Richardson, Karen

Torda, Lee

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education
Issue 16 Fall 2015
Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty
Partnerships at Bridgewater State University
Lee Torda
Bridgewater State University
Karen Richardson
Bridgewater State University
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe
Part of the Higher Education and Teaching Commons
Let us know how access to this document benefits you.
Recommended Citation
Torda, Lee and Richardson, Karen "Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State University," Teaching
and Learning Together in Higher Education: Iss. 16 (2015), http://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss16/1
INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPING STUDENT-FACULTY PARTNERSHIPS AT 
BRIDGEWATER STATE UNIVERSITY 
 
Lee Torda, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Administrator, 
Bridgewater State University 
 
Karen Pagnano Richardson, Ed. D., Professor, Movement Arts, Health Promotion, and Leisure 
Studies Department, Bridgewater State University 
A Brief History of Faculty Development at Bridgewater 
Bridgewater State University (BSU) faculty are very proud of the culture of faculty-led faculty 
development that has contributed to student learning and faculty quality of life for the past 
decade.  To understand the story of our rich, productive, and rather unique culture, it is useful to 
know our origin story, which we offer here in brief. 
Faculty development began to thrive on our campus at the nexus of a number of college-wide 
initiatives. The then-new Core Curriculum (2004), with its writing, speaking, and quantitative 
intensive courses taught to first- and second-year students, demanded a different kind of teaching 
than our faculty was then prepared to do. The University committed funding and faculty time to 
help all faculty reflect on their teaching practice, learn new ways of engaging students, and 
introduce high-impact practices into our teaching repertoires. 
This initial push for faculty-led faculty development was supported by the Project Compass grant 
(2006), a NERCHE multi-year grant that funded improvements on New England public 
campuses in support of the retention of underrepresented populations. The mantra of Compass, 
to “teach every student,” has become the hallmark of faculty development on campus. At this 
time, the Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL) came online. OTL has continued and amplified 
the efforts of faculty on campus, learning from and taking advantage of the vast faculty 
knowledge already in place. In 2011, under the auspices of a Davis Educational Foundation 
Grant, a team of faculty and director-level administrators charted a further course for faculty 
development at BSU through to 2015. 
What we hope becomes clear through the essays included in this issue of Teaching and Learning 
Together in Higher Education is that faculty development at BSU has, to our institution’s credit, 
developed most fruitfully out of the intersection of what our faculty have been interested in 
doing with and for our students and the wider community—things like sustainability, social 
justice, undergraduate research, just to name a few—and what the institution and its leaders have 
determined to be the values and goals of BSU. As such, faculty development as a movement has 
grown and changed over the years, emphasis has shifted, and new priorities have risen up. 
Additionally, the unique structure of the leadership of faculty development at BSU has also been 
a living, breathing, changing thing: faculty (new faculty and more senior folks, faculty who 
identify as scholars or as teachers, part-time and full) rotate in and out of different leadership 
positions (made possible through Alternative Professional Responsibilities, which are 3-6 credit 
per semester course releases) so that new ideas and fresh perspectives inform our practice at 
1
Torda and Richardson: Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State University
every turn (and, it must be said, the individuals involved in faculty development are energized by 
the experience as well). And this is where you, reader, find us now: we are actively engaged in 
exploring what student/faculty partnership looks like—partnership in all its many definitions and 
iterations. 
Before we continue: a word about how this collection of essays came to be. Annually, the faculty 
