Cultivating student–staff partnerships through research and practice

Cultivating student–staff partnerships through research and practice Student engagement is a central theme in higher education around the world. Over the last several years, student–staff partnerships have increasingly been portrayed as a primary path towards engagement. Indeed, Healey, Flint, and Harrington argue 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 twenty-first century’ (2014, p. 7). This special issue explores practices and research on student–staff partnerships, and considers the implications for academic development. In higher education, partnerships between students and academic staff in learning and teaching can be understood 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, & Felten, 2014, pp. 6–7). Partnership practices vary widely across disciplines, institutions, and countries. This special issue reflects that diversity with articles from Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the UK. These articles highlight that partnership is an emergent practice that is often unfamiliar to students, staff, and academic developers (Bovill, 2014) – and that partnership does not always fit easily within existing cultures in higher education. A common theme throughout this special issue is the difficulty of moving partnership from theory to practice. In the first article, Marquis and colleagues evaluate a student scholars programme at McMaster University in Canada. The authors, including both students and staff, use the theoretical lens of threshold concepts to consider the troublesome nature of partnerships for all involved. This article is refreshingly honest about some of the challenges faced in this work, including when staff attempt to make space for student perspectives yet paradoxically leave students feeling less capable of contributing to the partnership. Woolmer, with student and staff colleagues at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, critically analyze their experiences when co-creating an undergraduate course that spanned a range of science disciplines. They underscore the importance of beginning partnerships by explicitly addressing the aims and intended processes of the work. At the same time, they stress that too much early attention to structure can stifle the development of authentic partnership. Bergmark and Westman, scholars in teacher education at the University of Luleå in Sweden, extend this consideration of processes by emphasizing the democratic values at the heart of partnerships. In common with other authors in this issue, they carefully consider some of the tensions in trying to encourage students to take on more responsibility for co-design when students report that it is ‘hard to give concrete suggestions on tasks when you have little knowledge about the subject’. Jensen and Bennett at the University of Huddersfield in England outline an interdisciplinary study of their student–staff partnership programme focused on enhancing dialogue about learning and teaching through observation of teaching sessions. The most successful of these partnerships, Jensen and Bennett conclude, ‘created space for conversation and collaboration, a liminal space where students and staff stepped outside normal roles and the traditional learner-teacher relationship’.