The Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change

Reflections on co-leading module reviews in partnership for academic staff to design an inclusive curriculum

Lucy Bamwo — 2024-11-21

Module reviews have been offered at the University of Hertfordshire for the last few years. It offers opportunities for academic staff to have conversations on their teaching with both staff and students in a safe environment. Module reviews are offered throughout the year to academic staff, to help guide their online module design, to look at how they can create an inclusive curriculum and help guide their students through their content in the online learning environment. They consist of either a learning and teaching specialist or digital capabilities manager, a student technology mentor, and the Module Leader (the academic staff member who booked the session). They are normally an hour long, with discussions on module design, assessment, inclusivity, and teaching between all parties. Key to these discussions are the student voice and perspective when guiding academic staff through. This reflective essay will present the perspectives and reflections from both staff and students working in partnership, who have co-led module curriculum design reviews with academic staff.

Resisting Hierarchy and Harm and Centering Humanity in Higher Education

Mara Wald — 2024-11-21

It is rare to have experienced the phenomena described in a book—not just in the abstract, but literally. That is case for me with Co-creating Equitable Teaching and Learning: Structuring Student Voice into Higher Education by Alison Cook-Sather. As previewed in chapter 1 and elaborated in chapter 5, the book is guided by an overarching principle to support partnership in education among students, staff, faculty, and institutional leaders in pursuit of equity, agency, and resistance to white supremacy culture. The book offers three sub-principles: be guided by a commitment to equity (chapter 2); provide structures, not prescriptions, for engagement (chapter 3); and make rather than take up space for learning and growth (chapter 4). Each chapter integrates student-authored vignettes of student experiences and works through how the focal principle plays out at the course, program, and institutional levels. The foreword and afterword are written by recent undergraduates who participated in one or more of the co-creation efforts analyzed in the book.

Writing from the perspective of a rising senior at Bryn Mawr College, I can attest to the ways that course-, program-, and institutional-level co-creation can make space for learning, growth, and support for students like me and many others. In the spring-2023 semester, I completed the undergraduate education course Cook-Sather uses as her focal example. During the 2022-2023 academic year, as well as the 2023-2024 academic year, I served as a pedagogical consultant to a faculty member through the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program Cook-Sather uses as an example of programmatic co-creation. And since spring of 2022, I co-facilitated Pedagogy Circles for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, one of the examples of inter-institutional forums Cook-Sather describes at the institutional level of co-creation.

Building Individual Confidence, Responsive Practices, and Community for Wellbeing

Alison Cook-Sather — 2024-11-21

Students and staff are experiencing heightened stress and uncertainty prompted by climate change, racism and social injustices, the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, and concerns about job prospects and income. While co-creation practices cannot solve such problems, they can foster wellbeing as students and staff wrestle with the realities these problems create. Drawing from a review of 245 reflective essays published between 2010 and 2023 in Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education (TLTHE), a journal devoted to showcasing student-staff partnership work, we focus on three themes that illuminate how co-creation work can support wellbeing during these difficult times. Co-creation can: (1) build and boost confidence for individuals; (2) nurture the development of culturally responsive curriculum, identity, diversity, and inclusivity; and (3) contribute to community building. We substantiate each of these themes with excerpts from TLTHE essays, and we affirm the importance of recommitting to co-creation to nurture wellbeing through meaningful and reciprocally affirming relationships among students and staff.

Enhancing student experience through partnership and co-creation in a post-pandemic learning environment – a longitudinal study

Alicia Gonzalez-Buelga — 2024-11-21

This paper reports on the evolution and value of staff-student partnerships in a 4-year longitudinal study involving a cohort of Mechanical Engineering students at a UK University throughout their undergraduate journey from academic year 2020/21 to 2023/24. The research is divided into 4 phases, one per academic year, and is woven around three primary objectives: i) capturing and understanding students' perceptions of online learning, ii) collaboratively developing enhanced online/blended delivery strategies with students, and iii) reflecting on the transformative impact of this partnership on all those involved (staff and students). The students’ involvement increased with each phase of the study.