development leaders on campus host a faculty development day. Themes and speakers are 
determined by the faculty at large in partnership with the leadership group and the OTL. Last 
year, our theme was “the signature experience” at BSU. In other words, what academic and co-
curricular experiences defined a student’s time on our campus? In support of that theme, we 
invited Alison Cook-Sather to campus. We were intrigued and energized by what Alison had to 
say about working with students, and, too, recognized in her work something of our own 
teaching values. The day was a great success. Alison’s keynote address and follow-up workshop 
generated great excitement about the possibility of partnership with our students even as we 
didn’t entirely understand what that meant or what it might look like on our campus. 
To support us in defining what student-faculty partnership could look like on BSU’s campus 
across various courses and programs, Alison returned to BSU in February for a half-day 
workshop centered around a deeper understanding of partnership. She had us identify existing 
partnerships or opportunities to grow partnerships on our campus. After that workshop, Alison 
invited our faculty development leaders to contribute essays chronicling existing and developing 
student partnerships on the BSU Campus. Initially, many of us (Lee included) weren’t even sure 
we had partnership experiences to write about. But upon more thoughtful reflection, some 
nudging, and Alison’s return visit to campus for a kind of writing boot camp, we are happy to 
present to you ten stories from the BSU campus chronicling our evolving thinking and 
programming around student/faculty partnerships. 
Overview of the Essays in this Issue 
The result of all faculty development is that people understand pedagogy and they understand the 
range of ways student can participate in their own learning process. Interestingly, one theme that 
connects the essays in this collection is that they started out not as true partnerships between 
faculty and students but rather as collaborations focused on supporting student learning. In most 
cases (Maura Rosenthal is a notable exception) students were paired with faculty to support 
learning objectives in various courses or other academic programs. Faculty identify initially 
seeing the relationship more hierarchically: students would be the beneficiary of these 
partnerships. But, to a person, all of these authors identify, by the end of their time working in 
collaboration with students, the ways in which they learned about themselves as teachers, about 
the courses they thought they were teaching (versus the courses they were teaching). They 
worked their way to partnership—from hierarchy through collaboration. 
We begin with three essays that document formal, programmatic relationships between students 
and faculty that grew into something more—something akin to true partnership and, additionally, 
inspired those involved to want future student/faculty partnerships to be more explicitly 
reciprocal.  In MaryBeth Tobin’s and Caitlin Golden’s essay titled “Peer Assisted Learning:  
Unexpected Benefits for all Stakeholders – Students, Peer Leaders & Faculty,” Tobin and 
2
Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 16 [2015]
http://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss16/1
Golden share their experience of co-leading a peer-leader program and the unexpected benefits 
that inure to students, faculty and especially, peer leaders. They share the value of peer leader 
feedback in their efforts to continually improve the program and in informing their own 
pedagogy in an entry-level financial accounting course. 
In the second essay, Minae Savas’s, Dori AuCoin’s, and Fernanda Ferreira’s “Learner 
Empowerment: A Collaborative Approach to Peer-Assisted Learning in Global Languages,” 
Savas, AuCoin, and Ferreira share the trajectory of the Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL) program in 
the Foreign Languages Department, which has undertaken a series of projects to build an 
encouraging and non-judgmental learning environment, specifically in language learning, and to 
incorporate a partnership between learners, tutors, supervisors and professors. In Jennifer 
Manak’s and Jenny Olin Shanahan’s essay, “Learning to SOAR: Partnering with 
Underrepresented Students in Research,” Manak and Shanahan examine the mentor relationships 
