Nolan & Jessie focus on student-faculty partnerships in higher education and talk with Sophia Abbot, co-editor of The Power of Partnership: Students, Staff, and Faculty Revolutionizing Higher Education.
See our full episode notes at https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/fostering-partnership-projects-in-higher-education/.
In this episode, we focus on student-faculty partnerships in higher education. We talk to Sophia Abbot, a doctoral candidate in the Higher Education Program at George Mason University and a long-time contributor to partnership practice and scholarship. She currently works as a graduate assistant on the Anti-Racist and Inclusive Teaching (ARIT) team in Stearns Center for Teaching & Learning, and she’s a co-editor of The Power of Partnership: Students, Staff, and Faculty Revolutionizing Higher Education.
This episode is co-hosted by Jessie L. Moore, Director of Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning, and Nolan Schultheis, a first-year student at Elon University, studying Psychology with an interest in law. Nolan Schultheis also edited the episode. Making College “Worth It” is produced by Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning.
Nolan Schultheis (00:16):
Welcome to Making College Worth It, the show that examines engaged learning activities that increase the value of college experiences.
Jessie Moore (00:23):
In each episode, we share research from Elon University's Center for Engaged Learning and our international network of scholars. We explore engaged learning activities that recent college graduates associate with their financial and time commitment to college being worthwhile.
Nolan Schultheis (00:39):
I'm Nolan Schultheis, first year student at Elon University, studying psychology with an interest in law. I'm the Center for Engaged Learnings podcast producer and a legal profession scholar.
Jessie Moore (00:50):
And I'm Jessie Moore, director of Elon Center for Engaged Learning and a professor at Professional Writing and Rhetoric.
Nolan Schultheis (00:57):
In this episode, we'll focus on student faculty partnerships in higher education. We'll talk to Sophia Abbot, a doctoral candidate in higher education program at George Mason University. She currently works as a graduate assistant on the anti-racist and Inclusive teaching team in Stern Center for Teaching and Learning, and she's a co-editor of the Power of Partnership: Students, Staff and Faculty Revolutionizing Higher Education.
Sophia Abbot (01:22):
Hi, my name is Sophia Abbot. I am a doctoral candidate at George Mason University in Northern Virginia in the US and I also work in the Stern Center for Teaching and Learning, which is our teaching and learning center here on campus, as a member of our inclusive teaching team focused on assessment and resource development and things like that. I got interested in partnership 12 years ago, which feels like a very long time ago now when I was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in the United States. I was a student partner through the SALT program, which is the Students as Learners and Teachers program. That is a program that's focused on supporting students and faculty to sort of work together in an intensive semester or year long partnership where students are going into the classroom and observing their faculty partners teaching and reflecting back to them what they're seeing in the classroom.
(02:26):
And I got so excited about this kind of work and so just sort of intrigued with the process of reflecting on classrooms and reflecting on my own learning through the conversations I was having with my faculty partners over the years that I ended up designing my undergraduate major to focus on that kind of work. It was called Educational Identities and Empowering Pedagogies. So it was a self-designed major that brought in education and English and women and gender studies and history and sociology and really let me just focus on how we teach and learn together and in relationship at the university level. And I stayed super interested in that. I couldn't really let it go. It felt like really important work. I felt really empowered and age agentic when I was doing it. It gave me a sense that I had a voice at the university and that I could create change and all of those things were also things that I saw some of my peers who didn't have that same opportunity or weren't participating in the program, like very much not feeling when they were in college.
(03:40):
And so I also felt like more students should get to have experiences like this and how can we make more spaces where students get to be working in these really cool empowering ways and affecting change that directly impacts them and how they're doing college. So I went on to work at a teaching and learning center in Texas. Then I did my masters at Elon where I got to work with Jessie and Peter and folks in their team and continued to think about these kinds of relationships. And now I'm doing my PhD at George Mason and my dissertation is focused on ways that feminist instructors do co-creation in the classroom, all of their students sort of together. So I keep thinking about partnership. It keeps being this really strong thread in my work and something I continue to feel really excited about and passionate for. I
Jessie Moore (04:37):
Love all those examples. And Nolan's next question for you is going to ask you to pull a few more out, but I just want to acknowledge that that's such a rich array of partnership experiences just in your own trajectory.
