives its meaning in contrast to “students,” and the cultural structures are in place in some locations to ensure that this dialectic is maintained. We may be well into the 21st century, but we should not be surprised that such deep-seated assumptions about who does what in a class will take more than just an introduction of new concepts to change—power structures are experienced even if largely unobserved, even in the most liberated learning spaces.  If motivating student learning is about creating the conditions for learning (Biggs, 1994), then reducing barriers to learning—such as, activating the empathetic in teachers towards students; reducing the distance or closing the gap between teacher and student; and fostering a less rule-bound/oppressive culture, a less disciplined (in the Foucauldian sense) and a more conducive learning environment that is defined by a learning enterprise that suggests collaboration and partnership (though not necessarily equal, because someone has to lead, at some moment or other)—should be a first starting point. To modify a sentiment offered by Roxå and Mårtensson (2017) about institutional practices and structures that could work, whether consciously or subconsciously, to suppress academic agency, I think we should be consciously liberating students through transforming praxis, specifically in the way we relate to our students as co-journeyers in the learning process. In short, we need to find ways to partner with students, to find opportunities for them to be our collaborators in education, as partners, to allow them agency and ownership in their own learning journeys. How can we do this?   The happy news is: the “students as partners” literature is already filled with many good examples of creative partnerships, and there is no need for me to reinvent this wheel – this platform, Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education (TLTHE) is filled with examples of partnership, as are the many good works generated by lead practitioners in this domain (like Cathy Bovill, Alison Cook-Sather, Peter Felten, Mick Healey, and Kelly Matthews, to name just a few) who have already debated about the problematics and possibilities involved.  Is it possible to enable partnership with students in the Singapore classroom? What do we need to reimagine in order to position students as agents in [the learning and teaching process] in this particular context?      2Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 27 [2019]https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss27/33  Considering the Possibility of Students as Partners in Singapore  If indeed the Singapore context is as authoritarian and as hierarchical as many people assume  it to be, it will take an active reconsideration of the teacher-student dialectic to enable partnership to occur. Rephrasing Felten’s point slightly, we will need to redefine the purpose and practice of education and reconsider curricular outcomes and graduate attributes. Importantly, we will need to review and allow for certain types of student identities to flourish on campus—the type of practice that Felten iterated in his Atlanta keynote lecture included holistic education, focus on well-being, inclusion, critical attention to power, building trust and community, and creating openness and connection.  Much of everyday practice in Singapore classrooms is still teacher-centred to a large extent, even as the terms ‘active student engagement’ and ‘active learning’ are bandied around freely. Even though there are opportunities for project presentations (i.e. peer teaching supporting one another’s learning), role play (where students adopt the role of facilitators and peer reviewers), and student-led activities, many of these activities still originated from a teacher’s decision rather than from some kind of curricular negotiation prior to the design and final delivery. Very often, when asked why they would not allow students to have a voice in designing the curriculum, or to co-construct an assessment rubric, the response among many colleagues is, apart from time constraint, that students are novices, new to the discipline, and they ‘don’t know enough’ to be able to define their own learning and learning goals. Abbot and Gravett (2018) have, however, argued: “Indeed, there are times when the perspective of someone from the outside can offer a clearer reflection of one’s practice precisely because there is no content understanding or expertise coloring that reflection” (p. 13). I often wonder how much of this resistance is due to a teacher’s reluctance to relinquish his/her control in the classroom.   Having said that, there can be other barriers to partnership. In addition to the perception that students are not ready to participate in co-creating their own learning, as both Seow and Sim have pointed out (this issue), there are contextual, cultural barriers like ‘face,’ trust, and power issues that need to be first overcome to ease the way for partnership in the Singapore classroom.  If we re-think all these issues, as Felten has invited us to do, I believe we could realize the possibility of partnership, even in ‘authoritarian’ sites like the Singapore classroom.  There have been really good examples of partnership that have been undertaken by a number of Singapore colleagues. In the two examples described below, both faculty members have found ways to involve students more directly in their learning, and seem to have overcome obstacles discussed by Seow (about lack of trust and democracy in the classroom) and Sim (face issues). One such example is the NUS Young Educators in Science (YES) program that provides opportunities for undergraduates to develop outreach materials to excite and teach the public about Physics. These outreach activities were collected into “personalized portfolios” and presented to students when they graduate, and this has meant that each participating student has a document that tracks “their individual self-designed learning, science communication and service journeys” (Sow, 2018).   Another good example that puts students’ involvement in their own learning at the center is the use of podcasts to ‘make public’ student efforts in learning in a ‘Home’ module (McMorran, 2018). Most conventional student projects would have resulted in a written essay that is ‘shared’ only with the instructor. McMorran has moved away from this mode for 3Chng: The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore4  several years: by requiring his students to create a podcast to record their individual interpretations of what ‘home’ means; by filming their own chosen sites, overlaid with student commentary and self-sourced soundscapes; and subsequently sharing these with peers locally and globally through an online space, thus broadening the student ownership and impact of his/her learning (see https://blog.nus.edu.sg/homeonthedot/).  