It is not about the destination but the journey: A dive into student–staff partnership processes

Abstract

Student–staff partnership advocates the active involvement of students’ voices in the design of education. Although the concept of student–staff partnership is rapidly gaining momentum in health professions education, the current practices are more outcome-focused and pay less attention to the partnership process itself. Students’ involvement in most of the claimed partnerships has been viewed as input information to the educational design process rather than inviting them to the more pronounced role as partners. In this commentary, we elaborate on different levels of students’ involvement in educational design, before highlighting the possible dynamics between students and staff in partnership. We propose five key features of dynamics involved in the process of real student–staff partnerships and a Process-Outcome Model for Student–staff Partnership. We advocate that moving beyond outcomes and diving deeper into the partnership processes is the way forward to establishing true student–staff partnerships.

Keywords:

• Student–staff partnership
• power dynamics
• educational design
• students as partners
• co-creation
• student engagement

Acknowledgments

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library. We express our appreciation to all members of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Co-Creation and Educational Change at the School of Health Professions Education, Maastricht University (SHE-MU) who provided comments and feedback on the commentary. The Barradell and Bell article was discussed at one of the SIG-meetings and, subsequently, the authors decided to write this commentary.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Shireen Suliman

Dr. Shireen Suliman, MBBS, MEHP, is a Consultant at the Medicine Department at Hamad Medical Corporation, an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar, and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at College of Medicine at Qatar University, Doha, Qatar. She is a PhD candidate and a member of Special Interest Group "Co-creation and Educational Change" at School of Health Professions Education, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Muhammad Zafar Iqbal

Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, PhD, is a Research Scientist at Acuity Insights, Toronto, Ontario, Canada and a member of Special Interest Group "Co-creation and Educational Change" at School of Health Professions Education, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Karen D. Könings

Karen D. Könings, PhD, and Associate professor in the Department of Educational Development & Research and the School of Health Professions Education, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences at Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands and Honorary Professor at the School of Health Sciences at University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. She is the chair of Special Interest Group "Co-creation and Educational Change" at School of Health Professions Education at Maastricht University.