Students as collaborators

Trelfa, Jo, O'connor, Christopher, Ancient, Claire and Morris, Josephine (2024) Students as collaborators. In, Fosbraey, Glenn (ed.) Creative Learning, Teaching, and Assessment for Arts and Humanities Higher Education. 1st ed. Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury Academic. (In Press)

Abstract

“For many years, the methods of teaching and learning have remained relatively unchanged, with teachers bestowing knowledge to their students in a one-way hierarchical approach to learning” (Dianati & Oberhollenzer, 2020:np). Whilst interest in active learning focusses attention on students “engaging with the content […] in any way that can promote active thought” (Gifkins, 2015:1), it does not aim to “[challenge] traditional assumptions about the identities of, and relationships between, learners and teachers” (Mathews, 2017:np). In this chapter, three ‘students’ from different disciplines (who are also early-career lecturers taking a related course) and one ‘lecturer’ explore their experiences of working together to create learning and teaching.
Focus on student engagement in universities can be characterised as a continuum: from students-as-receiver; to students-as-consumer; students-as-partners; and students-as-producers. Whereas students-as-receiver views students as empty vessels, students-as-producer highlights the variety of experiences and knowledge that students bring to the learning table encouraging them to drive their own learning. Towards each pole end of this continuum, student-lecturer relations differ – from ‘master-apprentice’ to collaborators in the egalitarian pursuit of knowledge.
Immersed in practices in the module as well as in our own teaching, in this chapter we discuss what student-as-producers can mean, what it involves, and the challenges for ‘us-as-lecturers-and-students’, relating to Barnett’s (2007) epistemological, practical, and pedagogical risks. For Neary (2020) this can be summed up as ‘unlearning’. We track our experiences of this through three key themes: values; roles and interaction; and, the creativity of the affective domain in learning and teaching; and, offer a practical framework to support implementation of student-as-producer influenced by problem-based learning. This creative interdisciplinary student-led framework, named ‘The Triple ‘P’’, offers the iterative process of exposing a problem, probing the implications and attempting to solve, then presenting progress. Not only is this designed to support students in their current learning activities, but it also provides them with a framework for future development, recognising that learning is for life not just for a degree. In this chapter we describe how we applied this to teaching practice to support creativity and encourage student engagement in their own education, together with our own learning along the way.

References
Barnett R. (2007) A will to learn: being a student in an age of uncertainty. Maidenhead: SHRE and Open University Press
Dianati S. & Oberhollenzer Y. (2020) Reflections of Students and Staff in a Project-Led Partnership: Contextualised Experiences of Students-as-Partners. International Journal for Students as Partners Vol. 4, Issue 1. May [online]. Available from: https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/ijsap/article/view/3974
Ellsworth E. (1989) Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, August, 59:3, pp.297-324

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