It could be argued that in both examples that students were provided the space and an explicit role to step out of the conventional frame that is reenacted in many classrooms, and this overt pedagogical move has adjusted the conventional footing between the teacher and students, thus allowing issues of power and face to recede into the background. As Sim puts it (this issue):   When students are given roles to perform, they are afforded the opportunity and space to step out of who they are, to assume a different identity, and to momentarily become someone else, all of which can reduce the intricate politics among students in a competitive culture and alter the ecology of the classroom.  I would argue that the instructors in the YES program and in the ‘Home’ module have to some extent reimagined the purpose of teaching and learning in the Singapore context, by allowing students more active involvement in the decision-making process at the module (McMorran’s) and program (Sow’s) levels. They have created the space that enables student engagement. In the process, they have gotten students to show what they can do, from their perspectives, to scaffold the learning process rather than to prescribe a final product. In short, when the instructors took a step back, partnership as a pedagogical practice became possible—where there are instructors who actively redefine the roles that both teachers and learners assume in those contexts.   However, to qualify as “partnership,” where “there is a collaboration between an institution/faculty/department and student, involving joint ownership and decision-making over both the process and outcome” (see Healey et al., p.16), there may need to be a more deliberate, consolidated effort that goes beyond the effort of individual colleagues, and extended beyond one activity, as an isolated practice. Though an ideal, collaboration and joint ownership in decision making from end-to-end will require a kind of openness and connected curriculum that are able to transcend the cultural specificities of particular contexts.    Epilogue  The Sow and McMorran examples discussed here are just two specific examples of ‘creative pedagogy.’ They have given me optimism that trust and democracy in the classroom can be realized. At the same time, these examples have showed that ‘face’ and power issues can be mitigated in favor of student agency, even if not fully overcome. This has not been an easy journey. As Seow and Sim have reported, even when instructors extend that trust to students, not all students will necessarily respond, or respond comfortably. The reality is that there is a much longer preset social climate that makes assumptions about roles in teaching and learning, and a politics surrounding classroom behavior that is already predefined culturally as norm, in places like Singapore, even as this climate is gradually shifting towards a more student-centric ecology. The competitive nature of the Singapore education is a very real phenomenon, and years of induction into a conventional way to teach and to learn will require a lot more work than a mere showcase of some good examples of practice.    4Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 27 [2019]https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss27/35  The world of the 21st century youth is said to be a ‘flatter’ world that is networked rather than hierarchical. If this is true and as the globally aware Singapore students themselves increasingly and confidently make demands to have an education experience that speaks to their own learning goals, as they find their own voice in their learning journey, it will not surprise me that the idea of partnership will evolve over time. In fact, I see a near future time when we will find ourselves engaged not in debates about the possibility of partnership, but in a different set of issues such as, what is the role of the teacher in light of partnership?; what pedagogy works to enable partnership, how, and for whom the partnership serves? When that day arrives, the debate about whether students are clients, customers, objects, products, or just learners with a view about their own learning will be superseded by the hows and whys of partnership, and importantly, will go on to focus on the role of the university.    References  Abbot, S. & Gravett, E. O. (2018). Querying the P(hD)ath to Educational Development in Higher Education. In C. Bossu  & N. Brown (Eds.), Professional and Support Staff in Higher Education (389-403). Singapore: Springer.    https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-981-10-6858-4_10.pdf  Chesterman, S. (2018). Are University Students Products or Customers? The Straits Times, Singapore. https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/are-university-students-products-or-customers, accessed 27 September 2018.  Felten, P. (2018). Reimagining the Place of Students in Educational Development. ICED-Atlanta, June 2018.    Felten, P., Abbot, S., Kirkwood, J., Long, A., Lubicz-Nawrocka, T., Mercer-Mapstone, L., & Verwoord, R. (2019). Reimagining the Place of Students in Academic Development. International Journal for Academic Development, 24:2.  Healey, M., Flint, A., Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement Through Partnership: Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. The Higher Education Academy.  McMorran, C. (2018). Students as podcast co-producers: Transforming student research into a professional podcast at the National University of Singapore.”  Roxå, T and Mårtensson, K. (2017). Agency and Structure in Academic Development Practices: Are We Liberating Academic Teachers or Are We Part of a Machinery Suppressing Them? International Journal for Academic Development, 95-105.  Seow, Y. (2019, this issue). Taking a Small Step towards Partnership.  Sim, J. (2019, this issue). The ‘Face’ Barriers to Partnership.  Sow, CH. (2018).Undergraduates are involved in Science outreach via Young Educators in Science Programme, National University of Singapore.” http://www.science.nus.edu.sg/studentlife/student-development/yes  5Chng: The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore6  Tight, M. (2013). Students: Customers, clients or pawns? Higher Education Policy, 26 (291 – 307), International Association of Universities, Palgrave.     6Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 27 [2019]https://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss27/3

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The Possibilities of Students as Partners – A Perspective from Singapore

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