Three models for embracing student expertise in the development of pedagogical partnership programs

Abstract

Nearly a decade ago, two colleagues and I defined student-faculty (student-staff) pedagogical partnership as premised on the notion that students have expertise to contribute to processes of preparing for, reflecting on, and revising teaching and learning practices (Cook-Sather et al., 2014). This expertise is based in part on students' experiences as students. It is also informed by unique intersections of socio-cultural identities and lived experiences that students bring to educational contexts and analyses (Brown et al., 2020;Cook-Sather et al., 2021;Doktor et al., 2019;Matthews, 2017) and by students' engagement in sense-making about their identities and life experiences. As pedagogical partnership work expands around the globe, I am seeing undergraduate students at my own and other institutions develop another form of expertise: in pedagogical partnership work itself.I embarked on developing student-faculty pedagogical partnership work in 2006 at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, two liberal arts institutions in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. With student, faculty, and staff collaborators and several generous grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I co-created Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT), the signature program of the Teaching and Learning Institute (TLI) in this bi-college consortium. Through SaLT, undergraduates take up semester-long, paid positions as pedagogical partners to faculty members. As pedagogical partners, these students are neither enrolled in nor necessarily have knowledge of the subject matter of the course on which they and their faculty partners focus. They conduct weekly classroom observations, meet weekly with their faculty partners, and meet weekly with me and other student partners to discuss how best to be in dialogue and collaboration with faculty partners. Hundreds of faculty and students have participated in the SaLT program, and options for participation have expanded beyond this basic model (for a list of other programs, visit the TLI's Programs and Opportunities page).Because of my decades of experience directing SaLT, I have been invited to support a wide range of colleges and universities around the world in developing partnership programs (see partial lists at TLI's Pedagogical Partnerships at Other Institutions page and Developing Pedagogical Partnerships). Since staffing budgets are always limited, I have begun in this consulting work to recommend hiring students-while they are undergraduates or soon after they graduate-into limited-term roles to conceptualize, facilitate, co-create, or otherwise support the development of pedagogical partnership programs. This approach not only acknowledges student expertise, it also builds institutional structures that affirm that

Structuring extra-classroom pedagogical partnership to support truth telling for equity and inclusion: Recommendations for practice.

“…The student partners are in liminal roles—they are students, but they are not enrolled in the focal course (Cook-Sather, 2022; Cook-Sather & Alter, 2011; Cook-Sather & Felten, 2017)—working in one-on-one, semester-long partnerships with faculty or staff. This positioning allows students to draw on their lived experiences and expertise (Cook-Sather, 2023) and to mobilize their identities and insights to lead change for equity and inclusion (Cook-Sather, Krishna Prasad, et al, 2019; Marquis et al, 2021). In doing so, these students tell truths that, while not forms of telling faculty or staff how to do their jobs, offer insights faculty and staff are unlikely to access otherwise.…”