November 4, 2020Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Retrospectiveby Sophia Abbot and Cameron ShirleyIn their book Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching (2014), Alison Cook-Sather, Catherine Bovill, and Peter Felten present a definition of and guiding principles for partnership work, both of which have remained relevant through the last six years….
October 30, 2020Making College “Worth It”by Sophia Abbot and Lucia-Maribel CraigeAlthough day-to-day life for college students is far from normal, right now, faculty and staff can continue to help the class of 2024 pursue a journey of self-discovery. How can students make the most of their experience? Educational scholars George…
September 7, 2020Ask your students: The value of student input on online course designby Sophia Abbot and Geneva SteinFor Jeongmin Cho, a junior at Princeton University from Seoul, South Korea, the transition to remote learning this spring was a transition to an entirely new form of teaching and learning. He explains, “I have grown up in a traditional…
May 26, 2020The Power of Partnership, Section 3: Growing Partnershipby Sophia AbbotLucy Mercer-Mapstone and I started The Power of Partnership to explicitly explore some of the unexamined challenges and bumps-in-the-road of partnership. So, why do we include a whole section titled, “Growing Partnership” (Section 3)? Many critical pedagogues write about both challenging power…
May 12, 2020The Power of Partnership, Section Two: The Intersticesby Sophia AbbotSection 2 of The Power of Partnership is called “Intersections.” Sam Hester’s opening illustration for the section fully embraces this theme. She visually disrupts boundaries and juxtaposes apparent opposites, suggesting that the space where those opposites meet — the “and”…
April 23, 2020The Power of Partnership, Section One: A Series of Partnership Actsby Sophia AbbotThe first section of The Power of Partnership is called “Power and Politics” and focuses on the way power and hierarchy impact our ability to connect with one another across roles in meaningful partnerships in teaching and learning. When Lucy…
March 30, 2020Generative Disagreements in Student-Faculty Partnershipsby Sophia AbbotRecently, colleagues at Elon discussed two new publications in the Center for Engaged Learning’s Open Access Book Series: Pedagogical Partnerships and The Power of Partnership. Folks in these conversations repeatedly returned to the challenge of working through the disagreements that…
February 28, 2020Power of Partnership Origins: “Now you know the rest of the story”by Sophia AbbotThe Center for Engaged Learning recently released The Power of Partnership: Students, Staff, and Faculty Revolutionizing Higher Education. In our E-Origin Story, Lucy and I (the collection editors) explain the conception of the book itself. But I wanted to step…
December 4, 2019Pedagogical Partnerships Interview with Authorsby Sophia AbbotTo celebrate the release of Pedagogical Partnerships: A How-To Guide for Faculty, Students, and Academic Developers in Higher Education (Cook-Sather, Bahti, & Ntem 2019), I spoke to the authors about their experience practicing and writing about pedagogical partnerships. We started…
November 12, 2019Feminist Community Engagementby Sophia Abbot The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) lists service-learning or community-based learning among 11 high impact practices in education, and it’s not difficult to see why. The praxis (theory, practice, reflection) of service-learning promotes students’ deep…