Sophia Abbot (04:54):
Thanks. I feel really blessed to have been in lots of spaces where people were excited to work with me and for the most part not threatened B random undergraduate coming up and saying, Hey, have you ever thought about this? And I think that speaks to the creativity and thoughtfulness and generosity of a lot of the mentors that I've had throughout my experiences, both in undergraduate and my undergraduate experience and moving forward. But it's also something that I think is a generosity that many more people could develop as a habit, and so I'm also excited about that.
Nolan Schultheis (05:37):
Yeah, I was just going to say as well, your story is very inspiring in terms of just seeing the amount of raw passion you have for the material you're teaching and learning about. I think discovering it naturally and then being like, oh, this is it. This is what I want to do. Just even seeing you explain it, you're energetic, you're smiling about it. It's great to see that there are people out there that want to put new information out into the world and are very passionate about it.
Sophia Abbot (06:04):
I will say, so I have ADHD. I was diagnosed with it after I like two years ago, so pretty recently, and I am realizing that part of my excitement for this is the reason I've been able to do it, that because it's the thing that keeps driving me and keeps me energized and gives me a sense of engagement and connection to people and continually sort of refuels me because of those relationships. That's how I can keep following this path and how I haven't gotten burnt out on higher education academia, which happens to many people and is a sort of tragic element of the way our systems and structures sort of put pressure on people to be in certain ways so that people were willing to let me make my own major or willing to let me fiddle with what is allowed in higher ed or willing to let me do independent studies and other things is also how I've been able to keep this excitement.
Nolan Schultheis (07:14):
For listeners who aren't familiar with student faculty partnerships, could you offer a few examples of what they might look like or entail?
Sophia Abbot (07:22):
As I mentioned, my initial experience was in a more formal program, a kind of student consultant model where I was partnered with a person, I wasn't the student in their class and I hadn't been a student in their class before. It was usually cross-disciplinary. It was with a professor in a discipline that I wasn't familiar with for the most part, and those were sort of structured. We had meetings with other student partners each week in addition to the weekly meetings that I had one-on-one with my faculty partner. That's all sort of a structured formalized thing that I could do that I could get paid for as a student at brenmar. And those kinds of programs exist now in quite a few places across the US and across the world and are sort of continuing to grow as people get excited about what you can do in that kind of co-curricular space.
(08:21):
But there's also lots of other kinds. There are a lot of examples of folks doing research together about teaching and learning. So around the scholarship of teaching and learning using SOTL as the sort of central thing that people that a student and professor or several students and several professors and librarians and other sort of academic staff around the university might come together to collectively think about and explore and seek evidence for and analyze and write on. Then there are other examples of less formal partnerships. So my dissertation is focused on co-creation practices in the classroom, and I think while partnership implies a depth of relationship and intention and coming together with the very specifically co-created set of goals, that there's this very intentional collaboration and relationship building. I think in the classroom, even with lots of students and often just one instructor, there's lots of possibility to co-create in ways that start to develop more of those partnered relationships.
(09:42):
So for example, that might look like a professor coming in and saying, I have the first couple of weeks of the semester laid out for our course, but after that I want us to co-create what we're going to focus on. So we're going to talk together about what our collective interests are as a class and how we might use that to seed our future course topics, how we might collectively generate what the course readings are going to be or how we might assess our learning over the course of the semester. It might look like students and the instructor co-creating the rubrics for analyzing student work or establishing what does good participation in the space look like or what does a quality paper for this class, what should that include? How is that defined? Jessie Moore and Peter Felten teach a class like that in the Master's of Arts in Higher education program at Elon, and there are others around the world who are doing this who think really critically about ways that they can do this more in their classrooms.
