Partnership in pandemic: Re-imagining Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation for an era of emergency decision-making

Abstract

As higher education moves from the COVID-19 pandemic into a still uncertain world, many questions remain unresolved. One is how students shape their learning experience after a year or so of extraordinary pressures on decision-making processes but also a new wave of energy from students to engage with those decisions (Hassan et al., 2020). A useful prism for exploring students’ roles is Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation, and this article offers two reimaginations of the ladder for emergency-era student engagement, adapting its eight rungs to reflect how students have been involved (or not) in institutional responses to the pandemic. By highlighting the connections between student and citizen engagement (Giroux, 2010) as particularly important during the pandemic, the article illustrates the negative consequences of the two extremes of disenfranchisement and protest which featured strongly in institutional life during the pandemic, often overlapping to the detriment of universities and students’ unions. Further arguments are presented that reimagining the ladder in these ways shows partnership as steering a meaningful course between those two extremes, and that with more uncertainty ahead institutions must look to students’ expertise and enabling them to be constructive and partnered agents of change in institutions and wider society.