Definition

Students as Partners in higher education teaching and learning, or simply Students as Partners (SaP), is a pedagogical and reform approach—and a conceptual orientation—that has been embraced over the past two decades by many academics and higher education institutions around the world. SaP implies students and faculty/academic staff working in collaboration, as partners, to improve teaching and learning experiences (Mercer-Mapstone et al. 2017). Mick Healey, Abbi Flint, and Kathy Harrington (2014) describe SaP as “a relationship in which all involved—students, academics, professional services staff, senior managers, students’ unions, and so on—are actively engaged in and stand to gain from the process of learning and working together” (12). In practice, partnership often explicitly aims to create space for voices and perspectives that traditionally have been marginalized in higher education (de Bie et al. 2021).

In the most cited definition of SaP practice, Cathy Bovill, Alison Cook-Sather, and Peter Felten define partnership as a “reciprocal process through which all participants have the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision-making, implementation, investigation, or analysis” (2014, 6-7). These authors go on to suggest that partnerships between students and faculty should be based on three principles: respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility for learning. These principles, the authors argue, fundamentally reshape the typical faculty-student relationship in higher education. Throughout their 2014 book, they argue that all partners—faculty and students—need to see each other as colleagues, as people who can meaningfully (albeit in diverse ways) contribute to the process of teaching and learning.

“Co-creation” is a related term that has gained more recent traction in higher education (Jamil and Howard-Matthews 2025). Like partnership, the conceptual foundations of co-creation can be traced for centuries through educational writings, from Aristotle to John Dewey and bell hooks. Unlike partnership, which implicitly puts an emphasis on the student-faculty relationship, in co-creation the focus is on what students and faculty do together:

One way to conceptualise co-creation is… to suggest a meaningful collaboration between students and staff, with students becoming more active participants in the learning process, constructing understanding and resources with academic staff. (Bovill et al. 2016, 197)

Another distinction that sometimes appears in the literature is that partnership tends to be smaller scale than co-creation, with partnerships more likely to center on process-oriented questions of pedagogy and classroom experiences while co-creation is often a more product-oriented approach to changing courses, curricula, and programs (e.g., Bovill 2020; Dollinger and Lodge 2020). This is not a firm distinction, though; for example, students and faculty can co-create assessments in a course (Meinking and Hall 2020; 2024) and partners can reimagine STEM teaching and learning (Bunnell, Jaswal, and Lyster 2023).

Although conceptual distinctions exist, in practice and in the literature, terms like partnership and co-creation often are used interchangeably. To help clarify meanings, Cathy Bovill created a “co-creation of teaching and learning typology” (2019) that frames a series of questions useful for planning—and describing—any partnership experience. Alison Casey (2024) also maps the range of SaP practices in Australian higher education to create a helpful taxonomy for describing—and naming—the essential characteristics of partnership activities.

In response to the complexities of naming and defining this emerging practice, Lucy Mercer-Mapstone and Sophia Abbot (2020) resist the temptation to traditionally define terms and instead used poetic transcription (“a process of re-presenting data in the form of poetry where the words of a dataset are reshaped into poems”,16) based on a book they edited about partnerships. This brief excerpt gives a sense of how they envision partnership:

 …Aspirational, values-based,
Highlighting the collocations
academic selves / student selves,
past selves / future selves,
Partnership provokes us,
Destabilizing neat categorizations
That abstract us.
Partnership makes us human again….

(The full poem is available here; 14)

Within higher education, student-faculty partnership tends to shift the focus meaning- and-decision-making about pedagogical and curricular concerns away from faculty alone, to find some balance of faculty and student voices. Manor and colleagues (2010) note that by elevating or centering student perspectives, partnerships destabilize traditional faculty-student dynamics in higher education.

Rather than positioning faculty as the powerful experts and students as the passive consumers, SaP and co-creation emphasize that all have something to teach and to learn, and it is our shared responsibility to exchange the knowledge and perspectives we bring to the classroom and curriculum. SaP places responsibility of teaching and learning on both teachers and students, insisting that students have an active role to play in the decisions about what and how to learn. Thus, the SaP model challenges several foundational features of the current higher education system, including:

1. Its non-democratic, hierarchical structures;
2. Its focus on predetermined learning outcomes;
3. Its view of students as clients or customers.