that developed within the SOAR (Student Opportunities as Apprentice Researchers) program. 
The program matches underrepresented students with faculty in research partnerships that 
facilitate faculty scholarship and improve the retention and success of students from underserved 
groups. 
The next four essays in this issue involve classroom-based partnerships through which faculty 
invite students to co-create and co-manage the entire classroom experience in ever increasing 
degrees.  Maura Rosenthal’s essay, “Sharing Power to Promote Deeper Learning,” explores how 
Rosenthal partnered with an entire class during the semester to solve a problem in the book club 
learning activities she had planned.  She noted, “The  more I share power with students, the less I 
feel like I am in a constant tug-o-war where I am pulling students towards learning course 
content that I chose for them and they are resisting my pull.”  Anne Doyle’s essay titled 
“Creating a Learning Environment with Shared Responsibility for Assessment” focuses on 
Doyle’s work with her Introduction to Linguistics course. She shares her journey as she 
discovered that her goals were best served when she maximized the possibilities in her classes 
for partnership through inviting discussion about the focus and purposes of key assessment in the 
course. 
In Susan Eliason’s essay, “Using Student Feedback to Fuel the Family Project,” Eliason shares 
her desire to create with students more authentic assignments that enhance learning through the 
use of the project approach (Pianta, 2006).  The fourth essay in this set of classroom-focused 
partnerships is Karen Richardson’s, Deborah Sheehy’s, and Misti Neutzling’s. In their essay, 
“Students as Partners with Faculty in a Teacher Education Program," Richardson, Sheehy, and 
Neutzling share their experiences of working with student partners within a Physical Education 
Teacher Education Program. Through partnership they more deeply understand how their role as 
professor was a barrier to open and honest student-faculty communication. 
Finally, the last set of essays explores partnerships evolving beyond the boundaries of the 
classroom and even beyond the campus. Lee Torda, Kirsten Ridlen, and Marjorie Howe write 
about their experience co-creating a writing and travel experience in Israel in their essay “Chaos 
in the Promiseland: Mentorship as Partnership in Undergraduate Research.” They explore how 
they all negotiated respective expertise and inexperience while traveling, reading, and writing in 
a study abroad/undergraduate research opportunity. 
3
Torda and Richardson: Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State University
In their essay, “Co-creating Equity and Justice: Student and Employee Partnerships for Racial 
Justice,” Willison et al. share reflections on partnerships between campus staff, faculty and 
students to put on three specific social justice events designed to initiate discussion and raise 
awareness about racial justice. The final essay in this set and the collection overall is Roben 
Torosyan’s “Refreshed & Humbled: Altered Assumptions About Power and Payoffs.” Starting 
with a focus on a long-term, shifting relationship with work-study students serving as students 
consultants in his class, Torosyan’s piece takes an outward turn as he describes how he included 
graduate student voices from around the country as he wrote an external grant to support 
partnerships between research and teaching intensive institutions. 
A Continuum of Emerging Partnerships 
As the essays in this issue make clear, we are in different places in our partnerships with students 
on our campus. Some are quite purposeful and planned for, but many are partnerships that began 
via a different kind of relationship. If we consider how the development of student/faculty 
partnerships fits into the larger picture of faculty development and student engagement on our 
campus, we start with faculty development that asks us to design experiences to engage students 
in our classes. But there comes a moment when you are going down that path where, if you 
really mean it, you suddenly cede the perfect control you have over the learning environment and 
invite your students in, invite them to not simply be engaged but also to design and redesign 
what that engagement looks like. We, and our colleagues, find ourselves chronicling multiple 
versions of this moment in the development of student-faculty partnerships at our institution. 
 
