Student partners as co-contributors in research: a collective autoethnographic account

ABSTRACT

The practice of students as partners can be applied to numerous facets of the university, including curriculum design, governance, and co-curricular programs. However, while scholars have also conceptualised that student partnership can occur through co-research, adoption is far from mainstream. In this paper, we seek to go ‘under the hood’ of students as partners in co-research by exploring and reflecting upon our own recent co-research project. By doing so we aim to understand why the practice of co-research with students has failed to gain widescale traction in higher education. To support our study, we use collective autoethnography which helps to structure our reflections of the co-research process and create dialogue and shared understanding among the research team. Our findings identify two central points of tensions that prohibit partnership in co-research, including how to best support collaborative and reciprocal learning between students and staff in research projects and how students’ contributions can be reconceptualised to be different, yet equal, to experienced researchers. Through our findings, we advocate for universities to consider sustainable practices to support students in co-research and for scholarly journals to reflect on how student authors can be appropriately recognised.

KEYWORDS:

• Students as partners
• co-research
• collective autoethnographic research
• undergraduate research

Acknowledgements

Please note that while all team members were authors of our scholarly paper on the findings of our project (see Tai et al., 2022), not all team members chose to be authors of this reflective paper, including Sam Bohra, Marina Booth, Harmeet Kaur, and Merrin McCracken. We would like to acknowledge nonetheless their important contributions to our project.

Disclosure statement

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