Pedagogic partnership in higher education: encountering emotion in learning and enhancing student wellbeing

ABSTRACT

Despite emotion being recognized as fundamental to learning, the affective aspects of learning have often been side-lined in higher education. In the context of rising student wellbeing challenges, exploring ways of supporting students and their emotions in learning is increasingly significant. Pedagogic partnerships have the potential to help students to recognize and work with their emotions in their learning in a positive manner. As such, pedagogic partnerships offer opportunities to promote resilience and enhance student wellbeing. In this paper, we develop partnership research in three ways by: 1) considering the ways in which pedagogic partnership may support students to encounter emotions and empower them to develop resilience, leading to positive wellbeing; 2) exploring how this process might be achieved in the disciplinary context of geography; and 3) developing an evidence-based model to summarize the potential effect of pedagogic partnership in enhancing student wellbeing. We draw upon two case studies of student-faculty and student-student pedagogic partnership within geography curricula in order to evidence that emotional awareness in learning comes through the joys and struggles of working in partnership. We argue that pedagogic partnership may be developed to support the wellbeing of modern-day higher education communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogic partnership
• emotions
• wellbeing
• academic resilience
• geography
• borderland space

Acknowledgments

We thank Alan Marvell and David Simm for answering our research questions and for revisiting their partnership work in the light of student emotions and wellbeing. Equally, we thank all the students who participated in these projects. Quite simply, it is their time, given so generously, that will improve the higher education experience for successive cohorts. We thank the Organizing Committee of the INLT Collaborative Writing Retreat and all the participants present in Quebec for their comments on our work as it developed. Finally, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on our manuscript, which have helped to refine the clarity of our argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.