4
Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 16 [2015]
http://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss16/1


Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State University

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

Teaching and Learning Together in Higher EducationIssue 16 Fall 2015Introduction: Developing Student-FacultyPartnerships at Bridgewater State UniversityLee TordaBridgewater State UniversityKaren RichardsonBridgewater State UniversityFollow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthePart of the Higher Education and Teaching CommonsLet us know how access to this document benefits you.Recommended CitationTorda, Lee and Richardson, Karen "Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State University," Teachingand Learning Together in Higher Education: Iss. 16 (2015), http://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss16/1INTRODUCTION: DEVELOPING STUDENT-FACULTY PARTNERSHIPS AT BRIDGEWATER STATE UNIVERSITY  Lee Torda, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Administrator, Bridgewater State University  Karen Pagnano Richardson, Ed. D., Professor, Movement Arts, Health Promotion, and Leisure Studies Department, Bridgewater State University A Brief History of Faculty Development at Bridgewater Bridgewater State University (BSU) faculty are very proud of the culture of faculty-led faculty development that has contributed to student learning and faculty quality of life for the past decade.  To understand the story of our rich, productive, and rather unique culture, it is useful to know our origin story, which we offer here in brief. Faculty development began to thrive on our campus at the nexus of a number of college-wide initiatives. The then-new Core Curriculum (2004), with its writing, speaking, and quantitative intensive courses taught to first- and second-year students, demanded a different kind of teaching than our faculty was then prepared to do. The University committed funding and faculty time to help all faculty reflect on their teaching practice, learn new ways of engaging students, and introduce high-impact practices into our teaching repertoires. This initial push for faculty-led faculty development was supported by the Project Compass grant (2006), a NERCHE multi-year grant that funded improvements on New England public campuses in support of the retention of underrepresented populations. The mantra of Compass, to “teach every student,” has become the hallmark of faculty development on campus. At this time, the Office of Teaching and Learning (OTL) came online. OTL has continued and amplified the efforts of faculty on campus, learning from and taking advantage of the vast faculty knowledge already in place. In 2011, under the auspices of a Davis Educational Foundation Grant, a team of faculty and director-level administrators charted a further course for faculty development at BSU through to 2015. What we hope becomes clear through the essays included in this issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education is that faculty development at BSU has, to our institution’s credit, developed most fruitfully out of the intersection of what our faculty have been interested in doing with and for our students and the wider community—things like sustainability, social justice, undergraduate research, just to name a few—and what the institution and its leaders have determined to be the values and goals of BSU. As such, faculty development as a movement has grown and changed over the years, emphasis has shifted, and new priorities have risen up. Additionally, the unique structure of the leadership of faculty development at BSU has also been a living, breathing, changing thing: faculty (new faculty and more senior folks, faculty who identify as scholars or as teachers, part-time and full) rotate in and out of different leadership positions (made possible through Alternative Professional Responsibilities, which are 3-6 credit per semester course releases) so that new ideas and fresh perspectives inform our practice at 1Torda and Richardson: Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State Universityevery turn (and, it must be said, the individuals involved in faculty development are energized by the experience as well). And this is where you, reader, find us now: we are actively engaged in exploring what student/faculty partnership looks like—partnership in all its many definitions and iterations. Before we continue: a word about how this collection of essays came to be. Annually, the faculty development leaders on campus host a faculty development day. Themes and speakers are determined by the faculty at large in partnership with the leadership group and the OTL. Last year, our theme was “the signature experience” at BSU. In other words, what academic and co-curricular experiences defined a student’s time on our campus? In support of that theme, we invited Alison Cook-Sather to campus. We were intrigued and energized by what Alison had to say about working with students, and, too, recognized in her work something of our own teaching values. The day was a great success. Alison’s keynote address and follow-up workshop generated great excitement about the possibility of partnership with our students even as we didn’t entirely understand what that meant or what it might look like on our campus. To support us in defining what student-faculty partnership could look like on BSU’s campus across various courses and programs, Alison returned to BSU in February for a half-day workshop centered around a deeper understanding of partnership. She had us identify existing partnerships or opportunities to grow partnerships on our campus. After that workshop, Alison invited our faculty development leaders to contribute essays chronicling existing and developing student partnerships on the BSU Campus. Initially, many of us (Lee included) weren’t even sure we had partnership experiences to write about. But upon more thoughtful reflection, some nudging, and Alison’s return visit to campus for a kind of writing boot camp, we are happy to present to you ten stories from the BSU campus chronicling our evolving thinking and programming around student/faculty partnerships. Overview of the Essays in this Issue The result of all faculty development is that people understand pedagogy and they understand the range of ways student can participate in their own learning process. Interestingly, one theme that connects the essays in this collection is that they started out not as true partnerships between faculty and students but rather as collaborations focused on supporting student learning. In most cases (Maura Rosenthal is a notable exception) students were paired with faculty to support learning objectives in various courses or other academic programs. Faculty identify initially seeing the relationship more hierarchically: students would be the beneficiary of these partnerships. But, to a person, all of these authors identify, by the end of their time working in collaboration with students, the ways in which they learned about themselves as teachers, about the courses they thought they were teaching (versus the courses they were teaching). They worked their way to partnership—from hierarchy through collaboration. We begin with three essays that document formal, programmatic relationships between students and faculty that grew into something more—something akin to true partnership and, additionally, inspired those involved to want future student/faculty partnerships to be more explicitly reciprocal.  