Resumen de Academic staff perspectives on student-faculty partnerships: redressing or reinforcing inequity in higher education?
E. Marquis, C. Woolmer, Rachel Guitman, E. Nguyen
approachand a potential strategy for contributing to equity and inclusion in the academy. Because partnershipfocuses on mitigating institutional hierarchies and developing teaching and learning relationshipsfounded on respect and reciprocity (Cook-Sather, Bovill, & Felten, 2014), it can contribute todialogue that foregrounds typically marginalized voices and create opportunities for people occupyingdifferent institutional and social locations to learn with and from one another (Cook-Sather, 2015). Researchalso demonstrates that participating in partnership can have important outcomes for studentswho identify as members of equity-seeking groups, helping to increase their sense of belonging, understanding,and confidence within academic institutions (Cook-Sather & Luz, 2015; de Bie et al., 2019;Cook-Sather et al., 2019).While research exploring the intersections between student-faculty partnership and equity has consideredstudent outcomes, comparatively little attention has been paid to the experiences of staff memberswho themselves claim a range of social identities. Given the compelling inequities experiencedby university faculty belonging to equity-seeking groups (Pittman, 2010; Martinez, Chang, & Welton,2017), it is important to consider the extent to which student-faculty partnerships contribute to addressingand/or reproducing these systemic injustices as well.This paper thus presents preliminary findings from a mixed-methods study exploring the ways inwhich academic staff at three institutions (in Canada, in the US, and in the UK) perceive and experiencestudent-faculty partnership and its potential to contribute to equity and inclusion in postsecondary educationcontexts. Drawing from data gathered via an online survey and follow up interviews with participantsat these institutions, we consider how faculty views of partnership are informed by their sociallocations and their related experiences in the academy. The preliminary data highlight a wide rangeof perspectives on partnership and its relation to equity amongst faculty participants, raising provocativequestions about how partnership might reproduce inequities in some respects even as it challengesthem in others.
