Abstract
This paper analyses students’ experiences of a partnership learning community in which students take on an unusual amount of power over decision-making in the design and implementation of interdisciplinary education. Student-driven contexts are largely absent in literature on partnership in higher education, which has thus far been based on empirical study of institutional contexts in which faculty have more power than students. This reveals a gap in knowledge about arrangements in which students have more control over decision-making than faculty. Drawing from in-depth interviews with student course coordinators, and using the concepts of roles and liminality, we analyse how course coordinators perceive their challenging and often ambiguous roles in which they renegotiate their relationships to staff, students, and the university itself. We then identify some challenges and opportunities for partnership within this context.
Highlights
Each employee that we interviewed has worked as a course coordinators (CCs) from 9 months to 3 years with the exception of one long-term employee who has worked at Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS) for 8 years, originally starting as a CC
Current conceptualisations of student-faculty partnership in higher education (HE) commonly assume an institutional context in which faculty have the balance of authority and power over decision-making
This study has analysed the latter type of partnership, zooming in on the experiences of student CCs who manage design and implementation of sustainability education in a student-driven university centre
Summary
Partnerships that position students-as-partners, co-creators, producers, and change agents in higher education (HE) have been shown to challenge university norms and hierarchies (Dunne & Zandstra, 2011; Healey, Flint, & Harrington, 2014; Cook-Sather, Bovill, & Felten, 2014; Iversen, Pedersen, Krogh, & Jensen, 2015), raise awareness about and even reshape student and staff roles and identities in a variety of contexts (Healey, 2017), and invite reflection on the value of HE and the inadequacy of treating it as a consumer product (Dunne & Zandstra, 2011; Gärdebo & Wiggberg, 2012; Sveriges förenade studentkårer, 2013; Bryson, 2014; National Union of Students, 2015). Partnership reshapes student and staff roles and leads to new types of relationships and processes that fundamentally change teaching and learning environments (Cook-Sather et al, 2014; Bovill, 2014; Bovill, CookSather, Felten, Millard & Moore-Cherry, 2016). A process of student engagement, understood as staff and students learning and working together to foster engaged student learning and engaging learning and teaching enhancement. In this sense partnership is a relationship in which all participants are actively engaged in and stand to gain from the process of learning and working together. Students actively participate in activities that are usually only accessible to staff members, like curriculum design or the scholarship of teaching and learning and, partnership arrangements offer benefits that are co-created and not accessible to students or staff alone
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