Partnership, student orientation and peer mentoring: embedding students as partners as ‘culture’ in a new social sciences programme

• Autores: Andrea Andres, Niamh Moore-Cherry, Sara O’Sullivan
• Localización: Ikaskuntza-irakaskuntza akademikoaren eremu berriak arakatzen / Universidad del País Vasco - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (aut.), 2019, ISBN 978-84-1319-033-4, págs. 184-189
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Students as Partners has emerged as an important research topic and practice in Higher Education.It involves faculty, staff and students each sharing their particular expertise and working together toachieve common goals. The approach engages students more fully both with their institution and theirlearning and encourages the development of students’ decision making capacities as well as their senseof belonging to the university (Cook-Sather et al., 2014; Healey et al., 2014). In 2018, a decision was madeby the Social Sciences Programme Board at University College Dublin (UCD) to adopt a ‘Students asPartners’ approach to enhance student engagement. This paper will present findings from a subsequentresearch project involving Social Sciences faculty, professional staff and undergraduate peer mentors. Itadopts a scholarly approach to investigating the impact of several of the initiatives that followed.A new Peer Mentor programme for Social Sciences students was introduced in 2018 using ‘Studentsas Partners’ principles. The team agreed that the objective of orientation was to welcome studentsand engender a sense of belonging to their academic subjects rather than focusing on information provision.Over the summer paid undergraduate student interns worked on orientation planning, includinga partnership approach to peer mentoring, with the new social sciences programme team. During theirtraining, all peer mentors were invited to join a research team to co-evaluate the partnership approachwith faculty and professional staff; eight peer mentors volunteered and two will co-present the conferencepaper in Bilbao with a faculty member of the team.This paper explores interns and peer mentors’ perspectives on their experiences as co-designersand peer mentors. It assesses the extent to which the ethos, design and delivery of orientation wasunderstood in partnership terms across the different types of partners: faculty/staff; student interns;and peer mentors. There was a variable awareness of partnership across the different groups but alsoof understanding it as a process of engagement (Healey et al., 2014). Contrary to fears that partnershipwill potentially become instrumentalised in an increasingly managerial higher education environment(Tomlinson, 2017), our research indicates that the intrinsic value of partnership was recognised andsupported across the partners despite time pressures, other costs and challenges.