(10:56):
Feminist instructors, people who identify as using feminist pedagogy and are in the women and gender studies space or in other spaces that come into those spaces with this grounding and feminist theories and philosophies often also will use those kinds of practices because it's a way of embracing that knowledge is a co-created thing that you can't have knowledge without dialogue and multiple people's perspectives and voices coming together to create it. So sort of a way of living that out in a lot of classrooms. Other examples might be a professor reaching out to students after the end of a course and collecting feedback from them or even working with them to revise a syllabus or to take a more meta perspective, instructors and students coming together to talk about how a program pathway works for people, how students get into a major and move through it. What are the pathways into it and what is the chronology of how students should be taking classes or how people hope students will take classes and does that work or is there a different way that might work better for students or different ways that we might do requirements in this program to support students' flexibility and engagement and learning Overall, it might look like students and instructors and community members co-creating solutions to community problems.
(12:33):
And so there's lots of ways that engaged high impact practices in the community like service learning or community-based learning like study abroad activities, undergraduate research, that those things can also slip into and out of partnership not only between a student and a professor, but also with these other people that you might come into contact with and want to be collaborating with to create something that matters and that is impactful for the better for everyone.
Jessie Moore (13:04):
I was just going to say I really appreciate that range of examples. I think it's helpful in a couple ways. Among other things you are helping our listeners see the potential variation in scale that it can be anything from co-creating an assignment or co-creating a set of evaluation criteria to projects that are much larger in scope, and so that gives people different entry points as well, which I think is really helpful, including different entry points for students too. So one of the things that I'm excited to talk with you about is you co-edited the collection, The Power of Partnership: Students, Staff and Faculty Revolutionizing Higher Education, and we will include a link to that in the show notes for the episode. But could you tell us just a little bit about that edited collection and what space or conversation it fills in the broader scholarship on partnership?
Sophia Abbot (14:07):
Yeah, definitely. So the collection is a series of essays and dialogues, poems, some artwork and illustration, all about folks experiences in partnership and hopes for the space and sort of questioning about it and reflection on it. Almost all of the chapters are students co-writing with academics. Some of them are solely written by students or a single student. A couple are solo written by academics, but all of them are reflecting on what is the range of experience in this space and how do we experience and work through some of the challenges that are raised when we are trying to form relationships and create change and do work together across vast differences and in systems that really reward and reinforce hierarchy and separation and not collaboration. So the book is sort of three different sections. The first section is really focused on power and how does power operate and how do we navigate it in the kinds of relationships that we're trying to build as we explore teaching and learning together in critical ways.
(15:36):
The second is about the sort of intersections of how people are both navigating multiple identities and perspectives and standpoints and bringing that into conversation with and sort of creating new spaces with people from radically different identities and standpoints and experiences and how that sort of turns into and creates new sort of spaces for learning new kind of liminal areas where creation is possible. And then the third section is about growth. What could we imagine happening in these partnerships phases? How do we experience growth and radical change and potential through these kinds of relationships that ask us to be vulnerable with each other, make space for us to celebrate and experience joy and can be sort of deeply emotional and troubling and hard to do because of that vulnerability and because it's so different from what we're used to? The book came out of conversations I initially had with Lucy Mercer Mapstone, who is a scholar and professional in Australia.
(16:56):
She and I met over this massive collaborative literature review project where we were looking at a bunch of different examples of partnership in published literature, and one of the challenges we both experienced in that space was having to cut out all of the reflective articles having to sort of say, these are the boundaries of our review. And so the only things that count are this kind of traditional academic research. And we both felt that we could understand why in this context it made sense for a doable, manageable review to have to cut things. But that for as a reflection of our own experiences, it was so limiting because so much of the richness and emotion and uncertainty that can come up in these spaces and in that human relationship part of it was then also cut out and sort of lost when we said, this is what's not going to count for us right now.