Students typically come to higher education after having been immersed in a “transmission model of teaching” that promotes passive learning through standardized tests and that discourages curiosity and inquiry (Cook-Sather et al. 2014, 17). Higher education institutions, for their part, frequently treat students as consumers and advertise education as a product that faculty deliver and as a means to an end (such as a high-paying career). All of this frames education as a series of transactions involving faculty transmitting knowledge to students that will result in a credential that can be exchanged for a job. This approach encourages students’ passive behavior, as well as establishes clear power structures in the relationships between faculty and students in which faculty have all the expertise and, consequently, all the power to make decisions about students’ education. As a result, “students’ perceived powerlessness in their own education translates into a lack of their taking responsibility for their own education” (Manor et al. 2010, 10).

Matthews (2016) explains that SaP re-orients educational practices and relationships, re-framing students as partners as a process of “engaging with rather than doing to or doing for students” (2). As Werder et al. (2012) demonstrate, in partnership students — and faculty—come to understand learning as a dialogic experience that is divergent and difference-driven, questioning the hierarchical dynamics inherent in contemporary education systems that make it difficult for students to be active learners. Both faculty and students come to value the relative equality that comes with partnership and that enables all participants to have a voice in the pedagogical and curricular decision-making processes. Over time this creates a “partnership mindset” that shapes students’ and faculty behaviors and perspectives in and beyond higher education (Peseta et al. 2020).

Because SaP challenges traditional practices and hierarchies, partnership practices can cause friction within higher education institutions and systems. One commonly experienced example of this is how the process orientation of SaP is in tension with policies related to quality assurance and institutional assessment. In an early SaP paper, Cathy Bovill and CJ Bulley (2011) note that “our systems of quality assurance require courses to be validated and reviewed on the basis of clear intended learning outcomes and assessments” (6) that do not create much space for student voice. In the same vein, Mick Healey and colleagues (2014) underscore the importance of institutions and professional organizations setting guidelines and standards for educational outcomes. Yet those explicit—and often rigid—rules constrain the process-oriented and often emergent work of student-faculty partnerships; unlike the current model of quality assurance that aims toward a fixed and pre-determined end, student-faculty partnership is an approach that is “(radically) open to and creating possibilities for discovering and learning something that cannot be known beforehand” (Healey et al. 2014, 9).

Over the past decade, critical study of culture and identities in partnership is becoming more common in SaP literature—an instance where the SaP research might be catching up with practice, which often has occurred in educational settings that involve diverse partners working together. This emerging research on partnership within non-Western cultural contexts (e.g., Liang and Matthews 2020; Dai et al. 2021; Liang and Matthews 2022; Dai and Matthews 2023; Vayada 2023; Zhang et al. 2023) and critical reflections on identity (e.g., de Bie 2022; Kenway et al. 2019; Bovill et al. 2023; Cook-Sather & Cook-Sather 2023) demonstrates that students’ and academics’ identities deeply influence how partnerships are formed and experienced, and how power is perceived and enacted in partnership.

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What Makes Partnership a High-Impact Practice?

Student-faculty partnership offers ideal opportunities for creating environments consistent with many characteristics of high-impact educational practices (Kuh 2008; Kuh and O’Donnell 2013; Moore 2023). Jessie Moore describes six key practices that make any educational “high impact”: acknowledging and building on students’ prior knowledge and experiences; facilitating relationships; offering feedback; framing connections to broader contexts; fostering reflection and metacognition; and promoting integration and transfer of knowledge and skills (Moore 2023, 10-11).

These six are often central to SaP practice, but the research on partnerships tends to focus on four related themes that Lucy Mercer-Mapstone and an international team of colleagues (2017) outlined in a literature review. These four themes describe why SaP, when done well, is educationally powerful for students—and also often for academics.

