Unpacking the Nuances of "Partnership" Between Students and Faculty in a Departmental Change Effort

• In Event: "Designing for" to "Designing With" Partners: Emergent Challenges in the Co-Design Process

Abstract

This presentation discusses partnerships between students and faculty engaged in department-level changes in undergraduate education in STEM departments. Our project cultivates departmental changes through Departmental Action Teams (DATs) (Authors, 2019). DATs are teams of faculty, students, and staff working on some large-scale issue related to undergraduate education in their department. DAT participants enact sustainable changes by creating new departmental structures or processes and by shifting departmental culture. Multiple members of the research team serve as DAT facilitators and support DAT members in enacting changes and developing capacity as change agents.

A core principle of the DAT project is that “students are partners in the educational process.” Our conceptualization of Students as Partners (SaP) has been informed by literature on cogenerative dialogues (Tobin, 2006; Roth & Tobin, 2005), change in higher education (Kezar, 2013), SaP in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) community (Bovill, et al., 2017; Mercer-Mapstone, et al., 2017), and organizational change (e.g., Lindelow, 1989). Synthesizing this work, we have operationalized “students as partners” into four major components: students have unique expertise (Sabella, Van Duzor, and Davenport, 2016; Tobin, 2006); the DAT seeks diverse student perspectives on an ongoing basis (Kezar, 2013); students and faculty share power and decision making (Bovill, 2017; Mercer-Mapstone, et al., 2017), and students see themselves as partners (Mercer-Mapstone, et al., 2017). Our experience facilitating and conducting research on DATs has revealed challenges in meeting these components.

As part of ongoing research on DATs, we have been collecting pre- and post-interviews with members of DATs; extensive field notes, planning notes, and reflections from facilitators; and survey data. We analyze student interviews in one DAT to understand the ways in which students were seen as partners (or not). While we do not adhere to a single analytical or theoretical approach, tools from positioning theory (Holland & Leander, 2004), identity work (Carlone & Johnson, 2007), and communities of learners (Rogoff, 1994) help us make sense of how students are interpreting their roles in relation to faculty and their mutual engagement in the change effort. As researcher-facilitators, we also draw from ethnographic approaches, coordinating our interpretations of interviews with our long time-scale participation in the DAT (Becker & Geer, 1957).

Two major challenges emerged in our analysis. The first is a tension between supporting student agency and unequal distribution of work. Faculty encouraged students to make decisions and felt that they were giving students agency, but students found this unequal balance of decision-making to be burdensome. The second challenge is that students often struggled to see themselves as partners in the space due to their lower position in the academic hierarchy. While students attributed these feelings to their own lack of confidence and sense of intimidation, we argue that faculty and DAT team members also contributed to the construction of this hierarchy.

Critically reflecting on these challenges moves us beyond thinking of “Are students partners?” as a question with a binary answer, and toward asking “In what ways are students partners, and in what ways are they not?”

Authors

• Joel C Corbo, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Alanna Pawlak, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Gina Quan, San José State University

• Courtney Ngai, Colorado State University