(18:05):
So we were looking for a space where we could put more of that, where we could really celebrate and amplify how people are experiencing that huge range of human emotion and working through these really difficult questions and feelings and sometimes unanswerable just like liminal, nebulous spaces and senses of identity. We hoped that by embracing a range of threading genres and styles of communication by bringing in illustration and having folks express in this wide variety of ways, in addition to inviting people to just talk about things that often are cut from traditional scholarly papers that we might be able to better understand and grow, I guess our sense of what the possibilities are in partnerships. And I think the book still does that. I think the chapters that folks contributed are amazing and that they all sort of invite and demonstrate very, very different examples of what partnership can look like.
(19:19):
They grapple with very different kinds of questions. Their contexts are radically different. There's I think six different country contexts represented in the book and so many student perspectives, which also was really important to us at the time. Few students authored work on partnership now. There's been a huge exploit that folks are really much more, I think embracing the opportunities of co-authorship as well as students' solo authoring works in the field or authoring with other students works in the field. So can't say that our book is responsible for that, but it's really wonderful to see that explosion of and embrace of more in the scholarly academic communication space.
Jessie Moore (20:09):
And I should be transparent that I am a little bit biased with this book because it is published in the Center's Open Access series and it was the first one that we accepted under contract, and I still am just really appreciative that you and Lucy did really well, that you and Lucy took the challenge of publishing with us as a new press and that we were also open to the multiple genres and play because I think that that makes a lot of the ideas more accessible or accessible in different ways. I've been using the collection with our cell student scholars who are students who partner on scholarship of teaching and learning research with scholars from around the world. And with each new cohort of students, they find new entry points and new excitement through the collection. So it's your intentionality with integrating so many student voices from so many different contexts I think really helps make the collection accessible to exponentially more readers. And I'm really grateful for the work that you and Lucy put into that. I also know it's not easy managing that many authors in a collection, but it really has paid off well for readers and I think has had a tremendous impact even if you're too modest to own it.
Sophia Abbot (21:44):
Thank you. That is really lovely to hear. And I mean, it came out right before the pandemic, and so I think also it's been harder for me to get a sense of how folks are engaging with the text, but I hope that it's also been a source that it was and continues to be a source of inspiring challenge perhaps for people as they thought about and continue to think about how we navigate our new higher education context and the challenge and uncertainty and sometimes terribleness of the world around us, the crisis and chaos that increasingly touches every part of our lives and that higher education isn't sort of bubbled away from, but is also a participant in. So I hope that it's been fun to sort of return to this and think about this more recently, partially because of this work that I'm now doing for my dissertation. But yeah, I hope that it can sort of challenge people to keep thinking in more open ways about what we can do together. Absolutely.
Jessie Moore (23:04):
And Nolan has recently picked it up also and has read a couple of the chapters and so he's got a few questions for you from student perspective as well.
Nolan Schultheis (23:14):
I would also like to offer a student perspective before I ask this question. When you had mentioned working into introducing people from different backgrounds, different cultures and trying to work around how partnership is being kind of forced onto that and the troubles with it. I'm actually taking a leadership facilitation course right now through Elon, and we had just recently read an excerpt from something about how it's almost the same way in even facilitating and teaching a classroom in that the strategies we have for educating don't exactly hold up to including everyone, and it's not exactly a one size fits all. So I saw that parallel almost immediately when you had mentioned that it seems education as a whole is kind of being looked at and meticulously picked at and seeing what we can do to refine the process. And it's good that it's not only through a teaching lens, but it's also through a community and partnership lens of how can we improve not only the teaching, but the partnership that goes on during the teaching.
Sophia Abbot (24:19):
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think it's a lot easier for classrooms to be spaces where students sit back. Professors are the sort of font of knowledge, pouring that into students' empty vessel heads. It's easier for everyone to operate in that way. It's not good for anyone, but it's easier and it's much more challenging, but much more worth it to take the time to get to know the holistic complex collection of really just deeply wonderful, incredibly different human beings that are present in a classroom space. And that can be a lot easier in some contexts and much more challenging in say a 300 person lecture hall. And I think some of that relationship building and thinking really creatively about how we are together and how we can learn and be together is productive both for and worth it, both for classrooms at all scales, but also how we then move beyond the university into any other space, into a deeply divided world where people continue to have challenges communicating with one another and reaching across difference and taking other perspectives that I think this can be a nice way to practice the kind of democratic communication and engagement that is really necessary for us to create an actually inclusive actually works for everyone society.