Increasing Educational Engagement

In her article “Lessons in Higher Education: Five Pedagogical Practices that Promote Active Learning for Faculty and Students” (2011), Alison Cook-Sather suggests that student-faculty partnerships mean active and engaged learning not only for students, but also for faculty, and that this process is cyclical: faculty engaged in more active and reflective teaching fosters engagement in students who on their part encourage faculty to be even more engaged with, open and transparent about their teaching. Through partnership, faculty face the need to explain or clarify their pedagogical choices, as well as their specific teaching goals, thus developing a “greater awareness of their pedagogical goals, a stronger ability to analyze those goals, and an increased capacity to name what they intend and how they strive to achieve it” (Cook-Sather 2011, 3). Alison Cook-Sather, Cathy Bovill and Peter Felten (2014) rely heavily on higher education’s mission of creating opportunities for meaningful engagement when guiding faculty interested in collaborating with students on the issues of teaching and learning. By ‘meaningful engagement,’ the authors refer to student-faculty collaborations that offer both parties an opportunity to have consistent authentic and transformative experiences. Several studies highlight that students as partners start viewing education differently and take upon a more active role, become more engaged with learning, and they develop a greater sense of responsibility (Mercer-Mapstone et al. 2017; Cook-Sather et al. 2019). When collaborating with faculty, “students’ perceived powerlessness in their own education translates into a lack of their taking responsibility for their own education” (Manor et al. 2010, 10).

Enhancing Motivation and Commitment to Learning

Student-faculty partnership is conducive to an increased sense of motivation and responsibility in students, and consequently, commitment to and ownership of learning, as it challenges students’, as well as faculty’s, traditional understanding of who is responsible for what happens in the classroom or through the process of teaching and learning. Describing three different models of partnership, Cathy Bovill, Alison Cook-Sather, and Peter Felten (2011) maintain that “[S]tudent-faculty partnerships […] challenge students’ customary, and often comfortable, passive role in the classroom, as well as a common academic staff assumption that their disciplinary expertise gives them complete authority over the learning process” (4). This fundamental shift from passive to active learning is occasioned by giving agency to students and allowing them to make pedagogical choices, which consequently places on them more responsibility for learning, while at the same time increasing their motivation and enthusiasm. As one student comments: “I grew up thinking what I assumed every other student thought and the majority of students still think—what do I want to get out of this class? An A. The thought of actively trying to learn something never crossed my mind. Then one day as we were discussing…the subject of teacher and student responsibility…the realization hit me: What were my own responsibilities for my education?” (Manor et al. 2010, 5). Clearly, this student’s collaboration with a faculty member helped them recognize their own role in the process of learning and, hopefully, led them to a “re-energized and renewed commitment to learning” (Bovill et al. 2011, 6). The same seems to be true for faculty who partner with students. They report a renewed relationship with their students, as well as a sense of reinvigoration and renewal when it comes to teaching (Bovill et al. 2011).

Developing Relationships

The relationships higher education students form with peers, faculty, and staff contribute powerfully to their academic success and personal well-being (Felten and Lambert 2020). The process of partnering is deeply relational, supporting students and their partners in developing these kinds of educationally purposeful relationships. While this is not always easy or fully achieved, research suggests that partnership generates a greater sense of belonging within the university community (Curran and Millard 2016; Mercer-Mapstone et al. 2017). Because partnerships often develop across salient differences in personal identities, SaP often prompts both students and faculty to critically reflect on themselves, inspiring more openness, deeper connection and empathy (Cook-Sather 2015; Hamshire and Forsyth 2025). Cook-Sather notes that in her long-term research on SaP experiences, the “themes of discerning or recognizing differences, and striving to embrace and learn from differences, rather than reifying them as only divisive, have emerged repeatedly” (Cook-Sather 2015, 6).

