A partnership with students in learning and teaching

Abstract

Do you think you have a good working relationship with your students? Are they enthusiastic, responsive and enquiring learners: essentially, are they engaged? If the answer is yes to all of those questions, then well done! But do you consider them your partners in learning? Working in partnership with students is a hot topic. Any online search in this area brings up a range of academic papers and information on this subject from institutional, student and sector perspectives, and a whole raft of publications from bodies such as the National Union of Students and Advance HE. But what do we mean when we talk about ‘working in partnership’? It has to begin at one level with student engagement, as without this there could not be any kind of partnership working. But what do we mean by this phrase? Philippa Levy, in Healey, Flint and Harrington (2014, foreword) notes that: ‘ “Student engagement” has become a core aim for the sector and, increasingly, is being linked to ideas about students’ roles as partners in their higher education communities.’ Student engagement as a sector-wide aim reflects a broad spectrum of activity including national student surveys and institutional student partnership agreements, through to engagement at the cohort and individual level where teaching and learning related activities are potentially co-constructed by lecturers and students together. ‘Engagement’ is in itself a contested term (Carey, 2013; Buckley, 2018) and, as Kahn (2017: 61) notes, we need to distinguish between ‘students undertaking a partnership with their educators’ and other forms of engagement such as ‘giving a response to a consultation . . . or by [students] taking a lead of their own’ in order to be clear in what we mean by engaging with our students in partnership working. Chapter 4