Resumen de Learning assistants as key partnersin the scholarship of teaching and learning
Fifteen years ago, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) implementedthe LAOS project with a vision of employing students as a “qualified pedagogical resource [...] witha strong involvement in the departments’ academic work” (Tjeldvoll, 2005, p. 3; my translation). Thisvision built upon a community-of-practice perspective (Wenger, 2011), where learning assistants andacademic staff would engage in the shared interest of enhancing the quality of student learning.The starting point for this paper are recent evaluations of LAOS that show that neither learningassistants nor academic staff have been able to form pedagogical teams within the academicdepartments. One way of involving students in the departments’ work could be to include themas partners in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). A review of current research,however, revealed several issues that need to be addressed. First, both the time span and nature ofthe learning assistants’ employment argue against a community-of-practice perspective on LAOS.Second, conducting SoTL research in partnership with learning assistants challenges conventionalunderstandings of roles and identities. Academic staff need to develop a new professional role asteachers, whereas the learning assistants need to establish their expertise as students and learners. Onthe other hand, including learning assistants as key partners in SoTL could lead to significant benefitsfor both learning assistants and academic staff. Not only would they get valuable access to each other’sperspective and experiences, they would also grow as learners within a greater academic community.The paper concludes with a reflection on how the LAOS project could contribute to transformingexisting structures so that student-staff partnerships “become part of the culture and ethos of theinstitution” (Healey, Flint, & Harrington, 2014, p. 26). Steps that need to be taken are to make bothlearning assistants and academic staff aware of conventional role assumptions and to help themunderstand the potential that lies in realizing the LAOS vision.