(26:03):
And we're definitely far from that. So we've got work to do, but I see a lot of potential in what's happening just in these spaces as practice for and preparation for those other kinds of interactions and communication.
Nolan Schultheis (26:18):
So as a student who has to get it done and leave attitude as well, how do you suggest students like me can grow to engage in these positive ideas and partnership collaborations?
Sophia Abbot (26:29):
That's an excellent question. I think first, I don't think anyone can be forced to do partnership. That doesn't work. You can't be forced to be in relationship with, you can't be forced to make yourself vulnerable or trust or share responsibility for something. So there has to be consent in the process. And also I encourage folks who are resistant to the idea of the challenge that it takes, the extra steps that it takes, the emotional vulnerability that it takes, that we're often not encouraged to practice and often encouraged to sort of filter away from the classroom, but that this is an opportunity to make your educational experience work better for you. And so from a purely efficiency standpoint, it will help you get in, get it done better for the long run. And so from that standpoint alone, I think it's well worth it. I certainly had classrooms where, and I'm sure you've experienced this, where you are sitting and feeling deeply frustrated by lack of conversation or folks not showing up in engaged ways or just not feeling, engaged yourself in the space, not knowing what to do next, not feeling clear on an assignments intentions, feeling like certain readings or course assignments or activities are really just a waste of time and not productive for anybody.
(28:24):
And so I think partnership gives us the tools and these kinds of teaching and learning partnerships give us the tools to approach instructors and ask openly, what are your goals for this assignment?
(28:39):
What do you hope that I'll learn from doing this or get from this to apply to my future classes or to approach your peers and to say, how can we collectively make this a better experience that we're getting what we need out of this space so that we can go on and continue learning and be successful in the way we're engaging with things that interest us, things we feel passionate about, both in other classroom spaces and in our future lives. Yeah, it's about sort of developing a set of, I think skills and awareness to advocate for yourself and that serves everybody. So
Nolan Schultheis (29:26):
What would you like college students and the people who support them to know about partnership projects?
Sophia Abbot (29:33):
I think the first thing I would want students to know is that it doesn't have to start with the professor. You don't have to wait to be asked to join in on a project or invited to do research with someone. If you have an idea, if you are feeling frustrated, if you feel passionate about ways that small changes could happen that would improve your own learning experience and your peers learning experiences. You don't have to wait to be asked. You can take it upon, you can. And in fact, you have a lot of power in the university more I think than a lot of students realize. To actively advocate for yourself, to approach a professor and say, can we talk about this and think about how I might both fulfill the intentions of the course and your learning outcomes and also make this work for my own passions for learning or my own, the sort of individual goals I have for my career or the topics I'm really interested in or the ways I want to expand my experiences or mind around different content areas.
(31:02):
So those are little things you could also approach professors and say, what you're doing here is really cool. Could we explore this together? Is this something you've studied or is this something that you have written about? Could we talk about, could we write together about why this was a really productive experience for my learning or why this worked really well? Those are all things that journals teaching and learning journals would love to hear about, would love to hear students' perspectives on. And that instructors, I think also don't always realize that scholarship of teaching and learning, for example, is work that they can do. And that is valid and valued and valuable for lots of people. So students don't need to wait to be invited. Also, students' voices and perspectives on their own learning are very legitimate and worth that's knowledge. And I think students often are not encouraged to recognize that that's the truth, because if they did, it would be a whole lot harder for institutions to sort of get away with dismissing students' perspectives and feedback processes or ignoring students' complaints about all sorts of things. But students' perspectives are super legitimate. You've been a student for your entire life basically, and you're an expert in being a student at your institution, which most faculty are not. So even from that standpoint alone, there's so much that's valuable about what you know and what you've seen that's worth sharing, that's worth being put in conversation with other people and worth putting into conversation with people outside your institution as well. I love
Jessie Moore (33:01):
That encouragement for recognizing the agency that students bring to colleges and universities and the immense value of their perspectives for the work of teaching and learning. So the parallel question for you to that is, what would you like colleges and their faculty and staff to think about when they plan and implement partnership projects?
