An expansive approach to Success in Student-Staff Partnership
Tai Peseta, Samuel Suresh, Jen Alford, Jackson Edwards & Tamima Rahman WSU Student Partner team, Division of Education, Western Sydney University
In September this year, the Student-Staff Partnership (SSP) community celebrated 10 years of the National Students as Partners (SaP) Roundtable by going International. Framed around three sessions – Inspirations; Practices focused on Action; and Aspirations – my colleague Samuel Suresh and I had the wonderful honour of facilitating Session 1 on Inspirations, and we were thrilled to be in conversation with Professors Alison Cook-Sather and Mick Healey, both of whom have made a significant contribution to the SSP community.
Participants shared all kinds of inspirations about why and how SSP has become a practice for them – consequential chats with colleagues in corridors; seeing students in need of care; a desire to experiment, innovate and improve; and a commitment to revolutionising education through partnership. The SSP community is littered with narratives of transformation – big and small – and for the most part, it’s a community that rarely tires of hearing them.
Our team, WSU Student Partners, has been trucking along in the SSP space for some time now – since 2017 – when then Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Simon Barrie had a vision for curriculum transformation, explicitly shaped by a partnership pedagogy. Although involving students in curriculum co-creation wasn’t at all new back in 2017, the idea that students – not in governance roles – might contribute authentically to strategic curriculum transformation as partners seemed a tricky prospect to imagine, let alone fully realise. While there is a persistent discourse about students’ lived experience as learners being the basis of their partnership expertise, what our team has found is that student partners’ most impactful contribution is when their expertise intersects with questions and curiosities about context:
What is curriculum and how does it get made in universities?
Why do degree structures look the way they do?
Why do tutorials feel like they are comprised of teachers reading from their slides?
Why do we need to write 15 essays across our degrees?
Ask any university teacher for an answer to these questions and the response might be anything from straightforward to ‘don’t know’, or it could open a whole can of worms.
Yet these critically reflexive questions about student-hood don’t tend to be the kinds of questions students are routinely encouraged to ask their teachers. Or, if they do ask, the disposition of inquiry tends to be dismissed as complaint. That SSP can be a route for students to ask, be curious about, to undertake research, and co-create solutions alongside staff – and be heard with legitimacy matched by inquiry – is part of what anthropologist Gina Hunter calls cultivating students’ capacity to ‘see institutionally’.
There are broader questions to ask of SSP too – about impact, transformation, and success. In our view, there is a reasonably immature conversation about success in the SSP literature. In part, we suspect that this has to do with its historical focus on ‘ethos’; that is, on the process of partnership. We see it emphasised in the early influential SSP reports (e.g., Mick Healey, Abbi Flint & Kathy Harrington) and texts (e.g., Alison Cook-Sather, Cathy Bovill & Peter Felten). In these imaginings, there appears to be less of a focus on the ‘outputs, outcomes and impact’ of partnership. While we understand the emphasis on process is because of SSP's radical encounter (i.e., re-arranging both boundaries and power), we wonder why it can feel so tough sometimes to hang onto a language for interrogating quality in SSP. In short, how do we know our SSP work is good? Is that even a question we regularly ask? And who gets to answer it? How might we understand success in SSP in a more expansive way?
Here’s our ‘go’ at a set of draft propositions for SSP success. Ask yourself whether they resonate.
SSP is successful when:
A project or context chooses partnership as a method for organising and narrating itself.
Equity student cohorts are prioritised as participants in partnership.
All students and staff have an opportunity to engage in it.
Students and staff report and communicate growth (of all kinds) and skills development through participating in it.
The project outcomes are met.
The artefacts and resources co-created through the partnership opportunity are high quality.
The artefacts, resources, or experiences are used by the university community (or adopted elsewhere) for improvement (beyond the initial partners and project/context).
The artefacts, resources, or experiences of partnership establish a new practice, procedure, or policy in the university.
There is an improvement in the quality of student experience because of a partnership project, resource or artefact.
There is an improvement in the quality of the staff experience because of a partnership project, resource or artefact.
There is an increase in the number of projects/contexts that frame themselves as opportunities for partnership.
There is more partnership knowledge, know-how and capacity in the university (people who know how to do SSP and choose to enact it) alongside an active and visible partnership culture.
There is impactful scholarly and research activity (publications, conferences, grants, HDR scholarships etc) associated with partnership, which count in quality assessment exercises.
Ongoing resources are made available to grow engagement in partnership (e.g., for funding, training, and positions)
It is a strategic goal of the university and is attached to metrics which are routinely reported.
One routine answer to these 15 propositions about SSP success is of course: ‘it depends’. Another is that they’re all interdependent. Some teachers will have a natural disposition for partnership and plough ahead as a matter of judgement, others will look for signals that it is valued by their local culture before they dip their toe in, and others may resist altogether. Another response is that too long a bow is being drawn between SSP as an input, and the quality of the general student experience as an outcome. We have a great deal of sympathy for all those perspectives. Causal relations are notoriously hard to pin down, are rarely neat, and we are more likely to veer into the familiar territory of correlation, and even then, with some caution about claims and conclusions.
Unashamedly, our draft propositions range across micro, meso, macro, and mega institutional levels, and include elements of inputs, ethos, outputs, outcomes, impact, culture and strategy. And that’s intentional because of what we already know about the kinds of microcultures, conditions and environments that support and discourage individuals from starting and sustaining good educational practices (see Paul Trowler on teaching and learning regimes, and Torgny Roxå and Katarina Mårtensson on strong academic microcultures). A single teacher in a classroom searching for a way to comprehend whether a pedagogical innovation framed as SSP has been successful may well feel overwhelmed by the suite of propositions. And that’s understandable. Not all are relevant in every context.
These propositions are best understood as provocations. The point is not to accept them at face-value; the point is to interrogate the view of SSP success we each hold, to recognise that others may have a different perspective, to be curious about alternative views as generous interlocutors, and to aim to land somewhere common enough. It’s to have harder conversations about what constitutes success in our SSP initiatives, other than students participating as partners.
Crafting these propositions has pushed our WSU Student Partner team to see more clearly what’s in our control, what isn’t, to set our own narrative (where possible), and to see the work ahead as expanding what success looks like for students, staff, the project/context, and the University. If your work is SSP, we hope there’s something in these propositions that resonate for you.
Tai Peseta, Academic Lead, Student-Staff Partnership, Division of Education, WSU
Samuel Suresh, Coordinating Lead, Student-Staff Partnership, WSU Student Partner team
Jen Alford, Jackson Edwards & Tamima Rahman are all Student Partners, WSU Student Partner team
Follow our work on Instagram: wsustudentpartners