Paper 1: Elevating Students as Equal Partners in Research and Dissemination Through Storytelling Workshops

• In Event: Reimagining Researcher-Participant Relations in Engineering and Computing Education

Abstract

Purpose
Administrators, faculty and staff are positioned to architect undergraduate experiences in university settings, and the changes that improve undergraduate education. Similarly, educational researchers have positions and expertise to be able to study experiences and systems in ways that can inform change efforts. However, too often students are positioned as the recipients of these change efforts, or the objects of study. For instance, we often interview students to understand their experiences, and then as researchers write narratives that are extracted from the interviews.

Perspectives
Across higher education, there is increased interest in “Students as Partners” approaches that position students, educators and researchers as all having essential expertise to contribute to shared goals of advancing education (Cook-Sather et al. 2014; Mercer-Mapstone et al. 2017). Guiding principles of these “Students as Partners" approaches to research, pedagogy, and institutional change include: respectful dialogue; reciprocity; shared responsibility; co-investigation, shared reflection, problem posing, curiosity, rational exploration, and creativity in learning and teaching (Cook-Sather et al., 2014; Peters, & Mathias, 2018).

Methods and Data
In our work to partner with students in research, we build on narrative research approaches (e.g. Polkinghorne, 1995; Kellam et al. 2025) that emphasize keeping people’s stories intact, as told by the participants. We extend this by supporting students as they craft their own “stories” of their experience as undergraduate STEM students through: our own examples of our undergraduate STEM stories, warm-up reflection questions, discussion of elements of stories, time spent writing the stories, and peer reviews of the stories. During the two hour-long workshops, we also prompted the students to explicitly consider what kind of story they wanted to tell, the type of impact they hoped their story would have, and the audience(s) for their stories. Data include the students’ written stories and our facilitator reflection notes.

Findings
In their stories, the students shared their experiences with people, spaces, and structures. For example, one student shared a story of an advisor who suggested the student needed to find a different major that was “less challenging”, while another student shared a story of wishing that they had “some sort of ‘older sibling’ (not really a sibling but a mentor) to help[them]... avoid some of the unnecessary anxiety I got from navigating through these things on my own.” We also found that the process of developing the narratives during the workshops allowed students to reflect on their individual journeys, while the peer review process supported a culture of community amongst the students, where students offered each other feedback, validation, and connection.
Significance
In this work we explored an approach to research that allowed us to partner with our research participants, and shift traditional power dynamics between researchers and study participants by repositioning our participants as the authors of their own narratives. We drew on our own experiences and expertise to develop prompts and activities to support undergraduates in narrating their stories, while also giving students agency to choose what stories they wanted to tell and how they wanted to tell them.

Authors

• Monica Elaine Cardella, Florida International University

• Dorothy Decontee Gocol, Florida International University