Resumen de Imagine, create, and bake: the ingredients to a successfulfaculty, staff, student partner recipe
A. Khan, H. Poole, M. Agnew, A.C. Smith, J. Conder
The principle of meaningfully engaging students as partners in research has become a hallmarkof the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) (Felten, 2013). When students are involved in the researchprocess, they participate as co-inquirers and contribute in novel ways to the development andimplementation of relevant questions. Despite calls for students to be engaged partners in SoTL research,interdisciplinary teams where undergraduate and graduate students make authentic contributionsto large-scale multi-institutional research projects are relatively rare (Felten et al., 2013; Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017). Our research team includes a group of teaching-intensive faculty, staff, andstudents from across five post-secondary institutions in Canada and the United States. Our research activitiesalign with the common goal of understanding the impact of psychological stress in undergraduatestudents. We have designed well-controlled longitudinal studies that investigate student well-beingin a university setting in order to assess and support the creation and implementation of evidence-basedpolicies. To this end, we have successfully worked closely with student partners, many of whom havebeen recruited from student partnership programs at our institutional teaching and learning centres.This has led to a variety of collaborations with students from diverse educational levels (undergraduate,graduate, post-doctoral) and with varied backgrounds (Science, Social Sciences, and the Humanities).The breadth of our partnerships has led to research questions that are highly relevant to studentsas well as to policy-makers and educators. Furthermore, input from student partners has informed theimplementation of methods that are appropriate to their peers. In addition, many of our student collaboratorshave acted as full partners in all stages of the research process, from the collection of data to thepublication of research reports in the empirical literature. Our presentation will explore the key challengesencountered by the students and faculty in our team and will provide strategies for overcomingobstacles to a successful and authentic student-faculty partnership, particularly in interdisciplinary andmulti-institutional research contexts.