Sophia Abbot (33:26):
I think the most important thing, or maybe the first thing is for colleges, for staff, for faculty collectively or individually to prepare themselves to feel challenged, to feel defensive, to feel that sort of automatic sense of no, that's not possible, and to practice just holding that and not expressing that immediately. And I say that because it again is easy to say, well, this isn't possible because this is how we've always done it, or it would require all of this work. It's easy to think five steps ahead to, oh my gosh, who's going to be responsible for this in the long run? Or what does this mean for the workload of various people? And not to pause and think, what positive things could this do if I have take the time to just marinate with this idea that's been presented to me that beyond the sort of work, what could this do for us that's really valuable that could shift how we're relating to students that could shift a often confrontational or adversarial interaction or relationship because of the way that students have been positioned and instructors have been positioned at institutions for so long now.
(35:04):
So yeah, hold onto that. Recognize, prepare yourself for the fact that you will feel vulnerable or may have a sort of automatic defensive, like no, what are you saying? Kind of reaction and journal or do something to sort of hold it and sit with it, but don't let that be the first thing that you come to a student partner with because that will close off any future working relationship you have with that student and will reinforce all of the history that student likely already has with being told no. Find ways to do the sort of improv yes, and within that relationship so that you can continue to work together. You don't have to say automatically flat yes to everything a student suggests. That's also not a partnership. That's the student doing everything, that this is a collaboration. This is something that should be co-created. But yeah, that vulnerability will come along with it. And students are, I think, much more used to and familiar with being made to feel vulnerable in our academic spaces and instructors are not as comfortable with that because it's been a while since they've been made to feel that way, and it's natural to want to avoid feeling that way
Jessie Moore (36:38):
Again. I really appreciate that reminder. You have me thinking about what experience I had in co-creating a revision of a course and for many reasons I was feeling particularly vulnerable in that moment, but that learning how to pause and I love your word of marinate in it, actually gave me space to then think through, okay, I need to hear this perspective and then we can talk through together about some of my hesitations, but they can be my partners in figuring out how to work through what I'm seeing as potential challenges or if there are challenges that we can't collectively figure out how to resolve. At least we learn that and we know that and we find other ways forward, but it does require some vulnerability. So I appreciate you acknowledging that and the ideas for just pausing for journaling, doing what we need to do to give ourselves space to live in that tension for a moment so that we can really hear and learn from and partner with the students in our projects. So that's awesome. Thank you.
Nolan Schultheis (37:54):
Is there anything else you'd like our listeners to know about partnership projects in higher education?
Sophia Abbot (38:03):
Two things. The first is that, as I think maybe is clear from the range of ways we've been describing partnership and the range of examples I tried to give. Partnership doesn't have to be an intensive, structured, big program with lots of funding and formal people who are organizing the hiring of students and the partnering with instructors. And that can feel like a really big ask for an institution, for their budget, for their structures they're already trying to manage for their staff. It can feel like a big ask for an instructor. If a student is in a space where that doesn't exist, it's a huge ask for them to think like, well then how do I do this? And so the first is there are lots of smaller scale ways that you can engage in partnership, and the first might just be for students self-advocacy for instructors, finding ways to really encourage and reinforce that you value students' perspectives in your classroom and that you want to work with students to create a space together and following through with that, not just asking for feedback, but also then responding to it and emphasizing how you're going to make changes if you are or what can't change and why, and making that more of a conversation than you said this, but no, or this is what's on the syllabus.
