Reframing Success in A Pivoting Partnership – Student Mentors Trying to Engage: A Tale of Trial and Error

Abstract

This case study focuses upon the work of our student-staff partnership project working together on a new elective first year module. Focusing on the role of student partners acting as peer mentors we aimed to support the transition of new students into university and provided a bridge into the Law School community.

Student partners attended online and in-person classes, offering support and feedback to first year students. However, they struggled to get the first-year students to engage with them; the community support and mentorship that our student partners felt had been missing from their own pandemic-impaired first-year experience, was not welcomed by the new cohort studying on campus with more in-person classes. 

The student partners share their experiences of trying to engage first-year students to build a learning community. We highlight the way we pivoted our approach to meet student needs, with partners switching from mentoring to researching, to gain an insight into how the first years’ needs differed. 

This case study reflects upon and reframes the definition of “success” in a student-staff partnership project. By learning from our experiences, follow how our partnership pivoted from its original aims, but managed to see the positives amongst the difficulties, not least the obvious “success” in the process of developing employability skills for the student partners involved.