Increasing Confidence and Sense of Belonging, and Potentially Transforming Sense of Self

Research shows that when students work with faculty on the issues of teaching and learning, they gain a newer perspective and a deeper understanding of the process of learning, as well as that of teaching or pedagogical choices made by the faculty in the process of preparing for teaching certain material. Interestingly, Cook-Sather, Bovill and Felten (2014) note that student-faculty partnership asks for a reconceptualization of learning and teaching as a collaborative process and write that: “Research suggests that partnerships tend to produce similar outcomes for both students and faculty” (p. 100). In one student’s words: “You really don’t understand the way you learn and how others learn until you can step back from it and are not in the class with the main aim to learn the material of the class, but more to understand what is going on in the class and what is going through people’s minds as they relate with that material” (Cook-Sather 2008, p. 481). On the other hand, for a faculty member, partnership with students meant learning to “engage in the process of evaluating my teaching on a consistent basis… This experience has transformed me into a reflective practitioner” (Cook-Sather and Abbot 2016, 1). Research has also shown that partnership can engage and empower traditionally marginalized students and lead to sharing authority and responsibility with staff in the development of culturally sustainable pedagogy (Cook-Sather and Agu 2013; Cook-Sather et al. 2023).

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Research-Informed Practices

Kelly Matthews (2017, 2) proposes five guiding principles of good SaP practice:

1. Foster inclusive partnerships
2. Nurture power-sharing relationships through dialogue and reflection
3. Accept partnership as a process with uncertain outcomes
4. Engage in ethical partnerships
5. Enact partnership for transformation

These principles provide a useful framework for planning and enacting any partnership—and her open access article is an invaluable guide to research-informed practice.

Cathy Bovill (2019) outlines a typology of co-creation that is a practical guide to conceptualizing, designing, and conducting a co-creation project. This short article includes a baker’s dozen questions to ask as you prepare for a partnership, including:

• What is the focus or purpose of the co-creation?
• What is the context?
• Who needs to be involved?
• What is the role of different partners in the process?

Both the Matthews principles and the Bovill typology provide research-informed guidance for creating SaP projects.

These frameworks also draw on earlier scholarship. Healey et al. (2014) highlight eight values underpinning students as partners practice: authenticity, inclusivity, reciprocity, empowerment, trust, challenge, community, and responsibility. Cook-Sather et al. (2014) offer a shorter, but overlapping list of three guiding principles: respect, reciprocity, and responsibility. New students as partners projects can benefit from engaging with all of these foundational and updated frameworks.

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Embedded and Emerging Questions for Research, Practice, and Theory

Student-faculty partnership remains an emerging practice in higher education. Hence, researchers have identified many areas that require further study, assessment, and documentation, as well as some of the challenges and areas for improvement. Under-researched areas and opportunities for further study include:

• How to effectively and ethically engage more, and more diverse, students and academics in SaP? Promising research on this topic includes Acai, Mercer-Mapstone, and Guitman (2022); Mercer-Mapstone, Islam, and Reid (2021); de Bie (2022); Cook-Sather and Cook-Sather (2023); de Bie, Marquis, Cook-Sather, and Luqueño (2023); and Hamshire and Forsyth (2025).
• What aspects of SaP and co-creation practice most contribute to positive student outcomes? Promising research on this topic includes Dollinger and Lodge (2020); Lubicz-Nawrocka and Bovill (2023); and Dewaele et al. (2023). 
• Does (and how does) SaP contribute to educational, cultural, or systematic change within an institution? Promising research on this topic includes Kligyte et al. 2023; Mercer-Mapstone and Bovill (2020), Muelder et al. (2025)[IA1] ; and Peseta and Bell 2020.
• How do relational dynamics influence partnerships? Promising research on this topic includes Godbold, Hung, and Matthews (2022); and Scoles et al. (2021).
• How can SaP contribute to educationally purposeful student-student peer relationships? Promising research includes Seery et al. (2021).
• How does SaP work in different cultural and national contexts? Promising research on this topic includes Liang and Matthews 2020; Dai et al. 2021; Liang and Matthews 2022; Dai and Matthews 2023; Vayada 2023; Zhang et al. 2023.
• How is SaP conceptualized and understood by different people/roles in higher education? Promising research on this topic includes Cook-Sather et al. (2018); Gravett, Kinchen, and Winstone (2020); and Omland et al. (2025).
• How do emotions shape partnership experiences and outcomes? Promising research on this topic includes Felten (2017); McConnell (2022); and Healey and France (2024).
• How does SaP contribute to students’ (and academics’) well-being, belonging, and mattering? Promising research includes Cook-Sather and Felten (2017); Cook-Sather et al. (2023); and King et al. (2025).