(39:37):
So this is what's saying that you can have conversations and have open communication with your students all the time, and it doesn't only need to happen in these sort of special co-curricular spaces. The second thing I remember is that I think in addition to it doesn't have to be a particular scale, is that it is not a process that you, that's go into a partnership worrying about making it a perfect experience, that there will inevitably be bumps in the road and challenges and disagreements, and that those don't have to be the end of your partnership. Those can just be bumps in the road, rotor disagreements that you sit with, that you work through, that you talk about that maybe you don't resolve. And that can happen and that's okay in a lot of cases, but that doesn't mean that you failed at doing this really difficult task of trying to form a relationship, trying to build trust, trying to care deeply about someone outside of yourself and understand their perspective.
(40:58):
That's a hard thing to do. It's a lot of emotional labor and it's worth doing for all of these other reasons for the refueling you get from experiencing this relationship from the change that you're capable of making and the way that eases your interactions and makes the learning environment more collaborative and shared in the way responsibility is engaged in the way that enhances how people learn and gives folks a sense of the agency and power and in the way that that prepares everyone to be engaging with the world in more thoughtful and sort of critical ways.
Jessie Moore (41:40):
Thank you. What a fun conversation to reconnect with you and learn from you about your own evolution and partnership and some of the tips that you're offering. Our listeners, thank you for making time for it, and thank you again for sharing your expertise and always good to catch up.
Sophia Abbot (41:58):
So lovely. Bye.
Nolan Schultheis (42:00):
Thank you.
Jessie Moore (42:02):
Thank you, Sophia. So Nolan, that was a rich conversation with lots of nuggets of information about partnership and also tips for pursuing partnership. What stood out to you that you think students should think about?
Nolan Schultheis (42:23):
I think the part that stood out the most to me is the fact that partnership can't be forced on us, and we as students really have to be willing to try and interact in a partnership way with our professors and even students in the classroom. I think for me personally, I do struggle to make partnerships in the classroom because I've been raised my whole life to find it much easier to just do my assignment, turn it in and get my grade. But I think as education goes further, we're trying to break down those barriers and I think group work and partnership work definitely helps maybe patch up the other areas that a single person can't think about or conceptualize fully to the best of their effort.
Jessie Moore (43:05):
And hopefully also recognizing that as a student, you can approach a faculty member and offer suggestions or ask for clarifying questions or just ask What are you hoping our takeaways are? Which then might be an opening to talk through things that are challenging in the classroom that could be tweaked if the faculty member knew that it wasn't landing the way that they intended it to.
Nolan Schultheis (43:34):
Yeah, it seems like there's a real underlying theme in most of these conversations we've had with these professionals and it's that students need to take ownership of their learning and not really continue to rely on the institution and the professors to kind of just pound it into their head.
Jessie Moore (43:49):
Yes, it definitely is a partnership activity in all of education that we as professors and staff are here to guide and to share some of our expertise, but it is definitely a two-way streak and all the more effective when we can collaborate on the enterprise. So the one other thing that I wanted to comment on that stood out to me is Sophia's acknowledgement that it requires vulnerability for both parties, that there's some risk taking for students in engaging in partnership with professors and what is traditionally a power hierarchy in higher education. And there is a vulnerability for faculty and staff and being open to questions and suggestions and really generative collaboration with students and as Sophia said, others potentially in the community or in their institution. So honoring that it's not always easy, but that it is worth the risk if you can embrace it and give it a try on any scale, whether that's starting with a revision of an assignment or whether it's a larger scale, getting student feedback on what they're seeing happening in a class is in the SALT program that Sophia mentioned. So lots of range of opportunities, but it starts with a little bit of vulnerability and hopefully ends with great rewards for everyone involved.
(45:29):
Once again, I'm Jessie Moore.
Nolan Schultheis (45:31):
And I'm Nolan Schultheis. Thank you for joining us for Making College Worth It from Elon University's Center for Engaged Learning.
Jessie Moore (45:37):
To learn more about student faculty partnerships and higher education, see our show notes and other resources at www.centerforengagedlearning.org. Subscribe to our show wherever you listen to podcasts for more strategies on making college worth it.