Introduction: Digging Deeper into Partnership: The Stories Behind the Cases in Engaging Students as Partners in Learning & Teaching
Recommended Citation
Cook-Sather, Alison "Introduction: Digging Deeper into Partnership: The Stories Behind the Cases in Engaging Students as Partners
in Learning & Teaching," Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education: Iss.
Introduction: Digging Deeper into Partnership: The Stories Behind the Cases in Engaging Students as Partners in Learning & Teaching
Alison Cook-Sather 0
0 Bryn Mawr College
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INTRODUCTION: DIGGING DEEPER INTO PARTNERSHIP: THE STORIES
BEHIND THE CASES IN ENGAGING STUDENTS AS PARTNERS IN LEARNING &
TEACHING
Alison Cook-Sather, Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Education and Coordinator of the
Teaching and Learning Institute (TLI) at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges
Introduction
There are many ways to tell the stories of student-faculty partnerships. Each provides a different
angle on what is, by all accounts, a complex process of negotiation—around power, around
position and process, and around knowledge construction. Third-party analyses can raise these
issues from an outside perspective, but ‘back-story’ narratives of the inspirations, experiences,
and learnings penned by participants themselves allow for digging deeper. They provide
glimpses into the collaborative work that might be most intriguing to those already engaged in or
considering partnering in teaching and learning, and they include the affective as well as
practical dimensions of partnership that are not as often highlighted in standard publications.
This issue of Teaching and Learning Together Higher Education features essays written by
students, faculty, and staff involved in a number of the examples of partnership presented in
Engaging Students as Partners in Learning & Teaching: A Guide for Faculty (Jossey-Bass,
2014). In that book, Catherine Bovill, Peter Felten, and I provide theoretical grounding and
practical guidelines for developing student-faculty partnerships that affirm and improve teaching
and learning in higher education, and we include a wide range of examples and case studies. The
essays here tell expanded versions of the stories only mentioned in our book. Individually, they
provide the rationales behind, approaches to, and outcomes of their particular partnerships, and
collectively they offer us insight into the complexities and possibilities of such efforts.
These essays are engaging not only for the stories they tell but also for the questions they raise
about the inspiration behind and the challenges of partnership. Themes highlighted in Engaging
Students as Partners in Learning & Teaching are elaborated here: how, through partnership,
students sometimes doubt their capacities at first and then empower themselves; faculty
sometimes find their assumptions about teaching and learners challenged; and both students and
teachers develop new insights, capacities, and commitments. The overarching theme of these
essays is the potential for transformation, and the essays detail what forms such transformation
can take.
The first two essays offer case studies that span course design and assessment. They provide
concrete examples of changes made to courses in response to student suggestions, and they
enumerate the benefits to student learning of such changes and the process of making them:
In “Improving Engagement an Learning through Sharing Course Design with Students: A
Multilevel Case,” Sarah Bunnell, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Ohio Wesleyan University,
and Dan Bernstein, Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas, offer four brief
narratives about the rich collaborations that followed from multi-level exchanges they had across
courses. The stories focus respectively on enhancing student connections to course themes,
making the capstone assignment integrative, using out-of-class technologies, and mentoring
graduate students in best practices in teaching. As Bunnell and Bernstein remind us in the
conclusion of their essay: “While there is great disparity among faculty, graduate students, and
undergraduates in their knowledge of their fields, skills in intellectual interactions, and
understanding of instructional design, there is wisdom in the experiences that each of those
groups have with college level courses and learning environments, and having all those
perspectives in a single conversation gives a fuller picture of how learning is or is not taking
place.”
In “Learning Through Partnership in Assessment,” Susan J. Deeley, Senior University Teacher
and Convenor of Undergraduate Studies, School of Social and Political Sciences, and Ruth A.
Brown, M.A. (Hons) Social Sciences (Psychology and Public Policy) Class of 2014, both of
University of Glasgow, Scotland, offer two case examples of learning through student-teacher
partnership in assessment. Alternating voices, they share both their philosophical perspectives
and their experiences, highlighting in particular the ways in which some of their assumptions
about what would engage students were challenged. Providing two examples (...truncated)