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Over the last two decades, students have gained more diverse access in the arenas of governance, quality assurance, and teaching and learning in higher education. In an effort to expand their involvement from participants in student-active learning and voting members of governing bodies, students have started to be invited into designing, evaluating, researching, and developing education. Previous research on student–staff partnership tends to focus on what these partnerships are supposed to look like or what students and staff gain from them rather than what happens in practice. How students and staff jointly develop education is less well understood. The first aim of this thesis is to explore how student–staff partnerships become enacted in the context of educational development. To explore what students and staff do in practice, I conceptualise student–staff partnership as a continuously and emergently evolving social practice. The second aim of the thesis is to study how individual people, ‘moments of interactions’, and organisational aspects shape the unfolding of student–staff partnerships.
I address these aims using a qualitative approach with ethnographic elements within two empirical settings at the Centre on Experiential Legal Learning (CELL), a Norwegian Centre for Excellence in Education (CEE) at the law faculty of the University of Oslo. CEEs are funded nationally to create hubs for developing new pedagogical approaches and are required to involve students in their work. The first setting I investigate, using interviews and observations, consists of experienced law students, called colloquium leaders, as they support small groups of first-semester students in learning to collaborate in weekly sessions (Articles 1 and 3). The second empirical setting consists of student leaders and staff members who work for CELL as they directly collaborate on educational development and educational research. I explore their collaboration using calendar invitations to meetings; data on students’ and staff members’ offices, desks, and ‘working percentages’; and observations and interviews (Article 2).
In Article 1, individual colloquium leaders’ perceptions tell us how their ways of working locally as student partners encounter tension with how education is practiced at their institution. I trace how tensions between existing ways of organising education, institutional norms and culture, and individual colloquium leaders’ local work play out situationally. The findings show that colloquium leaders faced and created tensions related to (1) their aims of facilitating collaborative colloquia and the competitive learning environment at the faculty, (2) the perceived expectations of teaching legal methods despite not being experts, and (3) ambiguities regarding whether colloquium leaders were expected to act as peers or facilitators. These tensions typically emerged where local colloquium practice met institutional quality structures, implicit understandings of quality, and professional standards.
Article 2 illustrates the fragility of students and staff organising and practicing collaboration while moving between the student and staff spaces at the law faculty and between studying, researching, and engaging in partnership work in their daily lives. I connect the spatiotemporal and organisational ‘embedding’ of students and staff members as they pursue partnership—such as the rooms they have access to and the conditions and working hours of their contract—to the spatiotemporal and organisational embedding of their collaboration (in this case, their meetings). I found the practice of student–staff partnership to be vulnerable whenever student partners transitioned into and out of partnerships temporally, spatially, and relationally or when they entered new partnership constellations or project phases.
Article 3 unveils the ways in which students and staff, through consistently acting in relation to what was happening in a given moment, jointly ‘tinkered’ with their roles and tasks, and how they organised educational activities such as colloquia with first-semester students or preparatory meetings between colloquium leaders. ‘Tinkering’ means to continuously adjust or experiment, and I explore how organisational elements—such as group composition, and the organisation of experience exchanges and responsibility distributions—are adapted through students and staff interacting with such elements. Colloquium leaders were provided with additional pedagogical support and opportunities to exchange experience with others, and staff took over scheduling tasks from colloquium leaders. By doing so, and by the colloquium leaders’ continuous experimentation along the way, good peer instruction locally became a matter of making room for in-depth learning about legal methods and for participating students to take ownership of their learning.
Together, these articles reveal that student–staff partnerships are enacted as student partners resolve and create tensions between partnership practice and the institutional and disciplinary educational practices they are embedded within. Enacting partnership thus implies for students and staff to continuously transition between partnership and other educational practices, which I understand as points of vulnerability of partnership practice. Lastly, students and staff also enact partnership as they situationally tinker with how they distribute tasks and responsibilities and organise student–staff partnerships.
Based on these findings, this thesis contributes three combined empirical insights into and conceptualisations of student–staff partnership practice. First, such partnership means for students and staff members to take practical action under uncertain conditions by configuring both the processes of student–staff partnership as they unfold and the object or outcome of such processes, for example peer mentoring. Second, student partners have a dual role that consists of both student and staff elements; as student–staff partnerships unfold, students transition between these roles fluidly. Third, student–staff partnership is shaped by all the practices surrounding it; students transition from studying into entering partnerships with academics. I thus propose to understand partnership based on its connections to intersecting practices, visualised as a kind of ‘connective tissue’.
These contributions have been enabled by my abductive and reflexive approach, in which I moved continuously between theory and data, and researcher and practitioner lenses. The main methodological contribution of this thesis is the use of meeting invitations to map spatiotemporal, organisational and structural aspects of student–staff collaboration to illuminate the formalised structures of student–staff partnership using mixed methods social network analysis. In turn, that illumination elicited how these partnership spaces and schedules interacted with the structures of other prevalent practices at the university, such as teaching, exam preparations, or office work.
The empirical findings and conceptualisations of this thesis encourage students and staff to continue to collaboratively practice student–staff partnerships and to research the topic by identifying and embracing emergent tensions and vulnerabilities. The results further motivate students and university staff to examine transition points in their work and to persistently tinker with the ways they locally distribute tasks and responsibilities.