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Key Scholarship

Featured Partnership Journals

Many scholarly journals publish articles about partnership. These three focus specifically on SaP, and all three welcome students as authors or co-authors.

International Journal for Students as Partners: IJSaP is an open access, online, English-language, peer-reviewed journal that is committed to enacting the principles of partnership in the way it operates. IJSaP is designed to appeal to a wide audience of readers and potential authors in the higher education community. It aims to publish high quality research articles, case studies, reflective essays, opinion pieces, reviews, and other pieces from around the world.

Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education: TLTHE serves as a forum for the reflective work of higher education faculty and students working together to explore and enact effective classroom practice. Published three times per year, the journal is premised on the centrality to successful pedagogy of dialogue and collaboration among faculty and students in explorations and revisions of approaches to teaching and learning in higher education.

The Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership & Change  is a peer-reviewed journal that welcomes articles, case studies, and opinion pieces in written or video format relating to learning, teaching, and assessment with the context of students and staff as co-creators and change agents. Our aim is to inspire, educate, amuse, and generally engage its readership.

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Model Programs

Being Human in Stem (US). The Being Human in STEM initiative began at Amherst College and has now spread to more than two dozen US colleges and universities. This project aims to foster a more inclusive, supportive STEM community by helping students, faculty, and staff collaboratively develop a framework to understand and navigate diverse identities in the classroom, lab, and beyond. The heart of the project is a co-created and co-facilitated course. For more information, visit: https://www.beinghumaninstem.com/

Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College (US). The Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford colleges provides forums for exploration of classroom practice. The Institute embraces a partnership model of faculty and student academic development. The goal of the institute is to promote collaboration between faculty and students by creating spaces and structures on campus that support interaction, dialogue, and partnership. The Institute has also developed the Students as Learners and Teachers program (SaLT) that offers a semester-long pedagogy seminar to interested faculty to collaborate one-on-one with an undergraduate student as a paid consultant. For more information, visit: https://www.brynmawr.edu/tli/

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in collaboration with Hong Kong University and Hong Kong Baptist University (China). “Co-creating the Future of Education: A Student Partnership Project” is a grant-funded inter-institutional initiative with five goals: (1) create SaP pedagogical models; (2) develop a SaP resource hub; (3) enhance professional development on SaP; (4) formulate standard protocols and frameworks to evaluate SaP outcomes; (5) establish a Community of Practice on Student Partnership. For more information, visit: https://er.talic.hku.hk/sap/hkusap/interinstitutional/  

McMaster University (Canada). The MacPherson Institute’s Student Partners Program offers opportunities to both graduate and undergraduate students to collaborate with faculty in pedagogical research and innovation. The Student Partners Program (SPP) started in 2013 in collaboration with the Arts & Sciences Program at McMaster University, Canada. Students who have participated in the program since the time of its inception “have contributed to the design and development of new courses, helped to create resources for faculty and students, and collaborated with staff and faculty partners on research projects related to teaching and learning.” Students have also co-authored articles and served as reviewers or co-editors for the International Journal for Students as Partners, which is based at McMaster. For more information, visit: https://mi.mcmaster.ca/student-partners-program/ 

Western Sydney University (Australia). The Students as Partners program focuses on co-creation of curriculum, co-researching student experiences, and driving institutional change. Western Sydney’s partnership work is explicitly making the university better through co-creation. For example, one major partnership project explored “the challenge of student disengagement” after the pandemic lockdown ended. One exemplary aspect of Western Sydney’s partnership program is the compelling ways they document and share their work through videos and social media. For more information, visit, https://www.wsustudentpartners.com/  