Students participating in this study found it exceptionally rewarding as they felt their voices were heard, enabling them to actively shape the educational process. They acquired valuable research skills that would have otherwise remained unexplored. For the academic staff involved, this partnership enriched their teaching practices, establishing collaboration with students as a standard approach in their education-focused research. They actively contributed to training both fellow academics and students within their institution in conducting engineering educational research. The authors conclude that the power of a staff-student partnership in reshaping the landscape of higher education was transformative for all those involved

The power of external stakeholders to enhance social and emotional learning in Higher Education

Jonathan Jackson — 2024-11-21

Stakeholders external to students’ immediate academic environment such as employers and extra-departmental academics can offer a valuable source of live briefs which can enhance social and emotional learning (SEL) within a higher education context. By partnering with students to ideate and co-create solutions for real problems, module tutors can emotionally engage students on issues of social importance, provide more freedom for them to leverage their strengths, and promote wellbeing. The author shares his experience in delivering a final-year undergraduate module using a student-staff-stakeholder partnership model over several years in both face-to-face and online learning contexts. Benefits to learner engagement and wellbeing are explored, along with the positive impact to stakeholders who bring a live brief to an innovative classroom environment.

UCL ChangeMakers Case Study: Assessing the use of peer-tutoring techniques to enhance students’ learning

Aikaterini Tsatse — 2024-11-21

This paper discusses the rationale, development, and findings of a UCL ChangeMakers project led by the Department of Chemical Engineering at UCL in 2022/2023 academic year. The aim of this project was to assess the use of peer-tutoring techniques for improving students’ learning experience. Firstly, a selected cohort of students nominated topics of interest which they would like to develop further; next, they attended a series of workshops developed by student colleagues, with support from staff. Besides the obvious learning of technical knowledge, which is clearly demonstrated based on students’ views, it was also observed that students gained a stronger sense of belonging, both within their peer community and in relation to the staff. Ultimately, the insights from this project unveil the possibility of upscaling peer-tutoring to the whole cohort or programme level. Overall, this case study demonstrates and discusses the potential benefits of peer-tutoring in second-year Chemical Engineering students, exploring how the staff-student partnership can be an important catalyst when considering the implementation of alternative teaching approaches.

Co-creating a toolkit of resources and building knowledge share between students on how to communicate their own research to wider audiences

Sem Lee — 2024-11-21

The aim of the project was empower students to disseminate their research with wider audiences to create impact. The project was scoped to address the increasing demand for masters students to understand how to disseminate their research. With growing emphasis of digital platforms and channels, there are ways for researchers to disseminate their research in novel and engaging ways that can help to increase impact on science and society. We co-created a communications toolkit and set up external mentorship support with past students to help with the pastoral support and additional support from those that had a similar experience. Students that took part in the co-production workshops reported that they would like to be involved in a project like this again for the following reasons – 1) that it was a great initiative to improve student experience outside of answering surveys; 2) it helped to open up a safe space to voice personal concerns and reassured them about their upcoming research process; 3) felt that this helped improve their academic skills by understanding the different ways of gathering data and how this could help form insights.

Co-Creating our institutional response to the advances in generative AI with our students.

Abbie King — 2024-11-21

Generative AI has been attracting a great deal of interest in recent months in the higher education sector and more widely. Generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT, DALLE-2, Mircrosoft Co-Pilot and Google Bard) present both challenges and opportunities for our educational practices and there is much discussion about how - and how far - we can usefully embrace the technology. In the summer of 2023, UCL ChangeMakers, in collaboration with students and other central services and experts in AI, initiated a new scheme to provide quick, curated ‘mini projects’ to facilitate students and staff working together to explore the impact that AI might have in their disciplines. We will share learning across the projects, looking at what work happened under the four themes (assessment, feedback, learning support and exploration). We will also include reflections from staff and students on the benefits of collaborating and co-creating when it come to rapid digital developments, and look at the implications of working in this agile way to address future challenges together.

Co-creation of Capstone Assessment in Year 1 Undergraduate Integrated Medical Sciences

Iker Hernaez Sanz — 2024-11-21

In this case study we present our experience with a Student-staff partnership that aimed to implement a new capstone assessment component in the first-year Integrated Medical Sciences courses at University College London. The assessment was designed based on a problem-based learning modality, with the time-tabling, teaching asks, feedback structure, assessed output format and marking criteria fine-tuned with the help our of our student partners. A retrospective project evaluation conducted by the student partners revealed that the new assessment modality was an enjoyable experience for the participating students, that gave them a new appreciation of the connections between the modular content. Importantly, it also fostered essential transferrable skills such as leadership, teamwork, critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication among peers. In conclusion, the introduction of a holistic capstone assessment holds promise in addressing the limitations associated with modular assessments. Collaborative effort between academics and student partners was instrumental in ensuring that the assessment both met the students’ learning needs and catered to their interests and backgrounds.

Reflecting on Partnership Projects, the Impact on Students and Their Development

Sarah Flynn — 2024-11-21

Editors' introduction

Preface

Tim Stafford — 2024-11-21