Following our recent experience with student-faculty partnership on course (re)design, we offer some thoughts on the process, its purpose, its benefits, and some of the risks involved. Throughout several future blog posts, we – Lucia, Erin, and Ketevan – reflect on certain aspects of this experience. In this post, the question that all three of us answer is:

Based on your experience this semester, would you consider engaging in student-faculty partnership on course (re)design in the future?

Lucia

Yes, I would consider student-faculty partnership again. My experience was very positive as I learned a lot about the material, how courses are designed or the thought that goes into the design, as well as developed a positive relationship with my professor.

Erin

I would love to participate in another student-faculty partnership in the future. The experience gave me an in-depth understanding of some of the processes that go into choosing class assignments. This enhanced respect will undoubtedly transfer into classes I will take in the future.

Ketevan

I would definitely consider working in partnership with students on course (re)design and on any SoTL project. My experience has given me more confidence, as well as has emboldened me to continue to partner with students on teaching and learning in the future and, whenever possible, to incorporate the elements of partnership into the courses that I teach to offer students more and more opportunities to co-design their learning inside and outside of the classroom.

Through this experience, I clearly saw how much students could contribute to the process of developing teaching and learning materials, as well as and more importantly, how beneficial this collaboration is for their learning and for developing human relationships between faculty and students.

To elaborate, I would like to stress that through partnership on course (re)design I could observe the benefits that students were receiving. It was not only about reflecting on their previous experience(s) with the course or with the subject matter, but listening to the conversations we had with each-other, learning from those conversations and from the ‘homework’ that we all had to do to prepare for our regular meetings. So, one beneficial aspect of this collaboration for students was that it was a learning experience for them. As students were co-developing the courses with me, they were being introduced to new texts, new topics, and new ways of approaching the course topic(s). As Lucia commented at some point, she was “proud of the material we put together.” This sense of pride in what student(s) do, in themselves and their work, is something that I am sure all of us who teach aspire to achieve.

On the other hand, for this to happen, students had to be engaged with, interested in, and committed to the topic/subject matter. The partnerships that turned out to be successful were the ones in which students had seen the relevance of this collaboration to their major/minor, their current interests, and their future career(s). Just the incentive of being paid was not enough or, rather, was not the driving force for the success of the partnership and for the time commitment and effort. For this reason, one lesson I would say that I learned from the experience was that students’ interest in the subject matter should be, if not a determining factor, a very important factor when faculty make the decision about who to partner with. And, similarly, if students are in the position to make this decision, they should consider very carefully the discipline of the faculty they will be partnering with and/or faculty’s goals for partnership – and how those align with students’ own motivations for participating.

Lucia Craige is a rising junior at Elon who is double majoring in Spanish and Public Health with a minor in Religious Studies.
Erin Jenkins is an Honor’s student at Elon, majoring in Political Science with minors in Criminal Justice and Inter-religious Studies.

Ketevan Kupatadze, Senior Lecturer in Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, is the 2017-2019 Center for Engaged Learning Scholar. Dr. Kupatadze’s CEL Scholar project focuses on student-faculty partnerships.

How to cite this post:

Craige, Lucia Maribel, Erin Jenkins and Ketevan Kupatadze. 2018, July 17. Reflections on our experiences with partnership on course (re)design. [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/reflections-on-our-experiences-with-partnership-on-course-redesign/