Promoting and/or evading change: the role of student-staff partnerships in staff teaching development

ABSTRACT

While a large body of research considers factors enabling or constraining academic development in colleges and universities, comparatively little scholarship has considered the roles students might play in supporting positive change in staff teaching practices. This article explores one potential avenue by which such change might play out, considering the extent to which participation in a student-staff partnership programme supported by a central teaching and learning institute might encourage shifts in staff teaching. Drawing on data gathered via focus groups and online reflective prompts, we find that participating in pedagogical partnership can support a range of developments in staff teaching practices, though these changes might not always be pronounced or uniformly positive. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Staff change
• academic development
• student-staff partnership

Acknowledgements

We’d like to thank the team involved in the ‘faculty change’ research project sponsored by Elon University for their insights, feedback and support as this project developed. The authors would like to acknowledge that they have participated in and/or helped to oversee the partnership programme explored in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Academic staff are known as faculty in our context, so where this term is used it refers to staff with academic appointments.

2. Throughout, we use FG to demarcate quotations taken from focus groups, and R to indicate quotations from reflective prompts. The numbers that follow refer to the order of the focus group/prompt within the research design (e.g. FG1 indicates a quotation from the January round of focus groups.)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation, and Excellence in Teaching, McMaster University.

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Marquis

Elizabeth Marquis is an Assistant Professor in the Arts & Science Programme and Associate Director (Research) at the Paul R. MacPherson Institute for Leadership, Innovation, and Excellence in Teaching, McMaster University.

Emily Power

Emily Power recently graduated from the undergraduate Arts & Science Programme at McMaster University. While at McMaster, she worked as a student partner in the centrally supported Student Partners Programme.

Melanie Yin

Melanie Yin is a current undergraduate student in the Arts & Science Programme at McMaster University. In 2016-17, she was also participant in the university’s Student Partners Programme.