How to start and design a SaP project
Designing a SaP project can feel daunting, but it’s also an exciting, collaborative and can make transformational changes to your teaching, professional practice, and pedagogy.
A good place to start is to consider your own job, role and area. What challenges do you face? What do you wish you knew more about? And which of these challenges or gaps in knowledges do you think could be addressed with student expertise?
For example:
- As a Unit Chair, you are constantly trying to find new ways to explain a certain assessment task. Students are confused about what is require of them, but you’re not sure whether it is the teaching aspect or the assessment design causing the major pain points. You look to students who have previously completed this subject as experts in co-designing and co-creating a new assessment task.
- There is one unit, service or event that has routinely low engagement, despite high student satisfaction for those who do engage with them. You engage with student expertise to generate ideas, resources or insights to improve engagement.
In Deakin’s Tales of Teaching, Dr Jo Elliott and Dr Mollie Dollinger talk about how to get started with Students as Partners, with suggestions for how we can increase the involvement of students in decision-making at all levels of the University. Listen to this podcast and then consider the questions below.
Where can student partnership take place?
To date, research (Bovill, 2017; Healey, Flint & Harrington) has already identified several broad dimensions where a partnership can take place including curriculum, pedagogy, subject-based inquiry, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and student experience research, services and programs and finally – governance!
In short, there are plenty of dimensions within the university where a partnership can and should occur. And those are just on a university-level, other research has dug deeper and found there are also domains of partnership within a specific department or area. For example, the library may have as many as seven domains of partnership (see Salisbury, Dollinger & Vanderlelie, 2020).
What’s important when considering where you want to design a partnership project is to consider where student expertise is needed. For example, maybe you want to create new learning resources to support difficult topics in your subject (curriculum)? Or maybe, you are researching the first-year experience for students and would like student partners to be co-researchers (student experience research)?
How can student partnership take place?
The second question to ask yourself – What approach or form of student partnership will you take? At Deakin, as discussed in previous sections, we have identified four approaches to student partnership. These are the four pillars in the Student Partnership Framework: students as sounding boards, influencers, decision-makers, and co-creators.
You’ll want to make sure that the approach you select matches the aims of the project, as well as aligns to available resources and time.
| Curriculum and/or curriculum support resources | Pedagogy | Subject Based Inquiry | SoTL and student experience research | Services+Programs | Governance | |
| Students as Sounding Boards | ||||||
| Students as Influencers | ||||||
| Students as Decision-Makers | ||||||
| Students as Co-Creators |
References
Bovill, C. (2017). A framework to explore roles within student-staff partnerships in higher education: Which students are partners, when, and in what ways?. International Journal for Students as Partners, 1(1).
Healey, M., Flint, A., & Harrington, K. (2016). Students as partners: Reflections on a conceptual model. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 4(2), 8-20.
Salisbury, F., Dollinger, M., & Vanderlelie, J. (2020). Students as Partners in the Academic Library: Co-Designing for Transformation. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 26(2-4), 304-321.