Currently reading Murphy et al. (2017) “”I Am Wary of Giving Too Much Power to Students”: Addressing the” But” in the Principle of Staff-Student Partnership”

I talk a lot with teachers about co-creation of learning and teaching, and my own experience matches perfectly what Murphy et al. (2017) describe: “The overarching response was a positive statement followed first with a “but” and then with the issues that could be caused by a partnership approach“.

In their article, they explore “staff willingness to engage in putting partnership activities into the heart of their academic practice” before and after they had actually engaged in partnership activities.

Before engaging, almost half the participants saw students role in co-creation as evaluators of teaching, which is quite common probably also in my context, where student experiences are routinely surveyed and given as feedback to teachers, and a bit less than 1/3rd saw students as participants in decision-making processes. When asked what activities they did in co-creation with students, it is not surprising then that the most common are feedback practices, whereas assessment, taught content, and delivery are less common. The biggest reported barrier to co-creation was student maturity in terms of willingness to even engage, but then also understanding the subject, how things work at university, and things should be done.

After a co-creation experience, participants were more positive, and willing to consider changing their practice, but some concerns around whether students would know enough to be able to meaningfully contribute remained, especially for teachers that saw themselves as experts rather than facilitators.

What is interesting about this study is that a relatively small intervention of a partnership experience could change how participants looked at co-creation, and this is easily reproducible in other contexts in that a small opportunity to gain experiences can go a long way in changing how teachers look at partnership and start to appreciate student perspectives on teaching, and to raise awareness where teaching (and teacher skills and attitudes) might need to develop. And small opportunities for co-creation train not only the teachers, but also prepare students for future, possibly larger, opportunities. Using (trained) students or staff to facilitate the partnership makes the power dynamics work better, especially when teachers are still seeing themselves as the expert.

So if we want teachers to consider co-creation, it seems that a good first step is to invite them to talk more to students so that they have a chance to have positive experiences and gain confidence in themselves and their students to explore co-creation more and more extensively over time!

Murphy, R., Nixon, S., Brooman, S., & Fearon, D. (2017). “I Am Wary of Giving Too Much Power to Students”: Addressing the” But” in the Principle of Staff-Student Partnership. International Journal for Students as Partners, 1(1), 67-82.

Featured image: cool waves in the clouds on the way to training!