In MaryBeth Tobin’s and Caitlin Golden’s essay titled “Peer Assisted Learning:  Unexpected Benefits for all Stakeholders – Students, Peer Leaders & Faculty,” Tobin and 2Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 16 [2015]http://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss16/1Golden share their experience of co-leading a peer-leader program and the unexpected benefits that inure to students, faculty and especially, peer leaders. They share the value of peer leader feedback in their efforts to continually improve the program and in informing their own pedagogy in an entry-level financial accounting course. In the second essay, Minae Savas’s, Dori AuCoin’s, and Fernanda Ferreira’s “Learner Empowerment: A Collaborative Approach to Peer-Assisted Learning in Global Languages,” Savas, AuCoin, and Ferreira share the trajectory of the Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL) program in the Foreign Languages Department, which has undertaken a series of projects to build an encouraging and non-judgmental learning environment, specifically in language learning, and to incorporate a partnership between learners, tutors, supervisors and professors. In Jennifer Manak’s and Jenny Olin Shanahan’s essay, “Learning to SOAR: Partnering with Underrepresented Students in Research,” Manak and Shanahan examine the mentor relationships that developed within the SOAR (Student Opportunities as Apprentice Researchers) program. The program matches underrepresented students with faculty in research partnerships that facilitate faculty scholarship and improve the retention and success of students from underserved groups. The next four essays in this issue involve classroom-based partnerships through which faculty invite students to co-create and co-manage the entire classroom experience in ever increasing degrees.  Maura Rosenthal’s essay, “Sharing Power to Promote Deeper Learning,” explores how Rosenthal partnered with an entire class during the semester to solve a problem in the book club learning activities she had planned.  She noted, “The  more I share power with students, the less I feel like I am in a constant tug-o-war where I am pulling students towards learning course content that I chose for them and they are resisting my pull.”  Anne Doyle’s essay titled “Creating a Learning Environment with Shared Responsibility for Assessment” focuses on Doyle’s work with her Introduction to Linguistics course. She shares her journey as she discovered that her goals were best served when she maximized the possibilities in her classes for partnership through inviting discussion about the focus and purposes of key assessment in the course. In Susan Eliason’s essay, “Using Student Feedback to Fuel the Family Project,” Eliason shares her desire to create with students more authentic assignments that enhance learning through the use of the project approach (Pianta, 2006).  The fourth essay in this set of classroom-focused partnerships is Karen Richardson’s, Deborah Sheehy’s, and Misti Neutzling’s. In their essay, “Students as Partners with Faculty in a Teacher Education Program," Richardson, Sheehy, and Neutzling share their experiences of working with student partners within a Physical Education Teacher Education Program. Through partnership they more deeply understand how their role as professor was a barrier to open and honest student-faculty communication. Finally, the last set of essays explores partnerships evolving beyond the boundaries of the classroom and even beyond the campus. Lee Torda, Kirsten Ridlen, and Marjorie Howe write about their experience co-creating a writing and travel experience in Israel in their essay “Chaos in the Promiseland: Mentorship as Partnership in Undergraduate Research.” They explore how they all negotiated respective expertise and inexperience while traveling, reading, and writing in a study abroad/undergraduate research opportunity. 3Torda and Richardson: Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State UniversityIn their essay, “Co-creating Equity and Justice: Student and Employee Partnerships for Racial Justice,” Willison et al. share reflections on partnerships between campus staff, faculty and students to put on three specific social justice events designed to initiate discussion and raise awareness about racial justice. The final essay in this set and the collection overall is Roben Torosyan’s “Refreshed & Humbled: Altered Assumptions About Power and Payoffs.” Starting with a focus on a long-term, shifting relationship with work-study students serving as students consultants in his class, Torosyan’s piece takes an outward turn as he describes how he included graduate student voices from around the country as he wrote an external grant to support partnerships between research and teaching intensive institutions. A Continuum of Emerging Partnerships As the essays in this issue make clear, we are in different places in our partnerships with students on our campus. Some are quite purposeful and planned for, but many are partnerships that began via a different kind of relationship. If we consider how the development of student/faculty partnerships fits into the larger picture of faculty development and student engagement on our campus, we start with faculty development that asks us to design experiences to engage students in our classes. But there comes a moment when you are going down that path where, if you really mean it, you suddenly cede the perfect control you have over the learning environment and invite your students in, invite them to not simply be engaged but also to design and redesign what that engagement looks like. We, and our colleagues, find ourselves chronicling multiple versions of this moment in the development of student-faculty partnerships at our institution.  4Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education, 16 [2015]http://repository.brynmawr.edu/tlthe/vol1/iss16/1

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Introduction: Developing Student-Faculty Partnerships at Bridgewater State University

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