University of Queensland (Australia). The Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation’s Students as Partners initiative offers a broad range of partnership opportunities. UQ’s partnership approach includes opportunities focused on SaP projects, representation, and voice. UQ also coordinates a Students as Partners Network that has nearly one thousand members across Australia and hosts an annual Students as Partners Roundtable that engages students and faculty from around the world. For more information, visit: https://itali.uq.edu.au/advancing-teaching/initiatives/students-partners

University of Westminster (UK). The Centre for Education and Teaching Innovation has a “Student Partnership Framework” and also “Westminster Co-Creation Principles” that undergird the university’s SaP efforts. The Students as Co-Creators Programme has three strands: (1) learning and teaching research collaborations; (2) disciplinary research collaborations; (3) curriculum design collaborations. For more information, visit: https://ceti.westminster.ac.uk/student-partnership-2/

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References

Acai, Anita, Lucy Mercer-Mapstone, and Rachel Guitman. 2022. “Mind the (Gender) Gap: Engaging Students as Partners to Promote Gender Equity in Higher Education.” Teaching in Higher Education 27 (1): 18–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1696296.

Bovill, Catherine. 2019. “A Co-Creation of Learning and Teaching Typology: What Kind of Co-Creation Are You Planning or Doing?” International Journal for Students as Partners 3 (2): 91–98. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v3i2.3953.

Bovill, Catherine, and CJ Bulley. 2011. “A Model of Active Student Participation in Curriculum Design: Exploring Desirability and Possibility.” In Improving Student Learning (ISL) 18: Global Theories and Local Practices: Institutional, Disciplinary and Cultural Variations, edited by C. Rust, 176–188. Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development.

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Liang, Y., and KE Matthews. 2020. “Students as Partners Practices and Theorisations in Asia: A Scoping Review.” Higher Education Research & Development 40 (3): 552–566. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2020.1773771.

Liang, Y., and KE Matthews. 2022. “Are Confucian Educational Values a Barrier to Engaging Students as Partners in Chinese Universities?” Higher Education Research & Development 42 (6): 1453–1466. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2022.2138276.

Lubicz-Nawrocka, Tanya, and Catherine Bovill. 2023. “Do Students Experience Transformation Through Co-Creating Curriculum in Higher Education?” Teaching in Higher Education 28 (7): 1744–1760. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2021.1928060.

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Peseta, Tai, Jenny Pizzica, Ashley Beathe, Chinnu Jose, Racquel Lynch, Marisse Manthos, Kathy Nguyen, and Hassan Raza. 2020. “A Partnership Mindset: Students as Partners in and Beyond the Academy.” The Power of Partnership: Students, Staff, and Faculty Revolutionizing Higher Education 107–117. Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. https://doi.org/10.36284/celelon.oa2.6.

Scoles, Jenny, Mark Huxham, Kelda Sinclair, Caroline Lewis, Julia Jung, and Eoghen Dougall. 2021. “The Other Side of a Magic Mirror: Exploring Collegiality in Student and Staff Partnership Work.” Teaching in Higher Education 26 (5): 712–727. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1677588.

Seery, Christina, Andrea Andres, Niamh Moore-Cherry, and Sara O’Sullivan. 2021. “Students as Partners in Peer Mentoring: Expectations, Experiences and Emotions.” Innovative Higher Education 46 (6): 663–681. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-021-09556-8.

Vayada, Preeti. 2023. “Student-Staff Partnership in India: A Future Possibility within Contested Terrain?” International Journal for Students as Partners 7 (2): 84–102. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v7i2.5142.

Zhang, M., KE Matthews, and S. Liu. 2023. “Engaging Students as Partners in Intercultural Partnership Practices: A Scoping Review.” Higher Education Research & Development 42 (7): 1792–1807. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2022.2157800.

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How to Cite This Resource

Felten, Peter, and Ketevan Kupatadze. 2026. Students as Partners. Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/resources/students-as-partners/

The Center thanks Ketevan Kupatadze, the 2017-2019 Center for Engaged Learning Scholar, for contributing the initial content for this page. The current version includes updates by Peter Felten.